Economic Rationality E-Book

Stephen G. Engelmann

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: What is Political Economy?
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 265

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Economics used to be called political economy, and the loss of the “political” tracks the ascendance of the idea of rational choice within the discipline. Where does this idea of economic rationality – choosing to maximize benefits and minimize costs – come from? What are the consequences of its rise?

In this new book, Stephen Engelmann assesses these questions through a consideration of the often-hidden links between choice and government, ranging from the Benthamic utilitarianism that inspired modern economics to the contemporary economic psychologists trying to nudge everyone to choose more rationally. Multiple global crises are exposing how deficient economic rationality is as a political theory, since a focus on choice turns actors away from relations in the common. Political economy once targeted aristocratic rule – heralding a politics and ethics of egalitarian self-command and spurring democratic reform – but economics allows domination and forecloses alternatives to it.

This accessible volume will be of interest to students and scholars of politics and economics, and to general readers concerned about the various ways that psychology and management have infiltrated our politics.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Series Title

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

Notes

2 Textbook Rationality and the Behavioral Critique

Choice, scarcity, and economic reason

Economic rationality and economic science

Allocative choice and the behavioral challenge

Rationality, management, and politics

Notes

3 Political Economy

Reading Adam Smith

From Malthus to Mill

On interest: Back to Bentham

Notes

4 Economics as Politics

Choice and balance

Pleasures, pains, and commensurability

Economics and expertise

Governing interest

Notes

5 Conclusion

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Series Title

What is Political Economy? series

Bruce Pietrykowski,

Work

Suzanne J. Konzelmann,

Austerity

Geoffrey Ingham,

Money

Frederick Harry Pitts,

Value

Ian Hudson & Mark Hudson,

Consumption

Joe Collins,

Rent

Stephen Engelmann,

Economic Rationality

Economic Rationality

Stephen Engelmann

polity

Copyright Page

Copyright © Stephen Engelmann 2022

The right of Stephen Engelmann to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2022 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

111 River Street

Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3810-2 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3811-9 (paperback)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935234

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Dedication

To Mia, with love and hope

Acknowledgments

I have enjoyed a huge amount of support for this book from the beginning. A National Endowment for the Humanities University Faculty Fellowship launched the interdisciplinary journey that led to it. George Owers, formerly of Polity, solicited the proposal and saw much of the project through. The Press has been tremendous: in addition to Owers I thank Laura Booth, Susan Beer, Julia Davies, Evie Deavall, and their colleagues, as well as anonymous reviewers at proposal and manuscript stages. Research and writing for Economic Rationality were made possible by a residential fellowship at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Institute for the Humanities in 2019–2020, with additional support from UIC’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Department of Political Science, a Chancellor’s Undergraduate Research Award, and an Award for Creative Activity. Many works old and new not named in the notes were helpful to my research, including resources through the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s History of Economic Thought website, the Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty, and the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Daley Library and its I-Share partners. For the opportunity to present pieces of the project as it developed I thank: Michael Quinn, Philip Schofield, and the audience at University College London; Alba Alexander, colleagues, and students from UIC’s Department of Political Science; Mark Canuel, Laura Hostetler, Linda Vavra, and audiences from UIC’s Institute for the Humanities; Nils Goldschmidt, Mark McAdam, Deirdre McCloskey, and colleagues from the Sunday Seminar; panelists and audience at the 2022 Western Political Science Association meetings; and Malte Dold, students, and colleagues at Pomona College. Students in my political economy seminars have been an inspiration, and from early on many individuals helped in big and small ways; some are strong-minded but tolerant and generous economists, and they especially mustn’t be held responsible for the results. Finally then, thanks to Emma Acosta, Elif Baba, Ike Balbus, Bob Barbera, John Berdell, David Bleeden, Natalia De Lima Bracarense, Natally Brookson, William Callison, Adriana Castrillon, Catherine Chaput, Ralph Cintron, Annie Cot, Claire Decoteau, Andy Denis, Claus Dierksmeier, Malte Dold, Madhu Dubey, Mia Mihic Engelmann, Sébastien Engelmann, Sam Fleischacker, Rachel Forgash, Marco Guidi, Santhi Hejeebu, Begum Icelliler, Ali Khan, Erich von Klosst-Dohna, Tony Laden, Deirdre McCloskey, Sophia Mihic, Nadine Naber, Hayley Negrin, Joe Persky, Maureen Heffern Ponicki, Malcolm Quinn, Michael Quinn, Chris Riley, Eric Schliesser, Abe Singer, Jeff Sklansky, Will Small, David Stovall, Kim Wheatley, Daniel Williams, and Tahira Zainulabideen.

