Individuals Count

This is a book about the conceptualization of the human individual in recent economics. Why this subject? Economics has long been seen as the social science that makes the individual central. Indeed, a leading justification for why much of our social world over the last half-century has been reinterpreted in the language and concepts of economics is that economics makes the human individual central. In this respect, economics seems in step with the world today. It is surely one of the great normative assumptions of contemporary human society – one not held in much of the past – that the human individual counts or should count, that the individual is important, and that individuals have an inherent moral value, despite all the evidence of human practices to the contrary. It is something of a mystery why people have come to believe this, considering the violent past we have inherited and the world we still have in the present; in the long record of human history, individuals have suffered and been sacrificed to “higher” causes in limitless number, often in the cruelest and most inhumane ways possible. With our history, the conclusion should be just the opposite: individuals do not count. Nonetheless, it is still ordinarily believed by vast numbers of people everywhere that individuals are important, that this is a fundamental human truth, and that human society should be constructed so that individuals are each valued as a human right. So economics’ influence and power in representing the world today, it seems, is due in no small part to its being perceived as defending this deep human commitment.