55.1) The Human Basis of Economics

Several studies based on a belief that economics is just a specialist branch of human behavious.  And trying to understand it in terms of ‘rational self-interest’ misses the point.

Why Capitalist ‘Managerial Science’ is Highly Collectivist.  Looking at a noted book called ‘Creating We”, created by business for business.  And implicitly contradicting official economics, which supposes detached individualism.

Life as a burden on money.   How we are still paying for fear of Corporatism in the 1970s.  Why the Coalition’s policies are not about freedom but about a planned policy of ‘Feed the Rich’.

The Unnatural Nature of Commerce.  Far from arising from human nature, it is a gross distortion of what we mostly are.

Capitalism Within Culture.   What we had between World War Two and the 1980s was a ‘mixed economy’. Theorists of both left and right disliked it intensely when the real world made an untidy mess across their nice clean categories. Instead of adjusting their minds and devising more realistic theories, they insisted that there was a fault in reality.

Economics is About People, Not Money.  Looking at the social context in which Britain industrialised.  Suggesting that Marx and others were mistaken in just looking at the capitalist element in it.  And that in Adam Smith’s time, the British state was expanding faster than the economy was, part of a successful mix.

Corporations Good, Corporatism Bad?  People forget how successful 1950s Corporatism was in ending the miseries of the 1930s and the horrors of the 1940s.

Rational Chimps.  How chimps really do behave as economists think humans should behave.

Main Economics Menu.