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'Can economics really describe love? Well, it starts with greed…' Image sourced from www.shutterstock.com/
ECONOMICS is “not a ‘gay science,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1849. No, it is “a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.”
But, happily today, more and more economists are discovering that their discipline is not really a “dismal science”, but a subject of beauty, elegance and relevance, if it was to return to its original roots. More economists are realising that the focus of economics should be on the benefit and the bounty that the economy produces, on how to let this bounty increase, and how to share the benefits justly among the people for the common good, removing the evils that hinder this process. Moreover, they are noticing that economic investigation should be accompanied by research into subjects such as anthropology, philosophy, politics, ethics and spirituality, to give insight into our own mystery, as no economic theory or no economist can say who we are, where have we come from or where we are going to. Humankind must be respected as the centre of creation and not relegated by more short term economic interests.
Two such economists are Professors Paul Frijters and Gigi Foster, whom have recently published a very interesting book on 'humanising economics'. Their book: An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks is a compelling reading, where concepts of love, friendship, loyalty, power, coalitions, ideals, joy and compassion are all explored, and are used to temper, leaven and expand the insights of self-interested maximisation.
This is how they explain it:
“Economists understand greed very well; after all, the urge to get rich is our discipline’s main explanation for human actions. Economists further recognise that greed can be good. When our greedy urges are constrained by institutions, so that we compete with each other by means of specialisation in production rather than by killing or cheating one another, our economies produce growth.
But the phenomenon of love has flummoxed us economists. We have followed much of the rest of society in seeing love as something that is a cosmic accident: neither predictable nor manipulable, love has been thought to arise mysteriously. Once finding himself by chance in love, a person suddenly cares about more than just himself. It is allegedly by happy accident that people love their children, their spouses, the constitution of their country, and many other people and constructs.
In our new book, An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks, we behold and treat love in an entirely different way. It would be fair to say that we take the stance of aliens looking at humans as just another species, with love merely one behavioural strategy available to that species. Blasphemous as this may sound, our goal is to apply the scientific method to the realm of the heart.
At the most basic level, we contend that love is a submission strategy aimed at producing an implicit exchange. Someone who starts to love begins by desiring something from some outside entity. This entity can be a potential sexual partner, a parent, “society”, a god, or any other person or abstract notion.
From a position of relative weakness, the loving person tries to gain control over this entity by incorporating the entity into his own sense of self. Of many examples, that of the child is perhaps easiest to see in this framework: a weak infant starts to love the parents who provide for his needs, and starts to see himself as part of the family. We contend that the same fundamental process explains why men and women start to love their partners, their countries, their jobs, and their gods.
The consequences of this basic mechanism are immense for any human organisation. Without it, there could be no families, no religions, no science, and no countries, because the loyalty of those who love is part of what keeps families together, soldiers loyal, scientists truth-seekers, and the religious faithful.
Naturally, within any group, not everyone loves to the same degree, and in fact many members of groups do not love at all and instead merely pretend to share the group ideal. But without any real love, created when lovers are weak and needy, human organisations would fall apart and our economies would cease to function.
There is much more to say about love: how it conferred an individual evolutionary advantage long ago; how the neural mechanisms responsible for it relate to our cognitive and non-cognitive development throughout life; how to define weakness and how to describe human desires; how “love” relates to other difficult concepts that economists have long struggled with, such as “power” and “networks”; and, most excitingly, what steps lead from this essentially individual mechanism to the highly organised societal structures we see today. We explore all of these paths in our book. We argue that love is a vital element in almost everything that is important to economists and social science, from why people by and large pay their taxes to why they are able to work happily together in teams.
Why did we decide that love had to have something to do with economics? Because reality forced us into acknowledging the importance of love. If you want to understand yourself and your society but are prepared to make no mental space for love in your explanations, then all we can say is good luck. We hope you have more success than we did. For more than 10 years, we independently worked on understanding society without an explicit role for love, and we basically got stuck. It took us another 10 years to develop our best guess for how love relates to greed and to all of the complexities of humans and their societies.
Finally, why do we see the discipline of economics as the natural home for our theory of love’s genesis and consequences? Because economics offers an extensive discourse on the other crucial ingredient propelling human action – greed – and also because economics is a science whose nature and ideal is to offer simple stories to capture social complexity. By combining love and greed to construct a simple, tractable model of our social world, we hope to have advanced the discovery of what humans and their societies are all about.”
This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original article
Buy the book:
Read more:
Calling all academic economists: What are you teaching your students?
Economics and Economists Engulfed By Crises: What Do We Tell the Students?
A comment on a Financial Times editorial (November 12, 2013)
My Guest Blogger Anthony Werner: Ethical Economics
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Flowers are blooming, birds are singing, the days are getting brighter. What better way to sing the praises of Spring’s arrival than to read beautiful poetry.
Here are two poems I would like to share with you: One from Hopkins and the other from Wordsworth.
Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation is one of the three or four greatest poets of the Victorian era. He is regarded by different readers as the greatest Victorian poet of religion, of nature, or of melancholy. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I.
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‘Hopkins begins, “Nothing is so beautiful as spring.” If there is anything more beautiful, it is this poem. It has a heightened, rapturous and intoxicated quality: “The glassy pear tree leaves and blooms, they brush / the descending blue; that blue is all in a rush / with richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.” On a spring morning it is a poem one can recite that makes spring seem more intensely itself: even the lambs have been partying, and how that hallucinogenic “glassy” carries the line forward, unexpectedly filling it with light.’
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
BBC - History - Historic Figures: William Wordsworth (1770-1850) William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 at Cockermouth in Cumbria. As a young man, Wordsworth developed a love of nature, a theme reflected in many of his poems.
