One of the common concerns and complaints about studying economics is that it takes the position that people make choices and respond to incentives, and the discipline effectively discourages people from pursuing self-interest in many situations. You’re endorsing it, you’re not just acknowledging it, you’re stopping yourself from demanding a higher level. – Buying what’s sold at a grocery store is a paid job, but people actually do it. Furthermore, the complaint goes on to say that if economics champions self-interest, it will mold the flexible minds of sensitive students, who will wear „greed is good“ T-shirts on their chests instead of becoming responsible citizens. ing.
It is difficult to gather evidence for or against this claim. Merely comparing economics majors to majors in other fields does not prove that studying economics changed someone’s level of selfishness. Because people who were already prone to selfishness are more likely to seek the haven of economics in the first place. . Additionally, a simple survey asking if someone feels selfish isn’t the best approach either. Because economics classes can make people more willing to acknowledge selfish motives without actually changing their behavior. Researchers need a way to measure the degree of selfishness, preferably one that is revealed through actions rather than words.
Daniele Girardi, Sai Madhulika Mamunuru, Simon D. Halliday, and Samuel Bowles delve into this topic.Does studying economics make you selfish? (Southern Economic Journal, coming online on November 23, 2023). They point out some previous research on this topic, and a few years ago I also pointed out a review of such research. This is Girardi et al. Create groups based on previous evidence.
A much smaller body of papers has addressed our question: Is there a causal effect of economics research on social values and policy preferences? Two identification strategies are deployed. The first is to observe student attitudes and behaviors over time and compare students in economics courses with students in other courses. Frey and Meier (2003) study the (real-world) giving behavior of students in economics and other courses during their college years. They find no evidence that studying economics reduces donations. Bauman and Rose (2011) used a similar design and found no evidence that taking an economics course reduced economics majors‘ contributions to public interest organizations. However, we found a negative impact on the contributions of non-economics majors taking economics courses.
The second strategy is to conduct a controlled experiment. Briefly expose randomly selected subjects to economic concepts or language, give a control group an otherwise similar but unrelated exposure to economics, and then observe before-and-after differences in the measurements of interest. To do. . Ifcher and Zarghamee (2018) found that by asserting that “(1) all individuals are selfish and (2) all individuals seek to maximize their payouts,” randomly assigned to treatment (economic exposure). Subjects then play a game with incentives. The authors found that exposure to economics changed behavior in a selfish direction compared to subjects exposed to non-economic language. In another experiment, Molinsky et al. (2012) asked mid-level business leaders who were managers to deliver bad news to their subordinates, such as being reassigned to an undesirable location or being dissatisfied with their subordinate’s work performance. I asked him to tell me. Just before this, administrators were randomly chosen to create meaningful phrases from a bunch of scrambled words, some of which had economic content (e.g. unscrambled (format „analyze costs and benefits“) and some did not (controls). When delivering bad news to subordinates, managers who were exposed to economic language were less empathetic and less likely to convey sympathy to subordinates than managers in the control group.
Girardi et al. The study is based on an online survey administered at the beginning and end of the semester to students in her five classes at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Those people write:
We conducted an online survey at the beginning and end of the semester among a group of undergraduate students enrolled in four intermediate microeconomics courses and one non-social science course. The survey included questions about individual characteristics and policy preferences and four economic games with real money at stake: the Trust Game (TG), the Triple Dictator Game (DG) with charities, and the It includes questions that elicit two beliefs about other people’s behavior. game. We use these to obtain individual-level measures of generosity (DG) and reciprocity (TG), as well as “deviation from self-interest” through beliefs about the social preferences of others. …
Economics students in our sample began the semester with more favorable opinions of market competition and relatively conservative policy views, and were less generous and more reciprocal in experimental games. Masu. However, the impact of differential selection on economics faculty is relatively small and imprecisely estimated, except that economics students are effectively a “professional market.”
We found little or no causal effect of economics research on social preferences or beliefs about the social preferences of others. The differences in these results between economics students and the control group do not change over the course of the semester and are not affected by the content of the economics course. We did not influence the overall measure of “left versus right” political positions or views on markets, government intervention, or environmental policy. The only evidence of a substantive effect is that economics students expressed less opposition to highly restrictive statements about immigration policy.
I’m not very confident that any of these studies on whether economics causes egoism should be treated as negative. However, the empirical evidence supporting this claim appears weak.
Point out, as Girardi et al. point out, that economics is not purely about self-interest. They wrote:
In the introduction, we outlined a line of reasoning that leads to affirming the commonplace view that studying economics leads to more selfish behavior. But there are also good reasons to expect the opposite. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Smith, and other 18th-century thinkers argued that markets promoted honesty and cooperation toward others, and that these tendencies were as important as self-interest in making markets work. did. In today’s economics courses, students adhere to the social norms of respecting the property rights of others and reciprocating goodwill (e.g., not stealing other people’s goods), even when interacting with strangers in the marketplace. You may be surprised that doing so can be the basis for a mutually beneficial exchange. . Exposure to this message can promote not only self-interest but also prosocial preferences.
When I think about economics and selfishness, I also think of Comment from John Stuart Mill He argues that selfishness should be seen as a force of nature, like gravity or the wind. Mill wrote:
The same people who condemn logic usually warn against political economy. That’s emotionless, they’ll say. It recognizes an inconvenient fact. As for me, the most emotionless thing I know is the law of gravity. It will mercilessly snap the necks of the best and most amiable people if they forget to be careful even for a moment. The wind and waves are very unpleasant. Would you advise people going to sea to avoid the wind and waves, or would you advise them to take advantage of the wind and waves and find ways to protect themselves from danger? My advice to you is to study the great writers of political economy and hold fast to anything you think is true in them. And if you are not already selfish or hard-hearted, believe me, political economy will not make you so.