Homo economicus

The rational self-interested agent of economic theory is identified here as two things at once, an endo-ideal and a pure endoself, and both identifications carry weight. Calling it the endo-ideal of classical economists says the figure is an object of admiration within a discipline rather than a neutral simplifying assumption, so the model person is also the model of a good person for whoever built it. Calling it a pure endoself says what kind of person that is: one with no goals outside the exploitation of others for accumulation of personal power, which is Marsh's endoself definition with the qualifications removed. That last point matters because she is otherwise careful that nobody is purely an endoself, since either extreme would end life, so homo economicus is a being that could not exist. The consequence she draws is about what follows from teaching it. The idea that predation is an inescapable part of human nature results from viewing only the endoself as a model person, which is what a discipline does when it builds its foundational agent this way, and the belief then licenses the arrangements it claims merely to describe. She names psychology and economics as ideologies rather than sciences elsewhere on the same grounds. Her alternative is not a nicer model but a different question, since the framework asks where a person's energy comes from rather than what they are assumed to maximize.

Homo economicus has been under attack from within economics for decades. Behavioural economics after Kahneman and Tversky documented systematic departures from the model, Amartya Sen called the agent a rational fool for lacking commitment and experimental work on ultimatum and public goods games found cooperation the model does not predict. Institutional and feminist economists have criticized the assumption of an unencumbered self-interested individual on broader grounds. Almost all of this holds that the model is empirically inaccurate. Marsh's objection is different in kind, since she grants that such people exist and objects to their being the ideal, which makes the problem normative and disciplinary rather than a matter of descriptive fit.