Upstream - Documentary #9: Debunking the Myth of Homo Economicus

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

What do you see when you peek behind the curtains of neoliberal capitalism? What happens when you lift the veil off? Well, you see a mythological character. An apparition that haunts our collective consciousness. A spectre that permeates our institutions and that has epistemologically imprisoned us. Homo economicus. The term Homo economicus, or economic man, is a core principle in mainstream economic thinking. It’s a portrayal of humans as being inherently rational, greedy, and self-interested. We first got interested in the idea of Homo economicus when we started noticing a consistent barrier that many people have with the possibility of imagining a more just, solidaritistic, and sustainable economic future, stems from their assumptions about human nature. Time after time, we’ve heard — “But, humans are naturally selfish, so any system based on trust, equity, and true democracy would never work.” Where did the idea of Homo economicus come from? Why is it so embedded in mainstream economic thinking? And most importantly, is it true? Are we Homo economicus? Or are we the opposite — kind, compassionate, altruistic beings whose good nature has been thwarted by a mistaken view of our own humanity? Or is the truth somewhere in between? These are some of the questions we will be exploring in this episode, “Debunking the Myth of Homo economicus.” Featuring: Bayo Akomolafe — Philosopher, author, professor, and organizer currently based in India David Sloan Wilson — Evolutionary biologist and a Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University in New York. George Monbiot — Journalist and author of "Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis" Kate Raworth — Renegade economist and author of "Doughnut Economics" Matt Christman — Co-host of the Chapo Traphouse podcast Peter Fleming — Professor in organization theory and author of "The Death of Homo economicus" Tom Crompton — Co-director of the Common Cause Foundation Vas — Former economics student (Vas declined to provide her last name) Yuan Yang — Founder of Rethinking Economics Music by: Haley Heynderickx American Football Many thanks to Charlie Young for the cover art, as well as to Elle Bisgard Church, Lilly Datnow, and Emmanuel Brown for their research and support for this episode.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

This episode of Upstream was made possible with support by the Guerrilla Foundation, supporting activists and grassroots movements to bring about major systemic change. Additional support was provided by the Upstream Works Collaborative, taking a systems approach to uplifting communities, they also go upstream, to address the root causes of social, economic, and environmental injustices. Learn more at upstreamworks.org. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. A radio documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Join us as we journey upstream to the heart of our economic system and discover cutting-edge stories of game-changing solutions based on connection, resilience, and prosperity for all. Okay, I'm Voss. I go to a school, a private school in the Bay Area, and right now we're

outside of the business school on campus, about to go in. And what's the meaning of this business school to you? Um, a lot of libertarians walking in and out. Yeah. And my economics classes. You were a major. That's it. Yeah. When I was a major, yes. I used to have my classes here. Probably should have said that first. Let's go in. As we entered, we couldn't help but notice that the newly constructed business school was by far the flashiest building on campus. the flashiest building on campus. So I came into college as an economics student and I remained so for almost two years but I think the those two years worth of classes were very alienating and

frustrating as I was also being exposed to community organizing and very different ideas of structuring our economy while in the classrooms. Capitalism was a given, which was very alienating and again frustrating. My first economics class, my lecturer was great for what he was teaching, but I think there were like these little things happening in the classroom that were very frustrating. For example, I think like Econ 101, you go over price floors and price ceilings and a minimum wage. And someone just said in class that, oh, if you're treating your workers badly, I think customers should just leave Yelp reviews. Like that's going to fix everything because people are not going to go to that restaurant based on Yelp reviews. And that just did not make sense to me. And I was so frustrated and I was trying to say something in class, but I kept getting dismissed. So I think that's where it kind of started was

just lectures, validating a clearly very like libertarian point of view and dismissing everything else in class. So I am no longer an economics major. I'm a sociology and math major. As we wandered around the Bank of America Commons, located in the business school foyer, we came across a recruiting pamphlet describing the program that Voss had been enrolled in. The economics major provides rigorous training in how to analyze important issues based on theory

and data and how individuals, firms, and policymakers can use these methods to make good decisions. Anything stand out to you from that description? Good decisions? I don't know if a lot of people graduating with economics degrees from the school are making good decisions. Foss is not wrong. Several research studies have shown that students who study mainstream economics are likely to graduate making decisions

that benefit themselves at the expense of the common good. One study found that altruism drops among students who study economics. In their first year, economics students ranked values like helpfulness, honesty, loyalty, and responsibility equal to their counterparts. But after just two years in their major, they ranked these values as significantly less important than their peers. In another study, students of various disciplines came across an envelope filled with money on the ground. Researchers were curious about who would turn in the lost envelope to the front desk. Economic students were the most likely to be deceitful and keep the money, and the most

likely to think all others would do the same. Other studies have shown that in general, economics students have a greater acceptance of greed. In one study, economics majors and students who had taken at least three economics courses were more likely than their peers to rate greed as generally good, correct, and moral. And it's not just economics students. Economics professors give less money to charity than professors in any other field. One of the reasons for this is that mainstream economics is based on an ideology

that wildly simplifies and in many ways mischaracterizes who we are as humans. And just what is that ideology? Homo economicus. Homo economicus. Homo economicus. Homo economicus. Homo economicus. The term homo economicus, or economic man, is a core principle in mainstream economic thinking.