1Introduction

Rationality has a distinctive meaning in economics. Although economists have never quite agreed on what rationality is, they have converged for the most part on a technical definition for their teaching and research. The core idea is that the rational economic actor, for example a producing firm, or a consuming household, chooses to get what it defines as more for less, rather than to get less for more (which would be irrational). Defender of economics Lionel Robbins wrote that economics is “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”1 Critic Karl Polanyi wrote that economics “refers to a definite situation of choice, namely, that between different uses of means induced by an insufficiency of those means.”2 Once one turns one’s attention to this situation of choice, one realizes that any economic unit can make a rational choice by doing a better rather than a worse job of using the means at its disposal. To choose rationally is to choose what will yield more of what one considers benefit and suffer less of what one considers cost.

There are many other philosophical and common-sense ways to think about what is rational or reasonable. Here are just a few: Reason is what distinguishes a valid from an invalid argument. Reason is what distinguishes a consistent or coherent from an inconsistent or incoherent account. Reason is a process or mode involved in figuring out how to solve a puzzle, or figuring out how to build something from scratch, or figuring out how to fix something that is broken. Reason guides one to do the right thing. Reason is a social process, or a procedure, for people to do things like reach compromise or take advantage of the fact that many heads are better than one. To be reasonable is to be receptive and consistent, as opposed to rigid and arbitrary. Reason is what broadly distinguishes enlightenment or true religion from ignorance or superstition. Reason is a challenge to domination, or reason is a mask for domination. Reason is low cunning, or reason is high dispensation. Economic rationality overlaps with some of these and others but it is quite specific. Whether we speak of a part or a unit, or an individual or a collective, to be economically rational is to behave or act in such a way as to yield more benefits, suffer fewer costs, or both, of any kind, as determined by preferences and their satisfaction under given constraints. Economic rationality always looks to the future, and that future can present itself as alternative scenarios likely to result from more or less rational choices: more or less rational, that is, given preferences and given limited means to satisfy those preferences.3 Rationality, in an economic sense, is about allocative choice. The need to choose how to allocate is conditioned by scarcity. Economics points out, for example, that you only have so much time to do the things you want to do in this day, in this week, in this lifetime. How are you going to budget that time?

For most economists, one advantage of their approach to rationality is that it appears to be “value-free,” unlike many of the alternatives listed above. Most critics agree, but they see this amorality as a vice. After all, the sinner might be just as rational, in an economic sense, as the saint, and both as rational as the prudent householder. Economic rationality on the dominant understanding is simply a vehicle one uses to take one, by the best route, wherever one wants to go. It does not seem to privilege any one way of life over another. Thus its more thoughtful defenders will point out that economic rationality flourishes in and is particularly appropriate to modern, complex, liberal societies, where people are rightly understood to have a plurality of ends, and a plurality of conceptions of the good life.

But economics cannot escape values any more than any other social science discipline can. As the American economist Frank Knight observed almost a century ago, economists are part of the social life that is their subject matter.4 Social life is made up of how people and things relate to one another; it is made up of what people do and how they talk about what they do. Economists are people too, and when they write and teach they necessarily affect the social life that they write and teach about. Their doing so isn’t a problem – it’s not some matter of personal “bias” getting in the way – it is instead how even or especially the most rigorous social science is done. Knight was the undergraduate and graduate teacher of several very prominent twentieth-century economists, including leading lights of the postwar American Right. Few would claim that their scientific practice left the world they studied unchanged.

