The Innate Nature of Economics - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 43

Thus, while the hunter-gatherers created the right to use common property
spontaneously in their living (the “commons,” which is considered to be
everyone's birthright), it is today being progressively eroded as people, espe-
cially in the industrialized countries, are evolving from Homo sapiens (mod-
ern human) into Homo economis (economic human). To arrest this erosion, we
must understand and accept that the quality of our individual lives depends
on the collective outcome of our personal thoughts, decisions, and actions as
they coalesce in the environment over time, particularly with respect to the
global commons.
Thinking about the evolutionary process surrounding the notion of sur-
plus yields vital points in understanding modern economic life and the eco-
nomic methodology that supports it. This task is undertaken more fully in
the following chapter, which deals with the notion of consumption.
Economics and Human Nature
The first task of any academic discipline or field of study is to identify its
working theory of human nature. What does it mean to be “human”? The
arts emphasize the creative urge, the humanities our philosophical and
reflective bent. Biology will note that we humans are one among many liv-
ing organisms, and so on. Economics is considered to be a social science,
which means the issues and topics that compose the core of the discipline
innately involve human behavior. Political science emphasizes the ways
in which humans organize and operate in groups to achieve power and
influence. Sociology does much the same for social or communal behav-
ior of all kinds, and anthropology is more or less sociology and culture
throughout history. Psychologists, who often have problems determin-
ing whether the discipline is a natural or a social science, explore human
motivations and internal, mental processes. Each of these fields of study,
as branches of the social sciences, tends to adopt and refine a theory of
human nature that fits the purposes of the discipline and can be termed
self-serving in that sense.
It is no different with economics. Given the perceived need for mathemati-
cal certainty and predictability, the profession of economics has responded
with a bare-bones, almost mechanical image of a human being. Other social
sciences, and certainly the arts and humanities, honor and even celebrate the
intuitive, creative, capricious, and often emotional and contradictory nature
of the human psyche. Emotional variation is the stuff of a fully developed life.
Economic theory, however, cannot accept uncertainty, which heralds unpre-
dictability. The result is a construct that has become known as “Rational
Economic Man.” It is useful to examine some historical background that
assists in detailing that image.