It's a portrayal of humans as being inherently rational, greedy, and self-interested. This idea is the main reason why studying economics breeds greed. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If dominant economic theory tells people they are selfish, then it's no surprise they would start acting accordingly. And it's not just affecting economics students. Homo economicus is deeply embedded in the DNA of economics as a discipline, but it's also baked into our institutions, our politics, our news, and our minds. Robert and I first got interested in the idea of homo economicus when we started noticing a consistent barrier that many people have with the possibility of imagining a more just, solidaristic, and sustainable economic future, stems from their assumptions

about human nature. Time after time, we've heard, but humans are naturally selfish, so any system based on trust, equity, and true democracy would never work. Where did this idea of homo economicus come from? Why is it so embedded in mainstream economic thinking? And most importantly, is it true? Are we homo economicus? Or are we the opposite? Kind, compassionate, altruistic beings whose good nature has been thwarted by a mistaken view of our own humanity? Or is the truth somewhere in between? These are some of the questions we'll be exploring in this episode, debunking the myth of Homo economicus. So my journey in economics began as an 18-year-old,

as an undergraduate at Oxford University. Yuan Yang, a correspondent for the Financial Times living in Beijing, had a similar experience to Voss while pursuing her undergraduate degree in economics. I loved my time there, but it became very apparent to me that economics that we were being taught, and this was back in 2008, at the peak of the financial crisis, was not mirroring what was going on in the economy around us. After graduating from Oxford, Yuan went on to not only get a master's, but also a PhD in economics. The more that I studied economics and the more that I got interested in politics and the way that economic policy affects society, the more it seemed that there were gaps in our curriculum, huge gaps that couldn't understand the ongoing

banking crisis. And not only that, but other crises, crises of the environment, of inequality, and that the economics we were being taught really was not fit for purpose. It was not training economic students to be able to grapple with the real economy. I would say, okay, I understand this model. I'm pretty sure I understand this theory, but can you give us an instance where this theory has helped us understand the real world? And quite often, that wouldn't be a very good answer to that question. Yuan's experience inspired her to co-found Rethinking Economics, a student-led campaign that's changing how economics is taught in universities around the world.

One crucial economics assumption to rethink is the way that we talk about homo economicus or economic man. And in the modeling that we do, we usually assume a self-interested rational agent who is able to make quite complex calculations about their lifetime income or lifetime happiness and maximize and optimize over that long time period. There are some strengths to this approach. It's very simplistic, which actually can be a strength in modeling. It reduces problems down to this one issue, and it means you can go quite far. It's a very powerful tool for analyzing situations. But we're not at a stage where we can say these are the fundamental physical rules of nature when it comes to economics. And so long as we follow these laws of motion, we'll be able to

model an economic situation properly. So any rethinking of the idea of homo economicus takes us out of uncharted territory when it comes to how economic models work. Because quickly, if you start to fiddle with these axioms, if you start to, for example, make people not just self-interested, but interested in the welfare of people around them, a lot of basic models will not work anymore mathematically. We asked Yuan for an example of when the model didn't match reality. We asked Yuan for an example of when the model didn't match reality. but they're very willing to go into a huge amount of debt or to sacrifice basic kind of health needs like medicines or food in order to save up to throw a huge party when their son or daughter gets married. Now, there's been a lot of kind of very puzzled economics papers written about this phenomenon. And in fact, in some models, economists have pointed out, look, this is not very rational,

because if you were to save the money that you spent on a wedding and use it to invest in machinery for your farm or a small business or some other kind of small capital investment, that would give you a greater lifetime return on your income. You could potentially escape the poverty trap. You could potentially increase your lifetime earnings and your overall health and well-being. So why are poor people being so irrational? Or, you know, put in other terms, like, why are these people living in third world countries so dumb? I mean, that's not how economists present it, but you can see from how I describe this that the attitude

of the investigators kind of can be very similar to that sense of looking down on anything that's not wholly rational, wholly calculating, and wholly self-interested. anything that's not wholly rational, wholly calculating, and wholly self-interested. If the models that use homo economicus don't reflect reality, why is the idea so deeply rooted within the discipline of economics? To understand why, we have to go back to the mid-19th century when the discipline of economics first began transitioning from a moral philosophy to that of a mathematical science. Here's Renegade economist Kate Raworth with a lesson in the history of economics. major reasons why economics has been reduced to a very particular kind of diagrams and very particular numbers and algebra is, I would say it goes back to 1870, when in the UK there was