Both defenders and detractors say that economic rationality selects means for given ends, that it is simply “instrumental.” But that’s not strictly speaking true. Instead, allocative choice means that ends are “traded off” with one another in light of the chooser’s limited means; they are rendered commensurable, or somehow comparable, on a single scale. Do you want to read this book right now? How does it compare with something else you might be doing? You can’t do both! (Or can you? What about those people at gyms reading on the StairMaster™?) Critics are right that something is seriously awry with thinking of allocative choice as a model for rational action, that the deployment of economic rationality can obscure and even transform relations that work according to other logics. But these critics and even the most stalwart defenders are insufficiently appreciative of the rich political history and meaning of economists’ way of reasoning. Economic reason was once couched in a broader political theory that charted a clear-sighted course in opposition to dependence on, and domination by, aristocrats and churchmen. It worked as one department of a new democratic art and science of government. Today, however, economic rationality disenchants politics,5 and thus degrades responses to domination and other problems of the commons.

To behave in an economically rational way is to do more with less, or get more from less. To be more rational in this way is to economize, to make better use of what is available, whatever one’s aims. Economy, or economic efficiency, yields utility: whatever counts as satisfaction of priorities or preferences for and from any individual or collective conduct. Efficiency fights waste: that which could have been yielded but wasn’t, because of a correctable problem of misallocation. If that’s how economic rationality guides us, says the economist, it seems there is some kind of ethics or politics involved here after all: an opposition to waste no matter what one’s purposes, with waste defined strictly in accordance with those purposes. What could be wrong with that?

To make better use of what is available is to exploit. Critics target this exploitation. Consider that colonists over the centuries have seized indigenous lands and the very bodies of colonized individuals, justified in part by metrics claiming more efficient use than the colonized were making without their presence. This new use was seen as more pleasing to God and because, without being dispossessed or enslaved, the indigenous would, according to the metrics, remain in a state of underdevelopment, in everyone’s interest. Consider that employers devise ingenious ways to get more out of employees in often despotic workplaces in the name of the contribution this makes to the health of the competitive firm, and to the prosperity of the economy as a whole, even as aggregate metrics of prosperity can efface effects on workers, often including whether they even share in this prosperity at all. Consider that economic prosperity gained by efficiency unconsciously exploits and often disrupts or reshuffles an invisible array of care work, some of it in the paid labor force, so partly accounted for by economic measures, but much of it not. Care work becomes more visible in times of crisis: essential work that is shirked by most men and by people of higher status and is primarily done by women and immigrants and members of other subaltern groups. And, consider that humans generally dominate, or attempt to dominate, other animals and the rest of nature, exploiting them for their own purposes. Humans don’t even dominate nature efficiently, from another point of view, if losses from pollution, or in fresh water, habitat destruction, extinction, heightened disease risk, and outright climate catastrophe, aren’t even priced as costs.

Defenders of economic rationality will point to this last possibility, the possibility of newly recognizing and revising estimates of the benefits and costs of our actions, in order to showcase the enormous flexibility and indispensability of their framework. All material culture amounts to exploitation in some form, much of it surely either innocuous or reducing of harm. If our aim is to expose and to confront all forms of unjust and otherwise problematic use and abuse, so be it! We will still need to do that rationally as opposed to irrationally; we will still want to oppose this exploitation as economically as possible. If the critics are concerned that economic rationality turns everything and everyone into an instrument for use, the defenders of economic rationality will point out that it itself is an instrument for use. It still is a vehicle to take us where we want to go, wherever that is. By helping us to map out the most direct route to our destination economic rationality is, according to this retort, fundamental to individual and collective progress, whatever the standard or measure of progress might be.

