Humanomics: Moral Sentiments And The Wealth Of Nations For The Twenty-First Century

Description

While neo-classical analysis works well for studying impersonal exchange in markets, it fails to explain why people conduct themselves the way they do in their personal relationships with family, neighbors, and friends. In Humanomics, Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon L. Smith and his long-time co-author Bart J. Wilson bring their study of economics full circle by returning to the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith. Sometime in the last 250 years, economists lost sight of the full range of human feeling, thinking, and knowing in everyday life. Smith and Wilson show how Adam Smith's model of sociality can re-humanize twenty-first century economics by undergirding it with sentiments, fellow feeling, and a sense of propriety - the stuff of which human relationships are built. Integrating insights from The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations into contemporary empirical analysis, this book shapes economic betterment as a science of human beings. 1. Humanomics spans the two worlds of Adam Smith: sociality and economy 2. Words and meaning in Adam Smith's world 3. Conduct in the social universe 4. Frank Knight preemptively settles the horse race 5. Axioms and principles for understanding human conduct 6. Propositions predicting context-specific action 7. Propriety and sympathy in a rule-governed order 8. Trust game discoveries 9. The ultimatum game as involuntary extortion 10. Designing, predicting, and evaluating new trust games 11. Reconsidering the formal structure of traditional game theory 12. Narratives in and about experimental economics 13. Adam Smith's program for the study of human socio-economic betterment: from beneficence and justice to the Wealth of Nations.