There are many theories about economists. Two are common. The first is that everything we think and learn is money. The second is that economists think more about themselves than the average person.
Both theories are wrong. My wife, who is also not an economist but has been married to him for almost forty-one years, has a good answer to the first question. When people find out I’m an economist and say, “Oh, he must study money,” he replies, “No, he studies human behavior.”
But I want to focus on the second claim because I think it is untrue. My observation is that the average economist is less selfish than the average person and there is a good reason for that: the study of economics makes us think about consequences beyond the obvious. Furthermore, the scholarly literature that some people think shows that economics students become selfish does not actually show that.
These are the first 3 paragraphs of my latest Hoover article, “Economics Is not Selfish,” Defining IdeasMay 30, 2024.
Later in the piece, I discuss a controversy that arose a few years ago about a piece of academic work one of the co-authors claimed, wrongly, showed that economics students are more selfish than other students.
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