The modern social-theoretical debate over economic reason – the fierce and overlapping anticolonial, critical race, socialist, feminist, and ecological attacks sketched above, and various responses to them from the liberal mainstream – goes back in its systematic form at least to Karl Marx’s nineteenth-century critique of political economy. Marx disputed classical political economy’s conception of capital. Capital for Marx is not, as political economy generally thought, dead labor serving living labor, but instead living labor serving dead labor. And economic rationality as we know it and currently live it – the push to do more with less, to find the higher return, to maximize the satisfaction of preferences no matter what those preferences are – is the logic of capital. Capital is a become-alien monster of our own creation, an insatiable vampire feeding off the living, and economic rationality is its drive. The capitalist is merely a “conscious bearer [Träger] of this movement.”6 Thus agents don’t so much have (or not have) rationality: economic rationality, on the contrary, has them. In the twentieth century Karl Polanyi put an ecological twist on this critique. Economic rationality on his view was the logic of the “disembedded” market, attacking the foundations of the societies in which it needed to be re-embedded for its own and our very survival, and provoking counter-movements of the self-defense of society in response. Economic rationality sets itself upon its very preconditions. Whether one understands those preconditions as the treasures of the earth, the treasures of long-accreted or flexible and inventive human relations and human potential, or the treasures of the very institutions – law, property, money, etc. – that it functionally requires, economic rationality, left to itself, eats its seed corn.7

Marx and Polanyi, as well as a complex of decolonial/feminist/ecological approaches, are not launching “normative” critiques of economics so much as they are refusing its dominant descriptions and explanations as being incomplete or misleading, and substituting others. In fact, the misconception some economists have that their critics are moralizers goes hand in glove with the misconception that some non-economists have, that economists are immoralizers, supposedly pushing the idea that people are just out for themselves. That said, modern critical-theoretical concerns are powerfully resonant with older, and still very active, traditions of moral criticism of economic rationality and economic thinking. Generations of moralists of various stripes have worried about the problems that economic rationality poses for the ethical individual. If your aim is to realize your preferences as efficiently as possible, no matter how unselfish those preferences might be, what does this mean for your fundamental duties? A commitment cannot really be a commitment, a duty can’t truly be a duty, if it can be dislodged and traded off as just another value or preference to be weighed against other values or preferences.8

Consider the promise. In the English seventeenth century, to break a promise was to dishonor yourself and dishonor God. In the twenty-first-century US, law schools treat corporate contracts only as seriously as the cost of violating them (“reputational cost” does not capture what it is to lose honor). Regardless of how much or how little promise-breaking is punished, or promise-keeping rewarded, by law or norm, your promise to someone isn’t really a promise if you make it thinking you’ll keep it only so long as from your point of view the beneficial (in any sense, for anyone or anything you care about, which could even be that someone) consequences of doing so outweigh the costs. Being ready to treat such matters – one’s relation with another, one’s own decided practice – as so much “sunk cost” in the face of a new landscape of threat or opportunity, seems to involve an akrasia or weakness of the will, where your resolve is ever-susceptible, and your conduct vulnerable, to new temptations or their equivalents. Or maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe your will is strong, even monstrously so, in your careful calculation of the benefits from a change of course and your readiness and willingness to move away, at the drop of a hat, from past patterns.

Questions or problems of independence and self-command are intimately tied up with the history of economic rationality. To tell some of that history is to show how economics is moral and political from the beginning. My main concern about the limits of social-theoretical and ethical critiques is that they might take economics too much at its word, that it doesn’t do ethics and politics, and not recognize how, even after the loss of the “political” in political economy, economic rationality does its political work. As a matter of fact, it is more able to do the political work it now does because it is free of its classical moorings. That freeing allowed a new foundation in allocative choice. Once this introspective or psychic (if not psychological) vision was triumphant, economic rationality was free gradually to colonize or displace existing modes of political sovereignty.

Allocative choice and its political entailments are only reinforced by the recent challenge to rationality from within economics. Behavioral economists informed by cognitive psychology propose an alternative to the rationality assumption in systematic irrationality: for example, the tendency for economic actors consistently to underestimate distant costs and benefits in comparison to near ones. On the one hand, behavioralists participate in the myth that economics is a value-free science. On the other hand, they bring to the surface, through their practice, economic rationality’s buried historical and conceptual connections to an art and science of government animated by a kind of utilitarian evangelism. Behavioral economists view humanity as fallen, as “crooked timber,” and they are spreading the news while doing their best to help. Straightening us out is impossible, and thus a body of research works to inform policy that nudges us toward more rational behavior, and thus makes our crookedness less damaging to ourselves than it now is. In their narrow diagnostic and therapeutic approach, behavioralists run the risk of cementing varieties of contemporary servitude by arguing that our problems are of a cognitive rather than political cast, and then treating them as such. Think, for example, how different it is to approach retirement security as a problem for better systems-design fostering better individual decisions, rather than engage a collective struggle for pension rights.

