Applying economics the right way

Economics professors say the darndest things.

In a post on his blog, University of Rochester professor of economics and recent “Professor of the Year” Steven Landsburg wonders aloud about the implications of the Steubenville rape case and why he thinks the world should “be allowed to reap the benefits” of an unconscious individual.

He means you should be able to rape them. If they’re lights out and you don’t get them pregnant or give them a disease, Landsburg says go for it.

In my three years of study, I’ve found this sort of application to be one of the most disturbing complications of the ideas set forth in economics.

Ask most economics professors and they’ll tell you that people who study economics just think differently.

It’s true. We have a tendency to see things a lot of people don’t, to identify trends or patterns or applications of theory in the real world that some might miss.

Of course, there’s an opportunity cost associated with any method of thinking, and this includes the economics way.

For most of our lives, we are taught to think of individuals as an end rather than a means.

In preschool, we were taught we couldn’t hit Billy just because we wanted his toy, because hitting hurt and we would just have to wait. He was playing with the Tonka truck right now, but maybe we could ask Billy for a turn when he was done.

For the next decade and a half, that notion of our relationship with individuals is the dominant one. And then the fledgling economics major sits down in a microeconomics class.

Immediately he or she is asked to alter this method of thinking. Sure, Billy doesn’t like it when we hit him, but what really matters is that we maximize our own happiness and let everyone else do the same.

If we can convince Billy to give us the Tonka truck, that just means Billy didn’t deserve it to begin with. It makes Billy stronger, or at the very least eliminates his weakness from the economic herd.

Carry this idea all the way out to the extreme and suddenly you’re “reaping the benefits” of unconscious people.

We can sleep at night because we are convinced that making ourselves happy will make everyone else happy — or else no worse off — coincidentally.

Even the basic notion of property rights fundamental to the proper function of microeconomic theory is rooted not in the idea that people deserve what they have, but that if I can take from someone else, someone else could take from me.

Deregulatory capitalist economics writ large likes to see itself as the coordinated prosperous uplifting of all people in tandem.

I’ve come to see it more and more as the selfish dominance of the many by the most powerful, the egotistical delusion that megalomania is altruism.

By lauding the use of power and strength — subtly referred to as capital — by those who possess it as necessary to the prosperity of all, economics tacitly endorses the use of people not as an end, but as a means.

Of course, in many applications, this is a useful consideration that allows us to describe many aspects of human behavior accurately.

But that doesn’t mean we should confuse it for a comprehensive set of guidelines for how to live a worthy life.

Landsburg’s argument that rape wouldn’t cause harm to an unconscious individual but provides benefits to the perpetrator and therefore is economically — or even logically — valid in certain situations is the perfect example.

Even posing the question is morally reprehensible. It applies the idea that another person may be used as a means to furthering one’s own ends rather than an end itself with an absurdly broad brush.

People are not things or tools to be used and discarded for momentary pleasure because they were unconscious and therefore unharmed.

People are people themselves and should be treated that way.

­— drlreed@indiana.edu