Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Economics cannot be divorced from culture

From Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama. Page 13.
Over the past generation, economic thought has been dominated by neoclassical or free-market economists, associated with names like Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and George Stigler. The rise of the neoclassical perspective constitutes a vast improvement from earlier decades in this century, when Marxists and Keynesians held sway. We can think of neoclassical economics as being, say, eighty percent correct: it has uncovered important truths about the nature of money and markets because its fundamental model of rational, self-interested human behavior is correct about 80% of the time. But there is a missing twenty percent of human behavior about which neoclassical economics can give only a poor account. As Adam Smith well understood, economic life is deeply embedded in social life, and it cannot be understood apart from the customs, morals, and habits of the society in which it occurs. In short it cannot be divorced from culture.

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