William Stanley Jevons, who was an engineer who went becoming an economist. In Switzerland, there was Leon Valeras. In Austria, there was Karl Menger. They wanted to make economics a science as respectable as physics. This was the ambition. They saw the towering genius of Isaac Newton, who had discovered the underlying laws of motion of the world. And he could describe the movement of falling apples or rotating planets with his physics. And on it had been built incredible empires. And so they took it directly as a metaphor.

Just as a pendulum swings to rest because gravity pulls it down, so markets are drawn to equilibrium because prices pull them into position. And they loved playing with this metaphor. They even drew their diagrams in the style of Newton. So if you look back at Jevons' diagrams of supply and demand, they were drawn in the style of Newton's diagrams of a falling object. So it was the desire to be like physics, which then again drives the mathematisation,

not just from the diagrams resembling physics, but then the mathematisation to pin this thing down, but also to find out the underlying laws of motion. And I think that's probably been the most pernicious result of this desire to be like physics, to look for the laws of motion, as if the economy, the way the world works, was driven by these laws that we needed to discover. And I think that's really led us astray over the last 100 years

and has given rise to a very strong neoliberal story that let the market do its work. Market forces, again, the language of mechanics, market forces will bring the economy into its right position. Don't get in their way, they will sort things out. In order for economics to be as respectable as physics, it needed to be consistently mathematizable. The assumption of homo economicus gives economics that reliability. Homo economicus comes from a deep desire to view humans in an atomistic way, as cut-out figures, to be able to objectify our behavior, and to think that we can know life and thus control it.

But the idea that humans are inherently rational and self-interested is so pervasive in economics not only because it's easy to model, but because there's a group of people who benefit from perpetuating this belief. My name is Peter Fleming. I'm a professor in organization theory, which is kind of a branch of economics and sociology. Peter Fleming, based in Sydney, Australia, recently wrote a book titled The Death of Homo Economicus. Homo Economicus has been around, the idea has been around for many years, of course, and it got picked up as the main driving assumption in what is called mainstream economics, but we could call it neoclassical economics,

or neoliberal economics, during the 50s and 60s in the US, mainly the Chicago School, for example, is well known for this, and various other theoreticians associated with Austrian neoliberalism. And that was still reserved to universities and textbooks on economics. Something strange happened during the 1970s in which it was picked up by policymakers and politicians. And that's an interesting story. And a lot of people have talked about why that happened and why politicians like Ronald Reagan, Thatcher, Roger Douglas in New Zealand, each country has their own version of a main character in the political sphere, driving home the idea of homo economicus as public policy. And my theory is that it was really designed to break up and de-collectivise the labour

movement. And that might sound like a conspiracy theory, but if we go back to the 1970s, labor relations were just in a very, very tense position, especially with characters like Ronald Reagan breaking up various unions, you know, going out of his way to smash unions and just having this major distrust for labor associations, not only the working class, but professional associations and medical professional associations and so forth. And so homo economicus is an interesting way to do that because we all, all of a sudden, individuals are no longer, they're not employees because employees is a collective category. We are human capitalists. And human capitalists,

they're really kind of consummate individuals. And we cannot really think about anything to do with collectives to the point in which we only have individual agents. And I think that this was kind of supported and gained a very positive reception among politicians and policymakers and the corporate elite, of course, during the 70s, because it was actually a way in which to

de-collectivize the employee who was causing so many problems for industrialists and business people during that period. Now, that's not the only driving issue for why it got picked up. All sorts of other things were happening, like the global financial crisis driven by the oil crisis and various other things during the 1970s. But I think a good part of it was very political, very strategic and very tactical, and it worked. a system that validates the current power structure by justifying extreme wealth and income inequality, the privatization of public resources, and governments that impose austerity measures on their populations instead of prioritizing social welfare. So how do politicians and economists justify it? Their argument is that neoliberal capitalism is the only economic system that accepts human nature for what it is. And not only that, but they argue that a free market economy actually leads to the greatest common good by channeling our natural selfishness into a net positive outcome for society.