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Of all the famous poems of Wordsworth, none is more famous than "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud".
In this poem, Wordsworth says that, wandering like a cloud floating above hills and valleys, he encountered a field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing, fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along the shore, and though the waves of the lake danced beside the flowers, the daffodils outdid the water in glee. He says that a poet could not help but be happy in such a joyful company of flowers. He says that he stared and stared, but did not realize what wealth the scene would bring him. For now, whenever he feels “vacant” or “pensive,” the memory flashes upon “that inward eye / That is the bliss of solitude,” and his heart fills with pleasure, “and dances with the daffodils.”
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
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“Values represent our guiding principles: our broadest motivations, influencing the attitudes we hold and how we act.”
‘Try not to become a man of success, but a man of value’- Albert Einstein
As it has been observed throughout history, in action and thought, people are affected by a wide range of influences. Past experience, cultural and social norms are some of the most important ones. Connected to all of these, to some extent, are our values, which represent a strong guiding force, shaping our attitudes and behaviour over the course of our lives. Our values have been shown to influence our political persuasions; our willingness to participate in political action; our career choices; our ecological footprints; how much money we spend, and on what; and our feelings of personal wellbeing, contentment and happiness; as well as our relationship with others, with nature and the Mother Earth, to mention but a few.
Let us pause for a moment and focus on some fundamental and enduring questions of human meaning and value. Questions such as:
1. What does it mean to be human?
2. What does it mean to live a life of meaning and purpose?
3. What does it mean to understand and appreciate the natural world?
4. What does it mean to forge a more just society for the common good?
By their very nature, these questions lend themselves to thought and discussion around ethics, morals and values.
At the GCGI we are delighted and honoured that since 2002 we have been at the forefront of activities to highlight, address and analyse these and other relevant questions.
We recognised that building a better and more harmonious world will demand challenging and novel ways of thinking, perspectives that encompass the broad swath of human experience and wisdom, from the natural sciences and all the social sciences, to the philosophical and spiritual values of the world’s major religions and of indigenous peoples as well. The task before us is a daunting one, and wisdom in how to proceed will come from a multiple of sources, and must embrace the panorama of cultural and disciplinary perspectives. We appreciate that we should not carry on constructing a global society that is materially rich but spiritually poor. We did know that we must be led by values, and must uphold them at all times.
Thus, in 2002, we began to construct globalisation for the common good, as a path to build a more just and sustainable world.
At the GCGI we strive to uphold our values:
We value caring and kindness
We value passion and positive energy
We value service and volunteerism
We value simplicity and humility
We value trust, openness, and transparency
We value values-led education
We value harmony with nature
We value non-violent conflict resolution
We value interfaith, inter-civilisiational and inter-generational dialogue
We value teamwork and collaboration
We value challenge and excellence
We value fun and play
We value curiosity and innovation
We value health and well-being
We value a sense of adventure
We value people, communities, and cultures
We value friendship, cooperation and responsibility
Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative (GCGI): Where we connect our intellect with our humanity
To understand, appreciate, and face the challenges of the contemporary world requires us to focus on life’s big picture. Whether it is war and peace, economics and the environment, justice and injustice, love and hatred, cooperation and competition, common good and selfishness, science and technology, progress and poverty, profit and loss, food and population, energy and water, disease and health, education and family, we need the big picture in order to understand and solve the many pressing problems, large and small, regional or global.
The “Big Picture” is also the context in which we can most productively explore the big perennial questions of life - purpose and meaning, virtues and values.
In order to focus on life’s bigger picture and be guided by the principles of hard work, commitment, volunteerism and service; with a great passion for dialogue of cultures, civilisations, religions, ideas and visions, at an international conference in Oxford in 2002 the Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative (GCGI) and the GCGI Annual International Conference Series were founded.
We recognise that our socio-economic problems are closely linked to our spiritual problems and vice versa. Moreover, socio-economic justice, peace and harmony will come about only when the essential connection between the spiritual and practical aspects of life is valued. Necessary for this journey is to discover, promote and live for the common good. The principle of the common good reminds us that we are all really responsible for each other – we are our brothers' and sisters' keepers – and must work for social conditions which ensure that every person and every group in society is able to meet their needs and realize their potential. It follows that every group in society must take into account the rights and aspirations of other groups, and the well-being of the whole human family.
One of the greatest challenges of our time is to apply the ideas of the global common good to practical problems and forge common solutions. Translating the contentions of philosophers, spiritual and religious scholars and leaders into agreement between policymakers and nations is the task of statesmen and citizens, a challenge to which Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative (GCGI) adheres. The purpose is not simply talking about the common good, or simply to have a dialogue, but the purpose is to take action, to make the common good and dialogue work for all of us, benefiting us all.
What the GCGI seeks to offer - through its scholarly and research programme, as well as its outreach and dialogue projects - is a vision that positions the quest for economic and social justice, peace and ecological sustainability within the framework of a spiritual consciousness and a practice of open-heartedness, generosity and caring for others. All are thus encouraged by this vision and consciousness to serve the common good.
The GCGI has from the very beginning invited us to move beyond the struggle and confusion of a preoccupied economic and materialistic life to a meaningful and purposeful life of hope and joy, gratitude, compassion, and service for the good of all.
Perhaps our greatest accomplishment has been our ability to bring Globalisation for the Common Good into the common vocabulary and awareness of a greater population along with initiating the necessary discussion as to its meaning and potential in our personal and collective lives.
In short, at Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative we are grateful to be contributing to that vision of a better world, given the goals and objectives that we have been championing since 2002. For that we are most grateful to all our friends and supporters that have made this possible.
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