The economy is very much built by Homo economicus. The consumers are just assume customer to be Homo economicus.
(except we know that it’s just poor old Homo sapiens, which is why the shiny stuff is at the checkout counter. Let’s ~~exploit~~ optimize for all those gaps in cognition.)
So I’d have to highlight that Economic man is hard at work, hacking Homo sapiens. ————
And that’s the issue, the rational choice for the world is very clear. But local equilibrium points are very different. People are going to clear the Amazon because that means they can sell more meat.
The cost of that externality will never get priced in fully, because it’s in the interest of people to pretend it’s someone else’s problem (especially when they’re people’s jobs and food on the line.)
I’m sorry for the bleak image, but let’s remind everyone that Kyoto was a joke. It’s the best we could manage and even then it was weak.
I understand everything you mean about externalities, but once you leave Econ talk, and move to policy - well Homo economicus is there, busy doing the rational thing and lobbying to keep his interests safe.
I predicted AGES ago and publicly a year or so, that we would all soon be championing terraforming projects.
What is the actual path forward, to an actual consensus. Whether we have to go through Homo economicus or corrupt him, or through reminding Homo sapiens that he is the only source of moral authority.
This confuses the map with the territory.
The economy is built by actual people, with dreams, desires, etc, whose behavior is usually far beyond what the "Homo economics" would dictate.
Homo economicus is just a crude model.
>The cost of that externality will never get priced in fully, because it’s in the interest of people to pretend it’s someone else’s problem (especially when they’re people’s jobs and food on the line.)
Well, it will be fun to see them suddenly rebalance their "interests" when they are plagued to death, and it's their life and the life of their children on the line.
Homo economicus is very busy figuring out exactly what those dreams, desires etc entail.
We know about how their brains work, I know how to design reward schemes, job happiness plans, legal documents and so on.
We are paid, to act as economic agents, and to do so rationally and to the best of our ability, with the moral aspect of it abstracted away.
How many times have you heard of people standing up and saying "hey I wont be the lawyer who buries the immoral and indefensible clauses in the contract".
Not very often, I'd bet. Furthermore if people did bring this up, or even leave their job over it - we can always find someone for whom the moral question is not a problem.
Its very easy to get people who are rational business actors and dont want to worry about the moral aspects of their work. They just want to do their jobs well, get paid and go home.
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>Well, it will be fun to see them suddenly rebalance their "interests" when they are plagued to death, and it's their life and the life of their children on the line.
That's my point - people will "rebalance", but I don't see a solid path to avoiding that re-balancing.
Homo economicus is the perfect caricature, as humans usually make purchasing decisions for far from rational reasons. They buy for emotion, because of brand, etc. Read any current marketing book. The system within which we operate claims rationality solely on the basis of conveniently ignoring anything that might impinge: pollution, environmental damage, cost of cleanup or restoration of a site, societal and human damage. All of those get lumped in a category called "externalities" that might be more honestly labelled inconvenient truths.
A rational system would be more holistic and somehow account for the value of lives, planet, society and so on. It would find a market way to penalise those actors continuing to saw the branch on which humanity or other species sit.