Comment by gordaco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gordaco | Hacker News Reader

My biggest gripe about the concept of Homo Economicus is the huge ideological component that often gets ignored. The article mentions it, but doesn't focus on it.

An ideal HE behaves rationally, yes, but that doesn't tell the whole picture; being rational is about discussing with oneself all the possible behaviours, choosing the one that gives him the outcome closest to his desires. But also, and this is very important, it seems like the only thing an HE cares about is his own benefit, especially his own monetary benefit. So he has friends only because "who you know" is valuable and can help him get more money; he doesn't care about poor people because their misery doesn't affect him; the welfare of society in general is not relevant unless he can benefit from it; etc. Many people, including me, find all this very troubling, since this is the kind of people that makes this world far worse than it could be. And yes, I would say that it's clearly psychopathic behaviour.

Some economists that present, either tacitly or openly, the HE as a positive ideal, try to hop over this troubling issue by using the ill-defined term "utility", saying that an HE is someone who maximizes the perceived utility; and then they proceed to basically define the behaviour of the HE as economically-oriented, making the whole "utility" concept useless.

Contrast with this Marxist slogan: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. One can be perfectly rational and follow it; it's just about using reason to fulfill a completely different goal. So being rational is about means to attain a goal, while being an HE also includes the goal of hoarding money and not caring about what happens to other people.

You've touched on the strawman about HE, but you've misidentified the source. It is the Marxists that want you to believe the psychopath claim, in their desire to stereotype capitalism as blind greed. Good capitalists that understand economics will perfectly happily include happiness and such in the value functions they use, because it turns out economic theory stops functioning without that assumption; it's built in at the ground floor. By this, I mean, the math stops working, at the deepest and most profound level economics is built on the idea that entities have different value judgments, down at the microeconomics level where economics is actually meaningful.

And note the Marxists then wish to slide in the idea that they ought to get to set your value function, when you aren't looking. (Which is part of the silliness at the core of the whole idea when they think they can set the same valuations for everyone, because, again, the math stops making sense and, what a surprise, indeed systems that truly attempt to function in a fully Marxist manner really do break down in a horrifyingly complete manner, as if they were trying to build an economy on the proposition that 1+1=3.)

The strawman idea comes from the Marxists, who generally don't want you engaging with capitalist theory particularly fairly, since they would lose a big rhetorical weapon if you do.

You can not understand the anger about HE until you understand that Marxists desperately need humans to not behave "slightly irrationally under some circumstances" (the real scenario) but need humans to be profoundly irrational, so they can justify their handing over all sorts of power to the government so they can save everyone from themselves. Of course explaining exactly how the government will transcend being made out of irrational humans is conveniently left unexplained, since that is impossible. But, if humans were really profoundly irrational, we wouldn't be having this argument, because our species would be long dead. People who want to believe that people are profoundly irrational on a massive scale must grapple with the problem that such behaviors lead to death in the real universe, and tend to be evolved out pretty quickly. (This is where the "amusing" comes from in my other post; humans are not entirely rational, but we've been tuned to be surprisingly rational in many ways... our claimed reasons however have not been so tuned.)

So the problem with HE isn't that he's utterly, utterly nonexistent... the problem with HE is that it's a slightly imperfect model, and iterative systems like the economy being what they are, that imperfection can end up magnified in surprising nonlinear ways and have bizarre consequences, in a system that often has nonlinear and bizarre behaviors even if everyone was totally rational. So it important that science is done to determine the ways in which real humans deviate from HE... but these will generally be in relatively small ways, rather than the massive total failures of the model that the Marxists are searching for.

> You can not understand the anger about HE until you understand that Marxists desperately need humans to not behave "slightly irrationally under some circumstances" (the real scenario) but need humans to be profoundly irrational, so they can justify their handing over all sorts of power to the government so they can save everyone from themselves.

