Who we tell ourselves we are, shapes who we become.
The character of rational economic man who stands at the heart of mainstream economics,
is never actually drawn in the textbooks that are written and studied.
If a little picture of him was drawn, he would be man,
standing alone with money in his hand, ego in his heart,
a calculator in his head and nature at his feet.
The problem with this character is not just how absurdly narrow he is,
it’s what looking at him does to us.
Research has shown that the more that economic students learn
about the rational economic man, the more they become like him.
The more they value self-interest,
and the less they value traits like compassion and altruism.
The way we describe the climate system, for example,
doesn’t change the climate change; it doesn’t change how it works.
But how we describe ourselves to ourselves, change who we become.
Nobody wants to be the fool, the idiot, so if we tell ourselves that actually,
we’re self-interested and competitive, it becomes ‘normal’ and acceptable,
and of course it makes us more likely to be self-interested and competitive.
There’s a huge responsibility in the field of economics as in any other discipline,
to describe ourselves wisely
because we are actually shaping how we will behave in that process.
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