Because when people are free to make choices that maximize their own self-interest, because when people are free to make choices that maximize their own self-interest, they negotiate on prices and quantities of a product or service until a happy equilibrium is established. The idea is that this natural process, guided by the invisible hand, is the most efficient and effective way of producing and distributing goods and services and that it leaves everyone satisfied in the end. But is this model working? Are we all satisfied? Homo economicus, and this is the dark side of the theory, is an individual who's isolated,

economically isolated, and left to really kind of sink or swim within this new societal framework in which economic transactions are the only thing that matters. That stark individualism, if you like, I think is an important negative side effect of redesigning society as homo economicus. And that includes debt, that includes the rolling back of the welfare state. That includes the destruction of unions. You know, it's not only unions that aren't welcome in economic theories perpetuating the myth of homo economicus, it's labour itself. Even labour is seen to be too collective. individual agents who are isolated and act, make decisions purely as individuals. But also, I think there is another dark side, because one part of the economic theory that perpetuates the myth of homo economicus are theories like principal agency theory, which suggests that we're not only cash hunting animals and self-interested, but we can't be trusted either. So we will bend the rules.

We will break the rules even to make more money. And that means that we have to design institutions with that assumption in mind. And so they're not friendly institutions. They're institutions around the state, for example, that expect us to be unpleasant people. So there's this element of mistrust that creeps into the employment relationship, for example, that expect us to be unpleasant people. So there's this element of mistrust that creeps into the employment relationship, for example. You cannot trust anyone because they're out for themselves only, and they will cheat you if they can.

And it's this ludicrous assumption that really, really creates a lot of suspicion in our major institutions, particularly related to the government and the state, but also in the employment sector. The whole idea of employment and contract law is the supposition that you really cannot trust your employee because they are homo economicus. They're out for themselves. They're self-interested.

They will do what they can to maximise their own interests above and beyond anyone else. And that's the assumption that I think is really dangerous and creates so much disharmony and so much distress, if you like, within really normal institutions that don't really have to act like that. I think the term homo economicus conjures images of Atlas, you know, the archetypal titan holding the world on his shoulders. Bayo Akumalafé is a Nigerian philosopher, author, professor, and organizer currently based in India. Atlas, who he's referring to, is a character from Greek mythology who was condemned to hold up the heavens for eternity. who was condemned to hold up the heavens for eternity. In her novel Atlas Shrugged, the libertarian author and philosopher Ayn Rand utilized the mythology of Atlas to promote rugged individualism and laissez-faire capitalism.

It's man at work. It is man as the ground of being, as the rational site of the universe, ground of being, as the rational site of the universe, the rational center of the universe, where everything around this center is de-rationalized, genderized, sexed, made to be less worthwhile. Man, or the figure of the human, becomes this place of generativity, of productivity, of intentionality, of keen self-interest, of self-evident value. And this also carries the alarming proposition that the world outside of our activity is dead and mute and best bestial. There's nothing good to it except that which we impose upon it with language, with our work, and with our activity. So this idea of homo economicus as not only the working man, the figure of the lonely man, you know, it's also the separable, dissociated man cut off from gift, cut off from abundance, cut off from community, who must now work out salvation.

So that's how I think about homo economicus. It becomes, you know, the doctrine that, you know, humans are separate and separable from the environment. And we are the center of the universe, basically. and we are the center of the universe basically and we should tether our political systems and economic systems of course for the highest well-being of this individuated creature that we rudely call man so when i think of homo economicus it's man hard at work i just imagine someone spinning wheels and the rude suggestion that it's my spinning of these wheels that the whole universe, the grandiose universe, depends on my activity and my productivity and my rational solutioning attempts to fix things. neoclassical description of the individual. That is what is incentivized by the market. And people do better the better they treat themselves as one of those.

But that is not humanity flourishing. Here's Matt Chrisman, one of the hosts of the Choppo Trap House podcast. That's not humanity finding its meaning and purpose. To even suggest that is blasphemous and like a deep level. Just evil and demagogical. Just like an enchantment from the brimstone pit to suggest that humanity is somehow more fully felt the more that it's isolated. The more that it's delusionally fixated on satisfying its own ego. Terrifying. A world where people are like that is a world like the one we have now. And economists like to look around and smugly look at that and say, see, this is what people are like. And it's like, no, this is the system that you were a disgusting intellectual handmaiden for. This is what it turns people into. You're an individual,

self-motivated agent. If that was the truth, why is anyone alive? Why do people raise children? Why does anything exist? Why is there any social fabric to be pulled apart by capitalism in the first place? How is it fixed? How is it built into being? But even if you could be what they want you to be, and of course there's a zillion examples of why no one is rational, and that no one can know their own self-interest well enough to operate from it

