When I took my first economics course, the first proposition was The Economic Man.
The Economic Man was theoretical being whose only interest was maximizing his income. The course then went on to explain how, in a world of supply and demand, this Economic Man would maximize his income.
The Economic Man was very useful. Once you posited a human being whose only interest was in making money, you could then go on to showing, in terms of supply and demand, HOW this theoretical person would maximize his income in a world of pure supply and demand.
All this was fine until people started taking The Economic Man SERIOUSLY.
Ayn Rand built a whole world of Economic Men and Women who maximized their incomes and had no children. As every parent will testify if you want to end up with the maximum amount of personal assets, the LAST thing you will do is have children.
Socialists took the Economic Man seriously, too. They said that total output would be maximized if “intellectuals” told everybody what to produce and how.
Then came Public Choice, originally called Collective Decisions. It began with the obvious statement that there is no such thing as an Economic Man.
This gets so childishly basic it is hard now to explain what a revolution it was at the time.
It began with the idea that a person earns money to BUY things.
One of the things a person will buy is liesure time.
The Economic Man never bought liesure time. He only wanted money.
Economists were very worried ahout this whole concept of a non-Economic Man.
Here I run into the problem I always have when trying to explain what Mommy Professor believed fifty years ago. You think I am joking.
But the idea was that if you did not posit The Economic Man, economics would turn into something beside the nice safe area of supply and demand. Once you start talking about a human being as someone who wants more than money, a real human being who balances priorities, you are n o longer just an economist.
Psychologists and sociologists began to reaise hell about this new field of Public Choice.
The first person to ask me to be a discussant on academic papers was a sociologist at the University of Chicago.
Public Choice uses suply and demand to go into how a person leads a balanced life. It becomes sociology, psychology, philosophy.
All the other social sciences who worried that economists would get out of their safely bordered world of supply and demandwere right. But we’re out of htat stage now and Nobel Prizes are awarded in Public Choice, and nothing shows something is accepted by the least imaginative minds than a Nobel Prize.
So we grew out of The Economic Man crap a generation ago.
Today we still have a medical ethic based on Do No Harm.
Do No Harm to WHAT?
Do No Harm goes back to Hippocrates. The idea is that the first rule a doctor must follow is not to HARM his patient.
For couple of millennnia doctors treated patients by taking our an unsterilized knife they had recently used on somebody with smallpox and using it to cut their veins and take out a quarrt or so of blood.
In emergency cases they would take out two quarts.
I do not possess an MD degree, but I strongly suspect they were Doing Some Harm.
But it never occured to any of them to check and see if they were doing any harm.
Today, Do No Harm means that you do not cause a patient to be in danger of his life.
There is an exact parallel between Do No Harm and The Economic Man.
The Economic Man was based on the idea of a person who had no object in life except to maximize his income.
Do No Harm is based onthe concept of a human being whose only motivation is to maximize the number of years his heart keeps beating.
One assumes that an Economic Man would not have the slightest happiness in his life. For most people, working day and night would be miserable.
One assumes that a person whose only goal is to keep his heart beating for the maximum period would be miserable.
So what?
The economist has his supply and demand and the doctor has his Ethics.
Today
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