Meaningful Economics
Making the Science of Prosperity More Human
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Meaningful Economics
Buy Now for £12.99
-
Narrated by:
-
Barry Abrams
-
By:
-
Bart J. Wilson
About this listen
Economics has a problem—the discipline cannot distinguish the causes of human action from the consequences of human action. Economists deal with matters of fact, not with feelings and morals. They model representations of optimal agents, not flesh-and-blood human beings in ordinary life.
In Meaningful Economics, Bart J. Wilson challenges economics to directly engage human beings as we really are, not as economists ideally assume. Wilson argues that economic science is as much about purposes and human values as it is about incentives. Moreover, he shows how the outcomes of our decisions (costs and benefits) and the origins of our decisions (motives and goals) can be understood in an integrated way.
Over the course of the book, Wilson develops a framework that connects the origins of human action to the outcomes of human action, explaining human conduct with causes and effects. He then shows how three basic principles of economics—trade, specialization, and property—require meaning, values, and purpose. With a fresh perspective and a novel theoretical framework that bridges economics and ethics, Meaningful Economics explains the roots of human conduct and its economic effects by grounding a science of economics in the moral sentiments that prompt human beings to act.
©2024 Oxford University Press (P)2024 Ascent AudioMuch of what passes for economics now is a romance with arithmetic. Everything is measured, nothing is understood, and the soul is dismissed as an unhelpful variable. People become “agents”, desire becomes “preference”, and misery is treated as a statistical inconvenience. “Rigour” turns into a polite way of ignoring the very creature the discipline claims to study.
This book refuses that bargain. It tries to lead economics back to its first foundations: not the famous volume everyone waves about when they wish to sound practical, but the earlier and far more difficult starting point—the study of moral life. The question is not merely how wealth is produced, but why people cooperate, what they owe one another, what they admire, what they envy, what they forgive, and what they will not tolerate. Markets do not float in empty space. They rest on trust, and trust rests on character.
A market is, in the end, a place where promises are believed. Promises are believed only where adults are formed.
That is the book’s quiet insult to modern complacency. It suggests that prosperity is not simply “more output” or “higher growth.” A society can raise incomes and still become poorer—poorer in judgement, poorer in dignity, poorer in meaning. It can multiply choices while shrinking discernment. It can surround itself with convenience and still starve.
The central failure is not a system of exchange; it is education. In the last fifty years we have moved from educating people to training them. Education teaches a person how to think; training teaches a person what to do. Education gives logic, philosophy, aesthetics, art, history, and the habit of careful language. Training gives procedure, compliance, and a certificate. Training produces workers; education produces human beings.
When a culture chooses training, it gets citizens who can operate a system but cannot judge it. They can earn, but they cannot live. They can repeat slogans, but they cannot define their terms. They become easy to manage because they have not been taught how to see.
And this is where awe belongs, even in economics. Awe—A W E—is the shock of recognising something greater than appetite. It breaks the spell of mere consumption. It is the beginning of taste, and taste is the beginning of civilisation. A culture that cannot teach awe will teach craving instead; and a people trained only to crave will accept any authority that promises comfort, distraction, or moral permission.
This book is not trying to make economics “nicer.” It is trying to make it honest: to admit that moral formation, cultural inheritance, and aesthetic judgement are conditions of prosperity, not decorative extras. It reminds us that you cannot outsource adulthood to a bureaucracy, nor can you regulate a society into virtue, nor can you spreadsheet your way into meaning.
If we are becoming less as humans—less thoughtful, less precise, less capable of wonder—the cause is not capitalism, or any other fashionable scapegoat. It is the steady abandonment of education: the abandonment of the full person. This book is an attempt to reverse that abandonment.
recognition
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.