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University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006. 154pp., $16.00.
ISBN: 0-226-57202-1
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Tending to the body, much less the soul, may seem an odd project for an economist. After all, most academic economists strive for rule-bound logic and elegance, a task that is seemingly anathema to concerns of the body (economic models that focus on wants, rather than needs, privileges the Id/Ego mind over providing for the body). It is an even bigger leap to address concerns of the soul; moral or spiritual concerns are politely treated as crackpot divergences when they are not completely ignored. Julie Nelson's Economics for Humans cogently and creatively challenges these priors, offering an alternative understanding and vision that confound the usual categories of leftist vs mainstream. And it is highly readable, written in a narrative style and format that kept me happily perched under a sunshade in the midst of a Southwestern camping trip.
The core thread is that both pro-business and anti-market perspectives accept the dominant academic paradigm that the economy is an inexorable, amoral machine with its own "natural" laws that are basically independent of humans. This metaphor not only shapes how we think about the economy, Nelson argues, but dictates what is conceptually possible in economic life. Unfortunately, the metaphor of "economy as machine" has real and deleterious effects on our lives. Denying that the economy is a construction of humans leaves us either dependent on greed and selfishness to generate well-being (the pro-business view) or in a state of denial about the importance of money and power for achieving social goals (the anti-market view). Alternatively, if we can get away from the limitations of the machine metaphor, we can envision an "ethical economics" that combines body and soul.
In the first part of this book, Nelson sequentially discusses the body (economy), the soul (ethics), and then how to bring them together. "Tending the body" is an insightful guide to the history of neoclassical economic thought. The classical school of economics arose out of the Industrial Revolution and a growing fascination with...