It's human nature- the FT and the Conservatives

We live- so the advertising slogan tells us- in financial times. We also live, especially since credit started crunching, in very interesting times.

The FT correspondents and pundits have been puzzling out loud this last year or so about all their old certainties (market, efficiency, light touch regulation blah blah). And they run columns from various other centrist/right figures that make for interesting reading too.

Jesse Norman (who he?- more below) had a column headed "Human beings are not mere selfish agents" on Friday December 5.

We are daily conditioned to think of human beings as "economic agents": as purely self-interested, endlessly calculating costs adn benefits and highly sensitive to marginal gains and losses.
But a problem arises when this economic image feeds back into society and becomes our default picture of human motivation. We secretly know this picture is wrong; and our best economists know it is wrong too. We are aware that it cannot explain such things as volunteering or philanthropy. We fret about excessive materialism. We yearn endlessly for the things money famously cannot buy: love, friendship, joy. Yet without an alternative picture of what a human being is, we have nowhere else to turn.
We need a different vision and a richer conception of humanity in our public policy. Such a vision starts by recognizing the limits of humna nature. It emphasises the importance of independent institutions, competition and entrepreneurship as factors driving prosperity. It rejects the idea that humans are merely passive vehicles for utility, in favour of a far more dynamic conception of human capability.

Well, this wouldn't be out of place in the pages of Resurgence or some such rich hippy publication. I think Norman (who he? again) is on about bounded rationality.

But then, I've read Noam Chomsky riffing on the utter poverty of the neo-liberal vision of human motivation in similar (well, better) terms. Except a few minutes of googling can't find it me. But I did find the following, from either Robin Hahnel or Michael Albert, authors of ParEcon: Life After Capitalism-

The first answer [in response to "human nature is bad and nothing can change"] I like to give I first heard from Noam Chomsky. Imagine you are in an upstairs window looking out over a nearly empty street below. It is a scorching hot day. A child below is enjoying an ice cream cone. Up walks a man. He looks down, grabs the cone, and swats the child aside into the gutter. He walks on enjoying his new cone. What do you think, from the safety of your distance from the scene, about this man? Of course, you think this fellow is pathological. You certainly don’t identify with him and think, that’s me down there, I would do that too. Instead you would be horrified and you would likely even rush down to comfort the child. But why?
If humans are greedy, self-centered, violent animals wouldn’t we expect that all humans, confronted with the opportunity to take a delicious morsel at no cost to themselves, would do so? Why should it horrify us when we see someone do it? Why should we find it pathological? The answer is that we actually do not think that people are innately thugs. We only gravitate to that claim when it serves our purposes to rationalize some agenda we hold for other reasons entirely, such as when we ignore widespread injustice because to do otherwise would be uncomfortable, costly, and even risky.

Remember the Replicants "I've seen C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate"? What couldn't they do? They couldn't feel empathy...

And now the punchline, for those of you patient enough to still be reading-

Jesse Norman is the Conservative candidate for Hereford and South Herefordshire. His book Compassionate Economics is published this week by Policy Exchange.

Yep, the same Policy Exchange who advocated de-populating Liverpool, Sunderland and Bradford...

For another post- the fascinating article on the politics of the organic movement in the latest Lobster...