The Selfish Brain: A Layperson's Guide to a New Way of Economic Thinking
- ISBN-10
- ISBN-13
- 9798483901778
- Pages
- 322
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2021-09-27
- Author
- Richard McKenzie
Description
In The Selfish Brain, which has been written with non-economists in mind, expands on Richard McKenzie's development of "brain-centric economics," which provides a new way of assessing and reconciling (albeit partially) the growing conflict between conventional or neoclassical economics (represented by the work of Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman and Gary Becker) and behavioral economics (represented by the work of Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler). In the book, McKenzie uses conventional economic analytics to explain how and why many behaviorists' findings of widespread decision "irrationalities" and "biases" have a rational foundation. He is also able to develop many economic insights that conventional economists have missed, for example, how the gains from open trade are greater than Adam Smith and his followers have realized. He accomplishes such ends by first recognizing that the human brain, while powerful, is the one of the scarcest of all resources in the universe and by realizing that the brain faces a serious economic problem, that of allocating as carefully and judiciously as it can its limited mental resources to achieve its most valuable ends. The human brain is seen as the ultimate seat of rational decision making. Adam Smith famously wrote that people have a "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange," without giving a source of the propensity. McKenzie provides the source, the brain's scarcity problem. The brain seeks to accommodate its excess demands by seeking to specialize in its decision making and then searching out trades. Richard McKenzie, who has published widely, is the Walter B. Gerken Professor of Economics (ret.) in the Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine.
