Selfish Economics

These are harrowing times. Amid soaring inequality, political leaders in many countries are cutting programmes and services that benefit the poor, while stoking fear and anger against migrants and refugees. Their noble-sounding intentions ~ safeguarding individual freedom, promoting prosperity, and protecting citizens — are often a fig leaf for a policy agenda designed to enrich themselves and their wealthy cronies.

- Kaushik Basu

This deterioration in the practice of politics can be attributed to many causes. One of the most important may be found in the deterioration in how economics is practiced.

Economics is often described as a scientific discipline, which studies “if-then” propositions without reference to morals and values. But scientific findings do affect our values and normative judgments, and claims of “scientific objectivity” can be used to rationalise actions that offend our moral sensibilities. In fact, the logic of mainstream economics ~ in particular, the long-dominant neoliberal ideology, which emphasizes growth, efficiency, and market freedom — has often justified and even encouraged greed, exploitation, and extreme inequality.

This may well be built into the discipline. A 2012 study based on the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen’s “capability approach” ~a framework for evaluating economic arrangements that focuses on people’s ability to live the kinds of lives they value, not simply on material wealth — found that some educational approaches can help make people more caring and cooperative. But other studies indicate that students of economics tend to behave more selfishly than others, indicating that economics, as it is taught, may well promote selfishness as a normal or even desirable ethical principle.