‘Jane Austen, Game Theorist’ by Michael Suk-Young Chwe Is a Joke

When [Chwe] says that Austen was a game theorist, he means for us to take him at his word. Never mind the fact that game theory did not emerge until the middle of the twentieth century. Austen, he claims, was a “social theorist” who “carefully establishes game theory’s core concepts” and “systematically explored” them in her novels, which are “game theory textbooks.” This is a perfectly valid statement, as long as we ignore the accepted meaning of most of the words it contains. New Republic.