successfully beyond any of that, even if you could. What the fuck is your self-interest? What is your self-interest? Accumulating more than other people around you in a world where you're connected and tethered to every other human being on earth by deep ties of sharing a mutual ecology and a world together, each of you contributing in your smallest possible way to the full flower of human civilization and culture. That's all humans rubbing against each other. That's all humans collaborating at every moment and to say, I'm going to make my life, and everyone should make their life, about accumulating as much material distinction

from everyone else as possible. That's a recipe for planetary annihilation. That's a recipe for human beings ending life on this planet. When we look at the crumbling world around us, it's not hard to see that what economists have been telling us isn't true. An economy based on selfishness doesn't lead to the common good. We've been deceived by the orthodox economic narrative to think that everything is based on self-interest as the only motivation. All we need to do is monetize it. All of that kind of thing is actually very problematic, and we can say so scientifically. David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist and a professor of biological sciences and anthropology at Binghamton University in New York.

Neoliberal economics is predicated on the idea of self-interest as being good for society, that if we just let lower-level units pursue their self-interest and that somehow that's all going to work well at the societal level. This is the metaphor of the invisible hand as something that's profoundly false, and it leads to the decay of society, which is what we're seeing. And now we're seeing it happening at an ever-increasing pace. It seems almost difficult to stop. So you would call it cancerous in evolutionary terms. Cancer, real cancers, are cells that are proliferating at the expense of other cells within the body. That's another thing that is adaptive in the evolutionary sense of the word. Cancers are adaptive at competition within the body. Too bad that they kill the whole organism, including themselves. Evolution has no foresight.

And so I think what we see today in economics is many cancerous strategies. They're succeeding for some people at the expense of others and society as a whole. And they're causing, ultimately, the outcome of a cancer is that everyone loses. And that is what's happening all around us. David's research has found that while competition benefits an individual, cooperation is what benefits a society. Instead of finding that positive human evolution is guided by self-interest and the survival of the fittest, David's research shows that pro-sociality, behaviors that benefit others such as helping, sharing, donating, cooperating, and volunteering,

is actually a more evolutionarily adaptive trait. What sets us apart from all other primates is the fact that we are so cooperative and very distinctively cooperating with genetically unrelated individuals. So basically, we're so cooperative because our ancestors found ways to suppress disruptive self-serving behaviors within groups. If you look at hunter-gatherer societies, modern hunter-gatherer societies, you see, and this is true for small groups in general, it's just hard to benefit yourself at the expense of others within the same group. Why is that? It's because,

first of all, it's hard to do something hidden. What you do is observed by others. Few individuals are so strong that they can stand up to the collective retaliation of the group. So much is done by social favors that if you piss people off and they just stop being your social partner, that if you piss people off and they just stop being your social partner, then you're... So the deck is just stacked against antisocial behaviors and for prosocial behaviors. And then that has been reinforced by genetic evolution operating over many thousands of generations. Hello. George, good to meet you good well come on in thank you we're in the city of oxford to speak with british author and journalist george mobbio i was absolutely furious that we'd been told such a pack of lies about what human beings are that we've been told such a pack of lies about what human beings are, that we've been told that we're fundamentally selfish and greedy and self-interested. You know, this is what economists tell us all the time, and particularly neoliberal economists, because actually they think selfishness

and greed are good. They think it's good that we're hyper-competitive and individualistic and grab as much as we can, because then some people will become extremely rich and their wealth will trickle down to enrich everyone. Well, haven't we seen how well that works? Instead, of course, what we get is a massive accumulation of patrimonial capital. And I just thought, we've been lied to. I was outraged. I was so angry to see that everything we'd been told about human beings was completely ungrounded, in fact, and that we'd been given this totally dark view of humanity, which was a totally false one.

George's latest book, Out of the Wreckage, A New Politics for an Age of Crisis, compiles the latest scientific research to present the case for discarding the idea of homo economicus. Over the past 20 years or so, there's been an amazing convergence of findings in neuroscience, in psychology, in anthropology, in evolutionary biology. And they all point to this conclusion that in the words of a paper in psychology, a journal, a psychology journal, human beings are spectacularly unusual when compared to other animals in terms of our

altruism we're spectacularly altruistic what the science shows again and again and it is so well documented now in so many different studies and experiments is that while we all have a bit of selfishness and greed in us they are way down the list of our characteristics and our dominant characteristics in the great majority of people are altruism, empathy, kindness, benevolence, and community mindedness. Many studies have determined that the classic homo economicus personality is an extremely rare one. And actually traits associated with this personality are medically considered to be those of a psychopath. Most humans are instead marked by a deep capacity for reciprocity, cooperation, and selflessness. For example, research shows that at 14 months, children are already beginning to help one another

