Economics needs to get a life
Nov. 6th, 2005 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
openspace4lifeThere's a difference between rationality and reason, and I believe the Age of Rationality may be coming to an end. Hopefully, what replaces it will be a new chapter in the larger Age of Reason, what I like to call the Age of Sense, in which people will be sensible enough to act with the long-term consequences of their actions in mind. This may go against our immediate rational interests, but is certainly not essentially unreasonable, even when some of the consequences will only occur after the "sensible actor" is dead.
This is all very difficult, of course, but not impossible. After all, humans are mammals, and mammals care for their offspring. This is one of several important factors that the abstract "rational actor" model of self-interested behavior favored by most economists leaves out. In fact, if economists were willing to look at people as living things rather than economic automatons, they might see the implications of the drive to reproduce for any organism: the organism doesn't just want what's best for itself, but what's best for its descendents and, to some extent, for its entire species as well.
This is all very difficult, of course, but not impossible. After all, humans are mammals, and mammals care for their offspring. This is one of several important factors that the abstract "rational actor" model of self-interested behavior favored by most economists leaves out. In fact, if economists were willing to look at people as living things rather than economic automatons, they might see the implications of the drive to reproduce for any organism: the organism doesn't just want what's best for itself, but what's best for its descendents and, to some extent, for its entire species as well.
