Dennis J. Snower — The Looming Death of Homo Economicus

The world seems to be on the verge of another “great transformation," which will fundamentally redefine the nature of our economic and social relationships. But mainstream economics – which assumes that people are self-interested, fully rational economic actors – fails to recognize the social half of the equation.

Is economics at the brink of a transformation similar to the one in academic psychology when Abraham Maslow confronted B. F. Skinner's stimulus-response model of human behavior as grossly inadequate and distorting?

Project Syndicate
The Looming Death of Homo Economicus
Dennis J. Snower is President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and Professor of Economics at the Christian-Albrechts Universität zu Kiel

See also Herbert Gintis and Dirk Helbing, Homo Socialis: An Analytical Core for Sociological Theory

We develop an analytical core for sociology. We follow standard dynamical systems theory by first specifying the conditions for social equilibrium, and then study the dynamical principles that govern disequilibrium behavior. Our general social equilibrium model is an expansion of the general equilibrium model of economic theory, and our dynamical principles treat the society as a complex adaptive dynamical system that can be studied using evolutionary game theory and agent-based Markov models based on variants of the replicator dynamic.