In this book I excavate the political theory of economic rationality. It contrasts with the political theory of classical political economy, which targeted lordship as part of an emerging democratic art of government. Political economy mutated and buried its political theory when it built a new foundation on choice. Economics’ dominant political theory treats social and political space as a classless, dynamic space of unaffiliated choosers. It aims to govern economic actors as harmoniously as possible through the choices they make, and to educate, adjust incentives, or resort to carefully chosen administrative fiat when those choices go seriously awry. Thus the turn of behavioral economics to psychological science and managerial technique merely makes explicit the implicit governmental logic of the postclassical turn. But the people who either tamed or threw off the old aristocracy didn’t do so through individual or even policy choices. They, that is, those who saw a problem at all, saw the problem of aristocracy as a problem affecting them differently but common to them, a problem that, like all entrenched common problems, could ultimately only effectively be addressed by way of self-organization and collective action.

What follows is about an open secret: economics is an art and science of government. If we had any doubt – despite the economics-educated staff, think-tanks, and firms guiding states and corporations, and despite the rise of personal finance and related choice-aids even for households of modest means – behavioral economists have dispelled it with their public and private sector reforms designed to help people act better. Most economists will sincerely protest that theirs is not a political science, and not nearly so consequential. They think that if their work is practical at all they only serve, and that no one really listens to them anyway. Moreover, many will say, behavioral colleagues are outliers in their questioning of agents’ rationality and in their meddling policy ambitions. Behavioral economists are instead, however, reminders of the discipline’s roots as a moral science, specifically a secular evangelical project that promoted particular virtues toward the reform of individual and collective life. At the same time, behavioral economists’ reliance on cognitive psychology reflects how far the discipline has traveled from its roots as a self-consciously social and political science. The irony of behavioral economics is that its attacks on economic rationality as a description of, or stylized model of, behavior are about reinforcing economic rationality as a prescription for and governor of behavior. The refinement and reproduction of a particular idea of rationality has been the refinement and reproduction of the administrative logic that animates economic theory and practice. Political economy once engaged with other literatures to promote egalitarian self-command and democratic reform; economics has increasingly turned away from the rest of the humanities to promote better individual and institutional choice.

My argument proceeds in three stages. First (Chapter 2), I guide the reader through a basic introduction to textbook rationality and the behavioral challenge, and situate both in the recent history of the discipline. Rationality is less descriptive or heuristic and more prescriptive. Rational or not, allocative choice is a weird way to do things, and its weirdness involves an abstraction from relations between economic agents, and between them and their choices and the things they choose. Framing action in the introductory textbook way doesn’t just leave agents in charge and their ends untouched. Instead, by rendering ends commensurable, the framing allows less for considered action than it does for predictable reaction, and the behavioral critique reinforces said framework. Second (Chapter 3), I revisit classical political economy. Like other critics I go back to Adam Smith, but less for his classical ethics and more for the quasi-republican politics with which those ethics are entangled. Smith was concerned about liberty and domination, and the virtues needed to sustain the first and avoid the second. Although these concerns were blunted, in political economy proper, by the full turn to happiness in the nineteenth century, they certainly didn’t disappear: the critique of domination is, if anything, more on the surface in the canonical, virtue-forward work of John Stuart Mill than it is in Smith. Third (Chapter 4), I do a close reading of Lionel Robbins’ foundational essay in economic theory. With reference back to Robbins’ fellow Englishmen William Stanley Jevons and Philip Wicksteed, and forward to the American Gary Becker, I make the case that Robbins’ deliberately vague and ultimately consensual “harmony” definition of economic rationality (it is neutral between competing conceptions in the literature) is not the value-free project he presents it as but, instead, a highly consequential brief for the sovereignty of his science and its work. Robbins’ approach set up economics as an indispensable expertise, providing internal justification for its increasing institutional presence and power through the twentieth century and beyond. Jeremy Bentham, critic of Smith on usury, mentor to Mill, and inspiration for the choice (as frame and foundation) turn in Anglophone economics, figures in both Chapters 3 and 4, a reminder that both post-Smithian political economy and economics are projects, however stunted, of a utilitarian art and science of government. (Bentham’s importance to the tradition was once well understood, but it has since been obscured and is here restored.) As a look back at selected major figures these chapters resemble a brief history of “economy” – perhaps the foundational concept in economics – with all the strengths and weaknesses of that approach. But they, and the chapter preceding, are less history of economics than attempts to read economics and its rationality as political theory, attempts to bring out the political theory that is embedded there.