by handing over objects that other children are unsuccessful at reaching for. This empathetic behavior only increases as children grow older and begin to share things that they value with others and even object to violations of social norms. These are all early signs of what David Sloan Wilson referred to as pro-sociality. And most importantly, the research shows that this behaviour is motivated by a genuine concern for others and not by selfishness. You look at people in the street and they step aside for each other, they might open a door for someone, give up a seat for someone. You know, there's just constant tiny acts of altruism which we don't even notice. And mixed in with these are spectacular acts

there are people i know here in britain who have taken refugees into their homes and treat them as family members total strangers to them that's not the most extreme thing my dutch mother-in-law her family were in holland during the german occupation they took in a six-year-old Jewish boy, a total stranger to them, and hid him in their house for two years. The next door house was occupied by the local German commandant. There were soldiers and officials in the street all the time. And had they been caught, the whole lot would have been sent to Auschwitz and murdered. And yet there were thousands of Dutch families doing this. They weren't unique. You know, this was a pattern in Holland and in many other occupied countries under Nazi occupation.

I mean, what extraordinary creatures do this? I mean, this is just an amazing thing. And, you know, there's altruism in some other species, which goes beyond immediate sort of kin altruism, but it's much less developed than it is in humanity and the idea of you know even just having a room full of people sitting next to each other of strangers and not tearing each other's arms off that's pretty spectacular in the animal kingdom and all the evidence shows very strongly that we have these amazing socially oriented characteristics and a very strong capacity for mutual aid

helping each other for cooperation for standing together in the face of a common threat and for an altruism that goes way beyond reciprocity you know you give money to a homeless person you're not expecting them to give money back to you you send money to a cause on the other side of the world you're not gonna the starving people in Ethiopia aren't going to come and help you. They can't. You know that. This isn't reciprocity. This is altruism beyond reciprocity. Margaret Thatcher said on the second anniversary of her election, so she was interviewed by the Sunday Times in 1981, two years after her first election, she said, economics of the method, the aim is to change the heart and soul.

So my name's Tom Crompton, and I co-direct a small not-for-profit called Common Cause Foundation, which works on human values, what matters to people and what shapes what matters to people. The evidence from the social psychology is that there's what's sometimes called a seesaw relationship between two groups of values, a group of values that we call intrinsic, so these are values associated with concern for community or equality, social justice, friendship, helpfulness on the one hand and on the other hand a group of values that we refer to as extrinsic values. So these are values which are perhaps more aligned with a person's self-interest around financial

success and public image and social status and those two groups of values are held in some kind of dynamic tension. Engage one set and you suppress the other, and you're likely to reduce behavior associated with the other. Tom's research shows that we humans have both sets of values, and that either set can be activated internally or by our environmental conditions. Capitalism, through its operating principles of consumption, wealth accumulation, and competition, activates our extrinsic values while suppressing our intrinsic ones. Values relate to one another dynamically, and that if we hold some values to be important, it's difficult for us at the same point in time to hold other values to be important, it's difficult for us at the same point in time to hold other values to be important. And this relationship holds between intrinsic and extrinsic values.

So at a time when we're attaching particular importance to intrinsic values, we're likely to attach less importance to extrinsic and vice versa. It seems to be this antagonistic relationship between the two groups of values which has been called the seesaw effect. And there's another related effect called the bleed over effect, which is that if you hold one of that palette of intrinsic values to be important, you're likely to hold others to be important. If you hold one of a palette of extrinsic values to be important, you're likely to hold others to be important. As to the question of whether humans are intrinsically selfish and self-motivated or intrinsically altruistic, I think that it really depends on the situation they find themselves in and the context, especially the social context of what's normal.

Here's Yuan Yang again. Different purposes or values that we have are primed by different contexts of news and the media that people are consuming and the conversations they have with those around them. So at different points, even in a day or in your life, you can be acting out of very different kinds of value-based motivations. For example, when you're reading a lot of news that increases your level of anxiety and fear around you, you might have more authoritarian leanings. And then when you're feeling more secure, then your political leanings can actually change in the opposite direction, which is really very interesting in terms of how fluid human

motivation is and how difficult it is to capture that just in one equation. I think either story can be told persuasively and with integrity. I think what's interesting is which of those aspects of our human nature do we choose to exercise? Do we choose to bring to the fore? How do we choose to configure our societies? Do we configure them in a way which validates and celebrates those intrinsic values? Or do we do it in a way that validates and celebrates those intrinsic values or do we do it in a way that validates and celebrates the extrinsic? I think they're all there. The question is which do we want to elevate? Which do we want to encourage and celebrate through our social structures and organisations? so We're like a bee buzzing behind a window,

