One Sentence at a Time: A Quantitative History of Rationality in Economic Thought

Working paper
Authors
Affiliations

Thomas Delcey

Université de Bourgogne Europe

Aurelien Goutsmedt

UC Louvain; ICHEC

Alexandre Truc

Université Sophia Antipolis, CNRS

Published

2025

This is a simple computation of the relative frequency of ‘rationality’ and ‘rational’ but on large corpora of nearly 300 000 published articles from 1900 to 2009. It shows the rise of the notion of rationality in economics, with a peak in the 1980s and 1990s. The article explores those occurences in more depth by using large language model-based semantic analysis.

Abstract

This article demonstrates how unsupervised quantitative methods can enrich the history of economic thought. Using the largest English-language corpus ever assembled for the field—nearly 290,000 economics journal articles from 1900 to 2009 with citation data—we analyze the evolution of the concept of rationality. Combining large language model-based semantic analysis with bibliometric and network methods, we identify and cluster discussions of rationality across time and scales, such as the circulation of bounded rationality and the emergence of behavioral economics. We provide an open-source interactive tool to support transparency and reuse.