Who are the
economic men and women, and who the altruists?
Personal capital, social capital, human development, and the different economic men
The new concept of personal capital can be used to gain further insight into the different economic men and how they contribute to the whole of economics.
There is real virtue in recognizing the power of the incentives created by the social institutions of constitutionally constrained government, private property, and market exchange to lead
economic men, clods that they may be, to generate social outcomes far better than the most virtuous people could generate without those institutions.
Unfortunately, some empowerment proponents assume that Americans are
economic men - entrepreneurs who can be made virtuous solely by promises of material reward.
Independent of Thompson's essay, many historians have evoked the presence of such modern "
economic men" (and women) in the labor force, or Fordist or Soviet ideologies based on them--rather than specific political, social, and economic factors--to explain the introduction of the eight-hour day in the Soviet Union, Western Europe, and the United States during the interwar years.
It is that the humans that get addicted or avoid addictions are much more than simply rational or irrational
economic men. Ultimately, to comprehend what addiction involves for a human being, it is necessary to have a concept of what being human is that is dramatically different and broader than the economic man conception.
In the first chapter, Young offers a moral dilemma from 30 years past (whether to move the 1968 annual meeting of the American Economic Association from Chicago because of the violence associated with the recently concluded Democratic National Convention) to show that, as Kenneth Boulding stated in his presidential address, "not even the study of economics can turn people into purely
economic men" (p.
If two
economic men play this game, there will be a unique subgame perfect equilibrium: the proposer offers the minimum possible positive sum of money to the respondent, and the respondent accepts, something being preferable to nothing.
His findings lead him to conclude, inter alia, that medieval English lords were rational
economic men and that King William's taxation was not "arbitrary" and depended on ability to pay - "subject to the political constraint of placating his powerful barons" [p.
