Human beings
| Type of publication: | Article |
| Citation: | Piana V., Human beings, EWI Essay series, 2020. |
| Journal: | Economics Web Institute |
| Year: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://www.economicswebinstitu... |
| Abstract: | This paper presents an outline of what economics as a science has to say about human activities, in the broader context of human life. Economics should be the science addressing economic actions, which normally act as facilitators, limitators and motivators of human actions. Human beings should be at the centre of its attention, without reducing them to mere consumers, workers, savers or other very specific social roles as the neoclassical paradigm does. The importance of establishing and articulating "what human beings do" is highlighted. This calls for a substantive and explicit recollection of "what people do", so that the role of core economic concepts (such as buy and sell, produce and exchange) can be modestly localised in the bigger framework, basically as motivators and facilitators of higher-level entities. We leave aside a world made of goods "X and Y" and of uniform robots constrained to maximise some externally-given function in favour of retrieving general human actions over space and time (thus societies) and their relations to natural and artificial objects and categories. We single out a method to retrieve a list of human activities in a systematic way. In broader terms, we state that the true purpose and scope of economics: economics is called to analyse and propose motivators, facilitators and limitators for actions with complex temporalities, with due attention to innovations and their diffusion over time and space, including to the factors that prevent certain people in certain conditions to enjoy the common heritage of humankind. |
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| Added by: | [] |
| Total mark: | 0 |
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