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Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating some Categories of Economic Discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Albert O. Hirschman
Albert O. Hirschman
Affiliation:
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
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Extract

Economics as a science of human behavior has been grounded in a remarkably parsimonious postulate: that of the self-interested, isolated individual who chooses freely and rationally between alternative courses of action after computing their prospective costs and benefits. In recent decades, a group of economists has shown considerable industry and ingenuity in applying this way of interpreting the social world to a series of ostensibly noneconomic phenomena, from crime to the family, and from collective action to democracy. The “economic” or “rational-actor” approach has yielded some important insights, but its onward sweep has also revealed some of its intrinsic weaknesses. As a result, it has become possible to mount a critique which, ironically, can be carried all the way back to the heartland of the would-be conquering discipline. That the economic approach presents us with too simpleminded an account of even such fundamental economic processes as consumption and production is the basic thesis of the present paper.

Type
Essays
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , April 1985 , pp. 7 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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