Jay Hanson >Economists and politicians prefer to see people as little more >than computers made out of meat. They are either mazimizing >utility, or making so-called rational choices in the voting >booths. In other words, they get what they deserve. I don't think this is being fair to most of the economists I've known. Economists have to make assumptions about human behaviour to make their models work. Such assumptions include viewing people as behaving rationally in their self interest, as maximizing utility, and as behaving strategically. For some purposes they even attribute perfect knowledge to people as economic actors. However, in doing these things, economists recognize they are modeling. They are trying to predict what, from their understanding of how the economy functions, should happen if certain economic variables are changed. They are not saying that what should happen will happen. Most economists are broad-minded enough to understand that their models are grand simplifications of the actual world in which human behaviour takes place. They recognize that though people try to do the right thing (ie., trying to behave rationally) they must do their strategizing in an uncertain world in which the possible outcomes of particular actions are various and often unpredictable. They also recognize that self-interest is not the only motive in human behaviour. Other motives, such as altruism, are also part of the human equation. Otherwise you would have no basis for explaining the behaviour of Mother Teresa, Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. Your quotes from Turnbull on the !Kung Bushmen were interesting. One has to wonder why they treated children that way. Was it because they were behaving out of some perverse form of self interest, or was there something deeper there? An Alaskan anthropologist argued that, traditionally, some Alaskan Athapaskans treated their children very callously. He reasoned that they did this because few children survived the harshness of their first few years of life, so parents did everything they could to prevent bonding with children that would die in any event. Depersonalizing their children was their way of avoiding tragedy - being immersed in tragedy was not good survival strategy for small nomadic groups. I wonder if the motives of the !Kung mothers were similar. I would suggest you take it easy on economists and the rest of us. We are neither meat nor computers, though we are a little of both in addition to many other things. And most of us are trying to muddle through without too much lying, cheating, exploitation and self-deception. Ed Weick
