1st Edition

The Varieties of Economic Rationality From Adam Smith to Contemporary Behavioural and Evolutionary Economics

By Michel Zouboulakis Copyright 2014

    The concept of economic rationality is important for the historical evolution of Economics as a scientific discipline. The common idea about this concept -even between economists- is that it has a unique meaning which is universally accepted. This new volume argues that "economic rationality" is not not a universal concept with one single meaning, and that it in fact has different, if not conflicting, interpretations in the evolution of discourse on economics. In order to achieve this, the book traces the historical evolution of the concept of economic rationality from Adam Smith to the present, taking in thinkers from Mill to Friedman, and encompassing approaches from neoclassical to behavioural economics.

    The book charts this history in order to reveal important instances of conceptual transformation of the meaning of economic rationality. In doing so, it presents a uniquely detailed study of the historical change of the many faces of the homo oeconomicus .

    @text Chapter 1: Adam Smith and the idea of morally constrained rationality  Chapter 2: John Stuart Mill and the concept of socially embedded rationality  Chapter 3: William Stanley Jevons and the concept of rationality as maximization  Chapter 4: Vilfredo Pareto and the concept of instrumental rationality  Chapter 5: Lionel Robbins and consistency of choices under scarcity  Chapter 6: Neoclassical rationality under fire: theoretical, methodological and empirical critique in the late ‘30’s  Chapter 7: Three conventionalist responses. Machlup, Samuelson and Friedman  Chapter 8: Popper’s retreat and the ‘principle of rationality’  Chapter 9: Probabilistic choice and strategic rationality  Chapter 10: Herbert Simon and the concept of bounded rationality  Chapter 11: Rationality in behavioral economics  Chapter 12: The rationality of embedded individuals  Conclusion: What is rational after all?

    Biography

    Michel S. Zouboulakis is Professor of History & Methodology of Economics at the University of Thessaly, Greece.