just bashing ourselves against it again and again and again. And however hard we hit it, that window isn't going to go away. Here's George Monbiot again. We have to say, wait a minute, this is the wrong approach. There's a door open over there and we should be flying through that instead. And that door is our frame, is our new framing. And that is a door that we have to conceptualize. We have to see that's there. It's not like we invent it. It's there. It's there to be used, but we have to recognize it. We have to identify it. What I'm calling for is not to change human nature but to reveal human nature who we really are is what i'm talking about rather than who we've been

induced to become so instead of this sort of uphill battle against what people are like and saying no let's go with the flow of what human nature is but we have to actually see it for what it is. And we've got this fantastic scientific resources now which show us what it is. And then we discover within ourselves, within our amazing good nature, the new frame through which we can pass. Homo economicus is really a prison cell. It's an epistemological prison. Here's bio Akumalafé again. I wouldn't say that homo economicus is a lie. Because even if I were to say it's a lie, it wouldn't mean it's not real. Because something is a lie doesn't mean it's not real, right? In some sense. And yet we cry when we watch Titanic, or at least I did. So the sense here is not a point of accuracy, of finding out which one is true and which one is not. I would say homo economicus is

a performance of a certain kind of reality to the exclusion of other kinds of possible realities that are lingering, haunting the apparatus with which we produce our lives, abundance, our notions of wealth. The homo economicus is not in you. That's another modernist attempt at interiorizing a territory. No, we are part of it. It is participating with us. It is performing us. It's not just you and me. It's a territory of acting. It's a plantation, to use that term. And I think it's time to escape this plantation. So what I'm calling for is, first of all, for us to realize how entrenched this idea and how it's crept into almost everything. Education, family relations, employment, of course,

et cetera, et cetera, etc, etc, etc. Here's Peter Fleming again. So showing how entrenched and how this ideal, which is very dangerous, I think, has permeated so many of our institutions very, very deeply, become ingrained in our everyday lives. And calling for different metaphors, you know, beginning a conversation about how we could rethink and reframe what it means to be together and what it means to be needing to make a living and so forth. And we have different ideals that we could be striving towards. We may not meet them, of course, but or reach them. But those ideas are homo politicus, for example, that we are political men, and that we need to begin a debate and rethink how we want to, for example, organise work. And one of the ways in which neoliberal economics works is that it brackets off any political discussion. It's not a politics,

you know. And so we cannot really kind of debate it. And I think we need to rethink that assumption and bring politics and bring political dialogue back into these issues. And I think we need to rethink that assumption and bring politics and bring political dialogue back into these issues. So I'm thinking also Homo Ludens. Homo Ludens is, you know, the playful man, you know, what happened to play? I sound like Led Zeckler now, you know, does anyone remember laughter? You know, so we have a whole different set of different ideals that we could be using. But I think that reciprocity, trust, and a more socially humane way of organizing our economic affairs is definitely something that we should be striving towards. And also realizing how socially constructed these

things are. When I think about the human, I want to think about how the human is already rooted and connected with the world, with the modern human around it, around him or her. the homo economicus to die, that I think in these times, which we summarily, or some of us summarily note as the anthropocene, you know, which is another very, very strong correlate with homo economicus. You know, the anthropocene is this time of industrial activity, deleterious effects on the environment as a result of this homo economicus idea. I feel in this time of the Anthropocene, we need to dismantle the man. We need to invite the man to die. How do we do that? I think that's a whole different conversation, but it might begin, so to speak, with noticing that we are not at the center of the universe. So as to where economics goes from now, I don't think the question should be maths or non-maths. I mean, personally, I love maths, but the question should be more,

what kinds of maths do we use? What kinds of methodologies do we use? And what do we do that's not just the current kind of modeling? So for example, there are some students in rethinking economics who are very interested in complexity economics and new ways of modeling networks in economics, which are very mathematical, but they're just not the kinds of 18th century maths that are currently being taught in the economics mainstream curriculum. There's also a host of historical schools of economics, starting from Adam Smith, who considered himself a moral philosopher, onwards, who thought of what they were doing, not as narrowly as current academic economists often think of themselves. And I would really advocate for there to be more mixing of different disciplines, including philosophy into economics. And the benefit of having a more philosophical approach to economics is also that you can ask the question, like, what are we doing in economics? And what is the theoretical underpinning of our approach to investigating the world?

