This was the world of homo economicus: the rational, self-interested individual whose actions, when aggregated, supposedly created the best of all possible outcomes for society. Edgeworth’s major work, Mathematical Psychics (1881), presented this as a vision of “heaven on earth” – a world where enlightened self-interest guaranteed social efficiency.
Bit of a pastiche but OK.
In contrast, across the Atlantic, a very different figure was developing his own critique of capitalism. Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian-American economist and social observer, rejected the neat abstractions of Edgeworth and his peers. He was not content with blackboard models. Instead, he walked about, observed real behaviour, and asked awkward questions.
Veblen grew up in Minnesota in a Norwegian immigrant community, and saw at close quarters the realities of late nineteenth-century America: robber barons blowing up rivals’ factories, bankers rigging markets, monopolists gouging prices, and the brutal exclusion of black Americans under Jim Crow. This was not the world of rational calculators. It was a world of predators, brutes, and sociopaths elevated to positions of power.
Predators, brutes and sociopaths are being economically rational in doing so.
And?
Spud (and Christensen) are assuming that because they don;t like the outcome of rationality therefore people are not rational. Which just ain’t good logic, sorry.
The actual art is not to assume away the rationality and self-interest but to tame it.
You know, as capitalist free marketry with the rule of law does?
In a Norwegian immigrant community? In Minnesota?
Pants on fire.
The “robber barons” got rich, true enough, but mostly by making things cheaper for the plebes. This was also a period where living standards improved significantly for the average person. As opposed to say, the USSR where the benevolent gov’t was working for the benefit of the masses.
Wan’t this the period where the US government was so horrified that capitalism had made kerosene so cheap that the plebs could afford as much as they wanted, that they destroyed the efficient production systems and made kerosene expensive.
So he has moved on from quantum economics to homo economics?
It’s part of a typical attempt at argument from authority to use lots of words taken from another language. “I know lots of things. Look at me using all these words you don’t know the meaning of!”
He’s guessing that if you don’t know the meaning of the word, it’s harder to argue that he’s talking nonsense.
Sometimes a word from another language expresses the concept better, so you use it. This is quite rare.
It doesn’t work because his audience includes a number of people who know the meaning of the words he’s using much better than he does. And he’s using them wrong.
“the realities of late nineteenth-century America”
Somehow he omitted to mention the brutal savagery of the US trade unions back then.
Since when has the Solanum incorporated Inconvenient Facts in his ruminant musings?
They upset his carefully crafted thoughts on that mental blackboard of his…
He’s doing the same thing as all those late 19thC “Great Philosophers” he seems to admire so much, in line with the attitude of the Hallowed Greeks they absolutely idolised:
The Thought Experiment is Sacrosanct. Actually testing the hypothesis againt Reality would desecrate the Divine Inspiration granted the Rational Mind of the Thinker and as such is neither needed nor required.
Half the flak Darwin got was not because he proposed something as gross as the possibility of us having descended from mere monkeys.
It was because he actually went out and checked his initial hypothesis, based on observable reality. Inconceivable!!!
Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short describes Tater to a T.