Jonathan Rowe at On the Commons has a cutting essay on what he considers to be the "state of arrested psycho-emotional development" that US economics finds itself in.
"There is an infatuation with mechanisms and statistics – trucks and baseball cards – with little interest in the human realities and complexities that lie beneath them. There is also a solipsistic concern for the self and its desires, to the exclusion of everyone else.
That self-concern is embodied in the hypothetical person who inhabits the economics texts. It is homo economicus, the economic man, who lives according to a closed and relentless calculus of personal loss and gain. Economic man is a slug like Adam in the Garden of Eden, except that he is better at math. He has no conscience and no sense of right and wrong, only a capacity to respond to external “incentives.” His god is self-gratification; and his myopic self-seeking is what the economist calls “rationality.”
Thus a person who drives a Hummer regardless of the consequences for others is deemed “rational” provided the price of gas is cheap. “Developmentally challenged” would be a more accurate term."
Well worth a read.
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