Stories by Jag Bhalla

“Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” So said Garrett Hardin to correct misreadings of his misnamed “tragedy of the commons.” He’s partly right.

“Rational” is the secular holy. It is a sacred prestigious label in mind work. We look to the rational to save us. Yet some professors of a rational-is-holy faith aren’t being wholly rational.

“Darwin was no Darwinian.” Martin Luther King Jr said that before me. He was correct historically, scientifically, and morally. It’s a bad break for Darwin, and us, that his name is used to distort his ideas.

Words are thinking tools (as Daniel Dennett notes). New word-tools can sometimes avoid the baggage built into prior terms and thinking patterns.

Do you have enough enoughness in your life? Your biology definitely does. But your unevolved economic appetite might not. Life is limited—as are all corporeal appetites.

“Reason is larger than science.” So Leon Wieseltier reminds us in his essay “Crimes Against Humanities,” his reply to Steven Pinker’s “Science Is Not Your Enemy.” If well practiced, science reduces errors, but it grants no immunity to nonsense.

No perfect rationality is needed to see that markets often don’t work as advertised. But without perfect rationality, and other utopian conditions, the math of market theory doesn’t work.

Maxims matter more than maximization. Much in life isn’t quantifiable, much less numerically maximizable. Words, logic, images, and patterns all can express more than numbers can.

Is economics like physics, or more like history? Steven Pinker says, “No sane thinker would try to explain World War I in the language of physics.” Yet some economists aim close to such craziness.

Economics and fiction both seek to describe and explain our behavior. Measured against what makes fiction feel realistic, the tales of mainstream economists aren’t believable.

Economics is in our nature. But not the narrowly self-interested kind. We evolved to survive collaboratively. Models of us that exclude our interdependence are fatally flawed.