Event overview
What is rational after all? Twelve possible answers in the History of Economic Thought
Abstract:
The concept of economic rationality is essential to Economics as a scientific discipline since it describes how people behave in their economic relations. It serves as the fundamental behavioral premise in every economic explanation and in Neoclassical Economics it even guarantees the very existence of the discipline. The widespread idea about this concept, even between economists, is that it has a unique meaning universally accepted, from Adam Smith to the present. Thus, the concept of economic rationality commonly stipulates that every person is supposed to behave as a rational maximizer, which entails the calculation of the gains and losses from every economic decision that one takes. This is the widely portrayed image of the homo oeconomicus. Our purpose is to establish that “economic rationality” is nor a unique nor a universal concept and has many different, and often conflicting, interpretations in the evolution of the economic discourse. To achieve this, we trace the historical evolution of the concept of economic rationality, showing that it has many –no less than twelve – different meanings since the end of the 18th century. Thus, the idea of a monolithic way of economic thinking is challenged and the reader will discover that economists used in the past and continue to use, many different paths of thought about how economic agents behave.
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Michel Zouboulakis is a Professor of History & Methodology of Economics and head of the Department of Economics, University of Thessaly, Greece. Michel's research interests include History of Economic Thought, Institutional Economics and Economic History and he has published widely on these topics. His recent book "The Varieties of Economic Rationality: From Adam Smith to Contemporary Behavioural and Evolutionary Economics" was published by Routledge.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Jul 2018 | 11:00am - 12:15pm |
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