Economics education can shift people in a selfish direction?

http://qz.com/137754/economics-is-making-us-greedier/

by denzil_correa • 12 years ago

33 27 12 years ago

qz.com

n0rm• 12 years ago

Not quite.

Economics teaches you that there is no logic or system to this chaos, and after a threshold, it's no man's land.

Then, natural instinct takes over.

Welcome to the jungle.

rubyn00bie• 12 years ago

Economics students learn about mathematical games and how to use resources; they also learn stats which it appears the author is completely ignorant of... Saying that being more aware makes us greedier is idiotic. We understand the rules better.

Correlation != Causation

I mean that. There is seriously no information here which can be formulated into any reasonable hypothesis. The links to most of the data are pay walled.

"Adam Grant" seems to have his doctorate in Psychology-- which doesn't surprise me given the complete lack of proof. Looking at his Wiki page it appears he doesn't have anything even related to statistical analysis. So I guess we'll be "feeling" this one out. Anecdotal evidence like this is why Economists, Math, and the hard sciences make fun of Psychology.

Economics is such a massive subject well beyond money and greed that I think this sort of hyperbolic headline only helps keeps the masses ignorance. Go to any modern school of Economics and you'll be quite surprised when you get to the "institutional section," for starters.

Enrollment is psychology is probably down, or he lost some funding. This is an article from an idiot/marketer/businessman.

dang2• 12 years ago

This comment starts out as a shallow dismissal, rejecting the article with generic hand-waves, and then nose-dives off topic.

The article may be wrong but is not unsubstantive, and it appears to describe work done by many researchers. It deserves better. A better discussion would engage seriously with specifics. "Seriously" implies making less wild claims and trying to substantiate what one says.

There's a grain of a specific response here: the claim that the links don't point to data that can be inspected. But that doesn't mean the work is worthless, just that academic paywalls are a problem.

We did change the linkbaity title (probably not the work of the author) to a sentence from the article, and added a question mark, in the hope of dampening this sort of reaction.

baddox2• 12 years ago

In 1776, Adam Smith famously wrote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
Economists have run with this insight for hundreds of years, and some experts think they’ve run a bit too far. Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell, believes that his profession is squashing cooperation and generosity.

It's embarrassing that the author directly quoted Smith while completely failing to understand the quote. The point is that self-interest causes cooperation.

Detrus• 12 years ago

The author's point is it's not only self interest.

thelettere• 12 years ago

Just because he espoused capitalism does not mean he was not aware of its weaknesses or did not wish for ways to moderate its excesses.

He spoke about it quite often in Wealth of Nations, and took his concerns much farther in "Moral Sentiments" - which was about the role of morality in moderating this selfishness.

dang2• 12 years ago

No, the author does not completely fail to understand the quote. He's casting doubt on the reduction of co-operation to self-interest suggested by Smith—or rather by a simplistic interpretation of Smith—because (the claim goes) there is evidence that studying economics makes people less co-operative. The quote is apropos and there's nothing embarrassing about it.

What's embarrassing are instant middlebrow dismissals of entire research programs because of ideological and tribal identification.

I'm not defending the article's claims and have no idea if they're right, but HN threads can be and need to be better than this.

baddox2• 12 years ago

If you're implying that I am identifying myself with some tribe and therefore immediately dismissing the entire research program, I disagree and regret giving that impression. If this is your impression, I am curious what about my comment gave you that impression, because I genuinely do not see anything in my comment that hints at a specific ideology or tribe, or an instant middlebrow dismissal of an entire research program. I am not a "Smithian" or whatever tribe is being hinted at here, and I did not dismiss the entire research program. I only pointed out what I think is a misrepresentation of that well-known Adam Smith quote.

I find the research quite interesting, although I don't believe that we can conclude anything about the validity of any belief based on attributes of the people espousing the belief. That's the ad hominem fallacy.

lambda• 12 years ago

Why do you think the author failed to understand the quote? It's pretty clear that the author understood the implication that self-interest causes cooperation, but is pointing out that there are other forces which cause cooperation as well, and that focusing too much on self-interest can diminish these other forces.

drabiega• 12 years ago

I've seen a few papers directed at this exact question, but they've all come to the opposite conclusion. To be fair, these are Economics papers so some level of bias may be in effect, but I believe that at least one of the linked papers goes on to conclude that this is not the case based on experimental trials which showed that while Economics freshmen kept more than people in the Dictator game, seniors in Economics were in line with seniors of other majors and that both gave away more than their freshmen counterparts. I'll see if I can access more of the linked papers later, but it seems like he cites a lot of papers but only actually mentions their conclusions when they agree with his point.

dnautics• 12 years ago

Unfortunately for the title of the piece, there's a distinction between "economics" and "teachers of economics".

I would also like to see a breakdown of the study's economic professors based on the different "schools" of economics, roughly (and presumably self-identified): Chartalist, Keynesian, Monetarist, Austrian.

Mikeb852• 12 years ago

Pretty much everyone in the field belongs to the 'Neoclassical' school.

You only find distinctions like you mention on the internet...

calibraxis• 12 years ago

If the results are true, it's not surprising when we see economics as politics, and economic statements as ultimately moral ones. (Why organize production/consumption/allocation one way, rather than zillions of alternative ways? Does the economic system not affect society's power structures? Don't we spend over half our weekdays as producers, under boss rule?)

Econ-as-morality becomes clear when we discuss challengers/improvements to capitalism, and flamewars erupt. (And not just unimaginative alternatives like Soviet socialism, as if the only alternative to Coke is Pepsi...)

