Economics Is About People
Beneath every equation lies a portrait of the human being
I have spent this course tracing a single through six centuries of argument.
It began with a monk asking what a loaf of bread ought justly to cost.
It passed through Smith's butcher, whose selfishness fed a city he never meant to serve.
It moved among the smoking factories, where wealth and misery were forged in the same furnace.
It heard Marx name the struggle, and Keynes name the fear, and Hayek name the danger.
It ended among the sovereign numbers that now measure, and quietly mismeasure, our common life.
Standing back, I ask my students what, if anything, these thinkers held in common.
On the surface, almost nothing, for they contradicted one another with magnificent conviction.
Yet beneath every theory, I have come to believe, lies a of the human being.
Tell me what an economist thinks people are, and I will tell you what he thinks the economy is.
Smith's human was self-interested but sociable, restrained by sympathy and the watching of his neighbours.
Marx's human was shaped, almost wholly, by the labour he performed and the class he was born into.
Keynes's human was anxious and hopeful, guessing at a future no equation could .
Hayek's human was a knower of small local truths, dangerous to command and impossible to replace.
Each economics, in the end, was an wearing the costume of a science.
The equations differ because the pictures of the person differ, and the pictures differ profoundly.
This is why the discipline can never become as settled as chemistry, however it aspires to.
Its subject is not an particle but ourselves, changing even as we are studied.
A theory of the economy is always, whether it admits this or not, a about human nature.
And a about human nature is a moral act, dressed in the grey of statistics.
I do not tell my students which of the person is the true one.
I tell them, instead, that they cannot avoid choosing, and that their choice will have consequences.
To study economics honestly is to keep asking who we are, and what we owe one another.
The invisible hands of my title were never really the market's; they were always our own.
We built these systems, and we can, if we dare, examine the assumptions buried in their foundations.
So I send my students out with the question I began with, still open, still ours: what is the economy for?