“ If we humans are merely selfish maximizers, then selfishness is the cause of our prosperity”

“ It all comes down to just one thing: economics. Because, here’s the dirty secret.
There was a time in which the economics profession worked in the public interest. But in the neoliberal era, today, they work only for big corporations and billionaires, and that is creating a little bit of a problem.
The third assumption, and by far the most pernicious, is a behavioral model that describes human beings as something called “homo economicus,” which basically means that we are all perfectly selfish, perfectly rational and relentlessly self-maximizing. But just ask yourselves, is it plausible that every single time for your entire life, when you
did something nice for somebody else, all you were doing was maximizing your own utility? Is it plausible that when a soldier jumps on a grenade to defend fellow soldiers, they’re just promoting their narrow self-interest?
If you think that’s nuts, contrary to any reasonable moral intuition, that’s because it is and, according to the latest science, not true. But it is this behavioral model which is at the cold, cruel heart of neoliberal economics, and it is as morally corrosive as it is scientifically wrong because, if we accept at face value that humans are fundamentally selfish, and then we look around the world at all of the unambiguous prosperity in it, then it follows logically, then it must be true by definition, that billions of individual acts of selfishness magically transubstantiate into prosperity and the common good. If we humans are merely selfish maximizers, then selfishness is the cause of our prosperity. Under this economic logic, greed is good, widening inequality is efficient, and the only purpose of the corporation can be to enrich shareholders, because to do otherwise would be to slow economic growth and harm the economy overall.
And it is this gospel of selfishness which forms the ideological cornerstone of neoliberal economics, a way of thinking which has produced economic policies which have enabled me and my rich buddies in the top one percent to grab virtually all of the benefits of growth over the last 40 years.
~ The Dirty Secret of Capitalism – And a New Way Forward: Nick Hanauer ted talk 2019”
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