Re: People who think that "rational economic man" is sociopathic might find this a bit humorous

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

Economists play a bait and switch game.

The basic idea concerning human choice _is_ tautological: people do
what they want to do. (How can you tell what someone's preferences
are? simple, revealed preference, i.e., what they do.)

But there is another version, which appears in textbooks and lectures,
of the simple-minded maximizer of a given utility function who doesn't
care about others' utility, etc. This radical individualist is at the
center of the economists' conception, but when attacked, he falls back
on the tautological version. This is the bait and switch.

The old econ. vision of humanity should go away, if we're lucky, now
that experimental (or behavioral) economics is becoming popular. It
turns out (from the research of the guy in the office next door to
mine) that people have a built-in sense of what's fair (a social
notion that's totally missed by homo economicus).

More, we have to look to where "preferences" or goals come from. This
suggests that sociology should be seen as complementary to the
goal-seeking behavior posited by economics.

There's also the psychodynamic perspective (the broadly defined
psychoanalysic view), in which human choice is a product of an
internal conflict of motives (ego vs. id vs. superego).

BTW,  when Julio quotes Marx, it's irrelevant to the question at hand.
He writes: >In mid 19th-century Europe, a revolutionary
critic wrote that "what distinguishes the worst architect from the
best of bees is that the architect raises his structure in imagination
before he erects it in reality."  Purposefulness is a material
attribute of human labor -- and, more generally, of all conscious
activity, in all historical epochs.  It doesn't disappear under
capitalism: it only takes particular, in some cases perverse forms.<

sure, people have conscious purposes, but that's very different from
the neoclassical conception, in which those purposes are typically
seen as individualistic and almost always seen as arising somehow from
outside of society (dropping from the sky or determined by genes).
(Like Marx, the neoclassicals ignore internal conflicts. They should
know better, since most of them come after Freud.)
--
Jim Devine
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an
intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James Baldwin