You had me until that sentence. I don't think the Marxists need humans to be profoundly irrational, they need humans to be profoundly exploited, and for the exploiters to be rational. That means that you can't appeal to the exploiters to stop, because continuing is in the exploiters' best interest; you can only stop them with force.

I agree with your overall conclusions (that the Marxists were/are the ones pushing the HE strawman). I just think that you're off in your next-to-last paragraph. In fact, I think that the psychopath claim (which you cite in the first paragraph) is in contradiction with your argument in the fourth paragraph.

Permitting large-scale "exploitation" requires large-scale irrationality, wouldn't you think? It's not rational to be exploited, and it's really not rational to be in an exploited minority.

One of the reasons the Marxists see this is that they see a trade in which one side benefits "more" than the other according to one scale, and scream "exploitation!" But... it's still a trade that benefited both sides. It may indeed still be a bit exploitative (and our laws have cases to cover this) if for instance one side is a monopoly or something; capitalism does not begin and end with microecon 101, after all [1]. But it's a different character of exploitation than one in which one side fails to benefit, and Marxist theory has a major hole in it where it has a really hard time explaining why an agent would enter into a trade in which it comes out behind by its own value system, when one can visibly see that no force is being applied. (Let me also forstall the fact that there are cases where force has been applied, but I'd say those are nowhere near sufficient to explain the modern economy.)

[1]: And let me underline that. Microecon is not the beginning and the end of capitalism, and it's not as if it has no problems. I'm interested in informed discussions of capitalism's problems, but one must start from a proper understanding of what it really is. In a more neutral context, one can argue about whether "real" numbers actually exist and whether they should be used mathematically, but this argument is not helped by getting wrong what "real" numbers are from the getgo.

> Permitting large-scale "exploitation" requires large-scale irrationality, wouldn't you think? It's not rational to be exploited...

That assumes that you have a better alternative. My alternative to being exploited by the greedy capitalists is revolution, but for that to work, a bunch of my fellow oppressed have to agree. My decision is (normally) whether to hopelessly revolt and get crushed, or to make the best of it and go along. In that context, going along is probably a rational choice.

> ... and it's really not rational to be in an exploited minority.

Marxism says that the exploited are the majority, not the minority.

Look, I'm not an apologist for Marxism. I don't want a Marxist revolution, and I don't want to live in the aftermath of one. But I think you're a bit mis-characterizing their position. (Once you characterize it accurately, then disagree as much and as eloquently as you please.)

You mean Marxist-Leninists, Marxism in and of itself doesn't require violent revolution.

The real irony is that if governments are rational actors, and power is in their best interest, then the Leninist insistence on the need for proletariat dictatorship as a step to true Communism (where the government isn't needed) is undermined by the rationale that the government won't give up power.

Which is of course what has happened with every state that has tried it. Marxist Communism on a state level has never been reached, merely various forms of socialist dictatorship that claim to be working towards it.

> You mean Marxist-Leninists, Marxism in and of itself doesn't require violent revolution.

Well, maybe not require, but

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Marx/Engels -- Manifesto of the Communist Party

He's mixing up "Marxists" with "everyone other than anarcho-capitalists". Again. It's a depressingly common mistake.

"It is the Marxists that want you to believe the psychopath claim, in their desire to stereotype capitalism as blind greed."

Oh but they have more then abundant evidence that capitalism was brought into being by war an conquest, not because it's some law of nature.

http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/jferguson-1039684-c...

Albert einstein:

"The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called “the predatory phase” of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future."

http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

Marxists have all the evidence that Capitalism is brought into being by war and conquest, standing in stark contrast to every peaceful Marxist revolution that ended with such great results. If only Capitalists were as enlightened as Einstein, the highly regarded economist and anthropologist, who identified Capitalists as some primitive, predatory animal, we could finally evolve to see the socialist society of the future.

The American population has been indoctrinated so thoroughly with regard to socialism and communism that beyond a small minority it seems pointless to discuss the subject with them. The mainstream political discourse is so far right to that of Europe even among young people that it's not even funny.

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