Well yeah, people are different, this is blatantly obvious. But gravity isn't 9.81m/s^2 either[0]. And the speed of light isn't "c" (299,792,458 m/s) or even

Well yeah, people are different, this is blatantly obvious. But gravity isn't 9.81m/s^2 either[0]. And the speed of light isn't "c" (299,792,458 m/s) or even constant at all[1]. But these "wrong" facts are useful when creating predictive models of our universe. That's all this is - a "wrong" fact used to help simplify a model. Turns out the representative agent might be an oversimplification, but so are G (9.81 m/s^2) and c (299,792,458 m/s), depending on what you're doing. In a "science" (science is a methodology and lies a spectrum, and is not a dogma, so let's try to keep some perspective) where you don't really have a "lab", all you can do is create predictive models that fit your observational data. Technology of the past 10 years brings more data, and lets economics move away from the representative agent of the past 100 years. Good. Let's do that, but let's not forget whose shoulders we sit on - no one mocks the orbital model of the atom, or Newtonian laws of physics, even though both models are outdated [2][3]. [0] - http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=465 [1] - http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0305457 [2] - http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys314/lectures/bohrprob/bohrprob.html [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_mechanics#Limits_of_validity