Скачать или смотреть Uskali Mäki: Homo Economicus

Date: 14.12.2023
Time: 14:00 – 16:00
Place: Metsätalo sali 1, University of Helsinki, Unioninkatu 40, 00170 Helsinki


Homo Economicus – Persona from the past with a bright future (even though perhaps gloomy for Homo Sapiens)?

What is reasonable to assume about human behaviour and motivation in economics and the rest of social science? What is reasonable to assume about these things when designing institutions and doing policies? What kind of beings are we? What kind of beings do we want to be? Are these questions linked with one another?

Selfish and greedy, informed and rationally calculative, competitive and strategically opportunistic, amoral and asocial. Those are among the characteristics that in different permutations and degrees of idealization have constituted the famous – both celebrated and challenged – social science persona, homo economicus. The arguments used for justifying and criticizing its various incarnations have varied and have seldom been sufficiently elaborate. I will examine some of these incarnations and arguments, providing missing elaborations. These deal with different roles that idealizations play in explaining different types of explananda, including individual behaviour and social patterns. One of these roles is homo economicus as a Weberian ideal type, popular in behavioural economics that sets out to explain deviations from this ideal. On top of treating homo economics as an explanatory ideal type, behavioural economics also tends to use (at least parts of) it as a normative ideal towards which people’s behaviour is to be nudged. In combination with wide-ranging incentive-based policies, does this contribute to pushing us towards closer approximations of homo economicus? Would homo sapiens be comfortable with such a future? The issues are, and have always been, multifarious, ranging from theoretical to empirical, philosophical to political.

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
3:31 Uskali Mäki on Homo Economicus