Homo economicus must die (with Samuel Bowles)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2019

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Homo economicus is the figurative human being used in economic modeling. But the term defines human nature as perfectly rational, perfectly logical, and always self-interested. Does that sound like any real humans you know? Nope, we didn’t think so either. So we invited Professor Samuel Bowles to join Nick and Goldy in throwing a funeral for homo economicus, and all the flawed economic thinking that he’s inspired over the years. Samuel Bowles is a Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute where he heads the Behavioral Sciences Program. His work on cultural evolution have challenged the conventional economic assumption that people are motivated entirely by self-interest. His most recent books are ‘The Moral Economy: Why good laws are no substitute for good citizens’ and ‘A Cooperative Species: Human reciprocity and its revolution’. ‘Spock goes shopping’ was based on a thought experiment in Eric Beinhocker’s book ‘The Origin of Wealth’: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781422121030 https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/homo-economicus-must-die/ https://www.core-econ.org/ https://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2016/10/11/the-moral-economy-homo-economicus-becomes-human/

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's the consequence if you think that people are entirely selfless?
0:05.8	This basic assumption that economists have made has entered the culture and the consciousness of people.
0:13.0	And what we have done over generations
0:15.0	is that we have taught people
0:18.0	to believe that people are perfectly selfish and rational.
0:21.0	The capitalist system would fall apart. Indeed, any social
0:25.8	system would fall apart if the people were psychopathic as described by Homo
0:31.0	Economicus. to buy homoeconomics. From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics,
0:42.0	with Nick Hanauer in honest conversation about how to make
0:46.7	capitalism work for everyone. I'm Nick Henauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
0:59.0	I'm David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.
1:05.0	So in this episode of Pitchfork Economics,
1:10.0	we're going to make the claim that Homo economicus must die.
1:14.6	Oh my god who's that Nick?
1:16.6	Who's this guy you want to kill?
1:18.1	It's really mean here.
1:20.6	But in the interest of full transparency, I think we should just say that if you're still
1:26.7	with us in pitchfork economics, that means you're somewhat wonky and care a lot about these subjects and this episode will be wonkier still.
1:37.0	Right. So consider, we've talked about Homo economicists on previous episodes in the past, consider that your bachelor's degree.
1:45.0	On this episode, you're going to get your masters.
1:47.4	Exactly. We're going deep in this episode on one of the most important assumptions that undergirds neoclassical economics,
1:56.0	which is the assumption that economists make about how human beings behave.
	...

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