Like, how do we know what we know? And how do we evaluate these theories against other theories? And those are questions of methodology, which I think every reflective social science discipline should have. The realization of the recognition that there are other ways to be in the world might be the instigation, the start-off point of different kinds of fugitive systems. But our work now is not to create manifold or totalizing blueprints for new worlds, because I think we tend to repeat the dynamics of the world we're in, in the one we're envisioning. Sometimes the future is just a colonial attempt of the world we're in, in the one we're envisioning. Sometimes the future is just

a colonial attempt of the present. So I would say that what we need to do is to stay with the trouble, meet in places where we can be met by the world in return, hopefully defeated in our attempts to understand it, where Confucian becomes a form of research inquiry. Confucian becomes a philosophy, an epistemology. And maybe there, maybe there, we might learn about the world and about ourselves anew. There is no guarantee, but that's the invitation of the moment. If I was speaking to an 18-year-old who is starting to study economics for the first time, then I'd want them to know that economics is not just the textbook economics that's presented in front of them, know that economics is not just the textbook economics that's presented in front of them, and that they have a huge range of options outside of the

curriculum. If there is a rethinking economics group in their university or in their city, then I'd really encourage them to get involved and talk to other economics students who have the desire to explore economics more deeply and more broadly. I'd also encourage them to ask their teachers, you know, very straightforwardly the question, like, how should I use this to understand the real world? What's the relationship between what we're learning now and what's happening in the news? And sometimes a good teacher should be able to handle those kinds of questions and actually change the way they teach to make it more relevant to have debates about whether models are useful or not useful or inaccurate or otherwise. It's

only very textbook teaching, I think, that leads to a real narrowing of the mind and that is really unfortunate. So I think the overall message I'd want them to know is that if you want to be an economist in any sense, it is important to get credentialized, unfortunately. But also it's important to keep your mind open to the different ways that there are of studying the

economy and so to do those two things at the same time is very difficult and in fact is more time draining than just ticking the boxes and doing your degree but I think in the long run it will lead you to have much more freedom in how you engage with the world. Maybe economics has a lot to learn from a goat herder in India. Maybe professors on their ivory towers should stoop low and learn from bacteria and microbes and coronaviruses. Maybe that is powerful. But from a different point of view, economics not just as a discipline, but economics as our ways of relating with each other. So economics as a discipline needs transdisciplinary approaches, but economics as a territory needs a dehesion or dehiscence,

wounds, openings. And I think those openings are opportunities for us to study, for us to ask new questions. What if we didn't send our children to school? What might happen if we think of education, not as what happens in schools, but as what happens all around us? How might that affect what we think of as jobs and access and the future? What if we thought of well-being as not just accumulation, but as sharing? what if I decided to share my things, you know, with my neighbor, you know, instead of buying a different vacuum cleaner, I open it up to the neighborhood and say, if you want to use the vacuum cleaner this Wednesday, it's available. of thinking in terms of machinic assemblages of production

that stretch beyond the local and go to the global and that proliferate poisoning and the toxic attempts to shield food from being spoiled to know where food is planted, to plant food in my own backyard and share it with my neighbors. So this is the invitation at large. And I think we can only think about it in small, messianic, but fugitive and modest ways, instead of thinking

about it in broad blueprints. There are alternatives to market capitalism. And the thing is, they actually align much more closely to the natural human tendencies towards reciprocity and sharing. We have the capacity to activate our extrinsic values for power, domination over, and greed in our classrooms, our organizations, and our cultures, but we also have the capacity to activate our intrinsic values, our care for others and the planet, our sense of altruism, of connection, of kindness. It's our choice to make. The theory of homo economicus underpinning modern economics has left us with a burning planet and skyrocketing inequality. It's time to reclaim and rethink economics, to redetermine who

we want to be as humans in relation to the web of life, and to embody the more kind, relational, and sustainable economies we wish to see. If I were asked to teach economics, if I were invited she makes dal and dosa and the care that she gives into sweeping the compound. I would want to give attention to my mother's friends and neighbors and women in Africa who are most of the time ruled out of the equation when economic arrangements are computed. I would want to pay attention to those women that carry pots of water from the river and are told

those are not real contributions, that's not real wealth making. So I would want to create a moment of transversal truths, if you will, of openings, of trickster openings, where people can learn to have possibly an aha moment and see maybe we have a lot to learn from mothers around us. Maybe we're not the only ones that are economists. Maybe it's not just degreed people and certified people that have a say in what the economy might look like. Maybe we should turn our attention to our mothers and fathers at home, our grandmothers, especially our grandmothers.

And maybe there's a lot to learn here. That's possibly what I'll do. Thanks to all the guests in this show for sharing their time and wisdom. To learn more about them and the references we've made, please see our show notes at upstreampodcast.org. Thank you to our Upstream correspondents, L. Bisgard Church, Lily Datnow, and Emanuel Brown for their research and support for this episode. And thank you to Haley Hendricks and American Football for the music and Charlie Young for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert.

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