The economics of love: Following the heart, not the head
Prioritizing pure feeling, so the idea goes, leads to people choosing bad, unsuitable partners, to acts of desperation and violence, to shirking your duties. That love can also be an incredibly redemptive force meshes uneasily with our sense of individualism, with our Protestant ethics. Controlling it requires an entire normative framework.
Behavioral economics is demonstrating that humans don’t always act in self-interested ways, and that transactions themselves have an emotional component.
Clay Shirky • Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators
In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that.
Nicolas Truong • In Praise of Love
economicspaces
economicspaces.persona.coSecond, Homo economicus’s behavior happens in a market of some sort. Third, Becker’s method demands that Homo economicus’s preferences are the same across all societies and circumstances.5
Raj Patel • The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy
The core premise of economic theory is that people choose by optimizing. Of all the goods and services a family could buy, the family chooses the best one that it can afford.