{"id":3839,"date":"2012-04-23T09:05:17","date_gmt":"2012-04-23T13:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/?p=3839"},"modified":"2012-04-22T22:07:57","modified_gmt":"2012-04-23T02:07:57","slug":"in-economics-we-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/2012\/in-economics-we-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"In Economics We Trust?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/042312_0205_InEconomics1.png\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Jonathan V. Last writes that &#8220;men will die for God or country, kinship or land. No one ever picked up a rifle and got shot for optimal social utility. Economists cannot account for this basic fact of humanity. Yet they have assumed a role in society that for the past 4,000 years has been held by philosophers and theologians.&#8221; In an article that looks at the role that economics has come to play in our life, and how it has become a term that has become all encompassing (Centives being <a href=\"http:\/\/www.centives.net\/S\/2012\/gravity-in-2001-a-space-odyssey\/?preview=true\">an example<\/a> of this), there are several highlights:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Economics claims to have no belief system, but it does, that of utility maximization. However optimum outcome does not always mean most efficient outcome.<\/li>\n<li>\n<div>Yet we have come to let the economic philosophy of rational utility maximization dominate our lives. Examples include:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>Buying your way out of lines at amusement parks.<\/li>\n<li>Express lanes to avoid traffic.<\/li>\n<li>Paying students to get good grades.<\/li>\n<li>Naming subway stations after businesses.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>When markets are first introduced they tend to expand. Consider life insurance which was banned for several decades because people didn&#8217;t like the idea of speculating on death. It eventually won acceptance as a way for men to take care of their family in case they die. Today companies routinely buy life insurance policies on their employees \u2013 benefitting if their employees die.<\/li>\n<li>Taken to its extreme, utility maximization would mean no merit-based admission to universities. Instead the highest bidder would be able to get in.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To read more examples of economics coming to dominate our world, the implications for our society, how economics went from being a study of prices and unemployment to one of human behaviour, and why markets should not be demonized, click <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052702304356604577341940149291220.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052702304356604577341940149291220.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read\"><em>The Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a><em><br \/>\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jonathan V. Last writes that &#8220;men will die for God or country, kinship or land. No one ever picked up a rifle and got shot for optimal social utility. Economists cannot account for this basic fact of humanity. Yet they have assumed a role in society that for the past 4,000 years has been held [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-bulletin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/042312_0205_InEconomics1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3839"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3842,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3839\/revisions\/3842"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.Centives.net\/S\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}