If Marx was right, then economic rationality should be understood more as force than frame. And, certainly, no amount of re-framing is going to help with next month’s rent or next month’s payroll: it won’t make any individual or organization less subject to economic imperatives and thus to rationality’s prescriptions. But this book is written with the wager that it is worth alerting readers to, or reminding them of, the political and ethical costs and consequences of the microeconomic mode.9 It’s worth remembering too that the mainstream tradition of political economy and its broader classical utilitarianism are themselves a potential source of alternative, that is, non-microeconomic, approaches to the problems of individual and collective government. These can at least inspire counterforces to economic rationality, and perhaps much more. As I argue in the Conclusion, the political theory of choice economics is, by contrast, particularly ill-suited to contend with multiple crises. To the extent that economics has performatively disenchanted all politics but its own, it is time to re-enliven other political perspectives and possibilities, to be more aware of the primacy of the public, of the commons, and what it calls for.

My account, which tells one story about the emergence of a specific rationality in economics, makes modern economics, in a sense, into a branch of politics. There is a kind of tit for tat here. Many economists have been doing something along these lines to politics for decades now, making it into a branch of economics. But, whereas some of those economists claim to be able to explain all political problems in economic terms, I make no such claim about economic problems. I am not writing so much about economic problems as I am about the political work done by a particular kind of economics. The microeconomic mode makes both economic and political problems (and, really, any existential problem or puzzle at all) into matters, at base, of choice and rationality. Many economists think of the problems they study in other terms, and don’t link them to these micro-foundations. What follows has little or nothing to do with them and their work.10 But allocative choice is still the starting point for most introductions to the discipline. Chapter 2 turns to one such introduction, in the world’s best-selling economics textbook.11

Notes

 1

  Lionel Robbins,

An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science

, 3rd edn. (New York: New York University Press, 1984 [1932, 1935]), 16.

 2

  Karl Polanyi, referencing formal as opposed to substantive economics in “The Economy as Instituted Process,” in K. Polanyi, C. M. Arensberg, and H. W. Pearson, eds.,

Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory

(New York: The Free Press, 1957), 243.

 3

  This basic framework for rationality can accommodate not only for any number of metrics of cost or benefit applied by the choosing unit; it can account for and contend with all manner of supplemental conditions: technical, including informational, constraints plus other departures from any frictionless account of rational choice.

 4

  See, for example, Frank H. Knight, “The Nature of Economic Science in Some Recent Discussion,”

American Economic Review

24:2 (1934), 236 and passim.

 5

  I borrow this application of the Weberian language of disenchantment from William Davies,

The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty, and the Logic of Competition

(London: Sage Publications, 2014), 1–34.

 6

  Karl Marx,

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One

, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976 [1867]), 254.

 7

  Karl Polanyi,

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1957 [1944]).

 8

  For a now-canonical modern statement of this ancient concern see Amartya K. Sen, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory,”

Philosophy and Public Affairs

6:4 (1977), 317–344.

 9

  I borrow this language from Jane Elliott,

The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

10

 What economists do has arguably departed substantially from what they teach; David Colander, “What Economists Teach and What Economists Do,”

Journal of Economic Education

36:3 (2005), 249–260.

11

 It should be said that the “best-selling” claim regarding Gregory Mankiw’s

Principles

(see Chapter 2, below) is hard to verify, but the text remains very much representative. For a promising departure from the usual introduction to the discipline, one that begins not with allocative choice but with “the capitalist revolution,” see the Curriculum Open-Access Resources in Economics (CORE) project at

https://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/book/text/01.html

.