What do we know about capitalism's properties? Its supporters constantly talk about the moral benefits of sociopathic behavior. They say it harnesses humanity's greed... as if that's the only emotion to consider. (Rather than saying it rewards greed and punishes empathy.) So what else do we expect from courses in captalist doctrine?

And this is obvious when we imagine (largely uncritical) training in any other economic system; training in morality.

skylan_q• 12 years ago

It should be realized that the capitalist system should be treated as an economic mode. Far too often, people take capitalism to be a moral end.

I still consider the capitalist system the best for meeting human material needs when it doesn't take precedence over moral and ethical considerations.

gress2• 12 years ago

Choosing an economics major means not choosing any of the other subjects. Since modern economics is focussed on greed and selfishness, it seems perfectly reasonable that not spending time on other parts of the human experience would lead to a paucity of spirit.

Mikeb852• 12 years ago

Majoring in Economics here requires you to take the equivalent of 2 full years of elective courses... So you get plenty of exposure to other subjects.

deet• 12 years ago

Modern economics is not necessarily focused on greed and selfishness. As the article mentions, the field of behavioral economics includes motivations such as fairness and altruism. And behavioral economics is increasingly popular.

It is entirely possible to choose to studying economics precisely because it is an attempt to quantitatively assess human behavior and motivations, even those that aren't greed and selfishness.

QuantumChaos4• 12 years ago

I chose to study economics (in graduate school) because I wanted to make the world better, and I discovered that the non-economists I studied from as an undergrad (in "development studies") were less convincing than the economists they critiqued.

One of the main goals of economics is to provide advise for government policy to make society better off (by some average of human well-being). I would say it takes more spirit to choose the discipline than can and does do this, than to fall for shallow critiques from outside the discipline.

gress2• 12 years ago

You do realize you're begging the question by simply asserting that economics is the discipline that makes the world a better place and that critiques from outside are shallow?

eevilspock• 12 years ago

It's called a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And here on HN, it's the dominant ideology. It will be hard to achieve fair open-minded discourse on this.

[thanks lutusp for the spelling correction.]

lutusp2• 12 years ago

It's called a self-fulfilling prophesy [sic].

This is another error I'm seeing more and more often.

* Prophesy (verb): to predict.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prophesy

* Prophecy (noun): a prediction.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prophecy

afafsd• 12 years ago

Isn't this a bit like "Students who take too many science classes are likely to be ungodly?"

The article starts off from the presumption that greed is bad, and then whines that people who understand economics better are more greedy. Perhaps it could instead come to the conclusion that people who understand economics are more intimately familiar with the way that best-possible outcomes do tend to arise from everybody acting in their own self interest and thus that "greed" (in at least certain senses) is not a vice at all?

Incidentally, as for the Dictator Game, I imagine that you get very different results with economics students and others who are intimiately familiar with the "Dictator Game" and similar psychological experiments than you would with someone who has never heard of this situation before. That might be an interesting experiment.

lutusp2• 12 years ago

The above post didn't deserve to be downvoted (and I upvoted it on that ground), because it's topical and insightful. Regardless of how some anonymous reader with a mouse and an itchy index finger feels about the expressed opinions, the post meets all the criteria for a useful contribution to the thread.

Tl;dr: I find anonymous downvotes really, really irritating.

QuantumChaos4• 12 years ago

I think that economics leads to a different view on greed and selfishness, that the author should try to understand rather than talk down to us and force us out of our bad thinking patterns with re-education.

According to economics, all people are selfish (or self-interested if you prefer an less loaded term). How then can we make the world better when we are only interested in ourselves?

First, economics shows that in many cases, all individuals working for their own interests works as well as if everyone cared only about the common good. This is the first and second welfare theorems of economics.

Second, to the extend that we are altruistic, we should focus that altruism in an efficient way. For example, giving to someone slightly less wealthy than yourself is less efficient than giving to someone a lot less wealthy than yourself. And altruism exists not just in giving money, but also donating time and effort to maintaining the social institutions that benefit all of us. Given my experience with economists, they may actually be more altruistic when measured this way. And a rational person might choose to engage in the latter kind of altruism, while giving zero dollars to charity, since they already "give" money through the tax system.

Finally, given all of the above, economists tend to allow themselves the freedom not to feel altruistic. From a utilitarian perspective, what is needed is not so much more altruism, but more efficient use of people's existing altruistic feelings.

TheOtherHobbes• 12 years ago

I think economics raped the word 'rational', shot-gun married it to 'self interest', and created a godawful mess that it's going to take the species at least another century to escape from.

Likewise with 'efficient'.

As for selfishness vs altruism - short term gain can lead to long term loss, which is why 'rational' economic theories have such poor long-term predictive power. (In fact, they have negative predictive ability. You can be sure that if someone billed as important makes a prediction about macro conditions, something else is going to happen.)

What exactly is rational about a system which centuries of history have proven is unable to function without a predictable cycle of manic-depressive booms, recessions/depressions, and anti-democratic bailouts?

QuantumChaos4• 12 years ago

You cannot criticize economics without at least some understanding of it. The only point that was coherent enough for me to reply to was:

What exactly is rational about a system which centuries of history have proven is unable to function without a predictable cycle of manic-depressive booms, recessions/depressions, and anti-democratic bailouts?

Economists claim individuals are rational, not that the whole system is "rational". Rational individuals interacting could result in a really shitty result, which is bascically what macroeconomics is about.

Depressions suck, that is why macro-economists try to smooth out the business cycle. The fact the we needed the latest bailout is a sign they haven't solved this problem yet. But I don't have a better solution.

Economics education can shift people in a selfish direction?

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