Re: Heterodox Economics
[ QUOTE ]
The vast majority of human action is people maximizing their utility.
[/ QUOTE ]
This is where I disagree. I think that the vast majority of human action take a satisficing approach to increasing their utility while at the same time acting to decrease the gap between themselves and people with higher utility and increase the gap between themselves and people with lower utility. That is, once a basic threshold is reached, people care less about absolute utility and care more about relative utilty.
For example, I think that Americans are not attracted to policies that maximize GDP, but to policies that maximize GDP subject to constraints on the Gini coefficient, even if they fall well short of maximum GDP on an absolute scale without those constraints. Not that most Americans can put their thoughts into those terms, but that is what they want.
|