Homo Economicus Under Multiple Pressures

Uskali Mäki ()
Additional contact information
Uskali Mäki: Nankai University

A chapter in A Genealogy of Self-Interest in Economics, 2021, pp 309-325 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The issues around homo economicus are deep, and the debates over it have been heated. The chapter identifies four pressures that have shaped these concerns and conversations—deriving from economics itself, from the common sense, from disciplines other than economics (such as sociology, experimental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience), and from important features and processes in social reality (such as self-interest as a social norm, exposure to money, and the marketization of society). Economic theories assuming homo economicus find support from such trends in society, while the common sense and other disciplines largely speak against it. Among the themes examined are the applicability of the model of homo economicus across a negotiable range of phenomena, the negligibility of the falsity of its idealizing assumptions, and the consequences of designing policies on the presumption that people are sufficiently close approximations to homo economicus.

Keywords: Homo economicus; Idealised model; Economic theory; Common sense; Psychology; Marketisation; Applicability; Negligibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-15-9395-6_18

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789811593956

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-15-9395-6_18

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().