Economic man is a fiction, like the "reasonably prudent person" of the law. Both are presumed to behave rationally to be a model of sound human behavior. Except the RPP is used in legal reasoning to establish a baseline for behavior in a given set of facts, and the EM is used in many economic models where the set of facts are much less specific and much more idealized. Sort of like that other economic ideal, “enlightened self-interest.”Rural communities are becoming 'kill boxes' where 1 out of every 434 people have died from COVID-19: reporthttps://t.co/4rfMsViQom
— Raw Story (@RawStory) October 1, 2021
We are supposed to show both, rather like we were once presumed to have a “survival instinct.” I don’t think anybody’s holding on to that one anymore. What about people as rational beings? How have we been acting in enlightened self-interest?
I mean especially since the vaccines. Those changed everything. They made the situation worse. It should have been better after lockdowns and closed schools and economic disruption. Instead, we have this: more people dying, directly from Covid, or indirectly because they can’t get treatment at hospitals overwhelmed with unvaccinated Covid victims.
I wonder what’s happened to that ideal of the EM in the face of COVID? Does it only apply to money? Yet what is more valuable than one’s life? What is even vaguely rational about how much of the country has responded to this pandemic, especially since the advent of the vaccines?
No comments:
Post a Comment