Читать книгу Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism - Christopher Snowdon - Страница 8

In his best-selling book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Ha-Joon Chang says that free-market economists regard people as ‘tunnel-visioned self-seeking robots’, ‘totally selfish’ and ‘selfish, amoral agents’ (Chang 2010: 46, 47, 50). ‘Free-market ideology,’ he claims, ‘is built on the belief that people won’t do anything “good” unless they are paid for it or punished for not doing it’ (255). Richard Murphy, who bills himself as the UK’s number one economics blogger, claims that economists assume people to be entirely self-interested and that their self-interest manifests itself in the desire for ever-greater consumption of material goods. He says that economics, as taught in schools and universities, is ‘predicated on the belief that human beings’ behaviour is solely focused on maximising their own individual returns; that businesses maximise their profit and that everything that indicates success in life depends on consuming more’ (Murphy 2011: 12).

If this is a fair representation of what economics is all about, economics is obviously flawed. We can all readily think of acts of altruism which contradict the theory of total selfishness, and none of us feel that we are wholly driven by consumerism. If free-market economics is based on the belief that everybody is relentlessly greedy all the time, it is not just simplistic but wrong. Chang (2010: 255) writes:

People are not as much propelled by material self-interest as free-market textbooks claim. If the real world were as full of rational self-seeking agents as the one depicted in those textbooks, it would collapse under the weight of continuous cheating, monitoring, punishment and bargaining.

The task of debunking free-market economics is therefore an easy one. If economists believe that everybody is selfish and greedy all the time, it only requires a few examples of selflessness and altruism to undermine the entire field. The problem is that they do not believe that.