Edward Skidelsky — I Spend, Therefore I Am by Philip Roscoe – review

Utilitarian consequentialist ethics pitted against deontological, virtue and rights ethics.

I Spend, Therefore I Am is a splendid denunciation of the dismal science in the grand tradition of Dickens and Carlyle. Not only does economics embody a false image of man, claims Philip Roscoe; it remakes him according to that false image. It "brings into being the agent about whom it theorises: self-interested, calculative and even dishonest". It has recast each of us as an "entrepreneur of the self".

How does an abstruse academic discipline exert such extraordinary transformational powers? Two mechanisms are central to Roscoe's account.

The first is the incentive. Economists treat all human behaviour as responsive to monetary costs and benefits. "The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he cannot fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme," write Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, authors of the bestselling Freakonomics. Roscoe agrees and argues that incentives have been disastrously influential, not least in justifying bankers' bonuses. The trouble with monetary incentives is not that they don't work – often they do, at least in the short term – but that they "crowd out" other, nobler sources of motivation: professional pride, institutional loyalty and public spirit. They bring into being the kind of person they presuppose, shrewd and mercenary. As popular wisdom has always known, if you treat people like knaves they will behave like knaves.

The other villain of Roscoe's story is measurement. Scoring systems now exist for everything under the sun, including quality of life, intellectual achievement, sex appeal and other such intangibles. Embedded in governmental and corporate software, these systems shape the very conduct they claim to measure. Give academics "citation scores" and sure enough, they will churn out dreary articles for other academics. Rate hospitals on "patient turnover" and lo and behold, they will turn patients over with indecent haste. A measure is a dangerous tool, for it tends to take the place of whatever it measures. The thing itself – talent, health – disappears behind a numerical proxy. This is why Aristotle famously warned his pupils not to seek for more precision in a subject than its nature permits.

The Guardian (UK)

I Spend, Therefore I Am by Philip Roscoe – review

Edward Skidelsky, co-author of How Much Is Enough? with his father, Robert Skidelsky

See also The True Cost of Economics, a video of Roscoe recommended by Clonal in the comments.

Phillip Roscoe is a reader (associate professor) in Management at the School of Management, University of St. Andrews, in Scotland.