Just who is Homo economicus?
The importance of the CONSUMER to the whole Capitalist economy
If you recall that the Economy is a thing we can measure (and that we apparently want – and are able – to eternally grow), you’ll also appreciate that Homo economicus is a creature invented and honed by the capitalist economy. ‘The term Homo economicus, or economic man, is the portrayal of humans as agents who are consistently rational and narrowly self-interested, and who pursue their subjectively defined ends optimally. It is a wordplay on Homo sapiens, used in some economic theories and in pedagogy.’ (Wikipedia, 2025) Homo economicus is, because of his/her rational, money/wealth loving, emotionless, cold-as-a-reptile operator set of characteristics, perfect for a Capitalist world.
Capitalism, and its alleged killer, Technofeudalism, love fairy tales. Perhaps the best known is ‘The American Dream’, a myth which assuredly features Homo economicus, not Homo sapiens. (The dream is not just American, of course; every country where capitalism holds sway – and that’s most countries – believes in its own version of The Dream.)
In ‘Requiem for The American Dream’ Noam Chomsky wrote that:
The American Dream, like most dreams, has large elements of myth to it. Part of the nineteenth-century dream was the Horatio Alger story—“we’re dirt-poor but we’re going to work hard and we’ll find a way out,” A lot of people could do that’ [make a ‘success’ of themselves]. ‘It was possible for immigrants from Europe, in the early days, to achieve a level of wealth, privilege, freedom, and independence that wouldn’t have been imaginable in their countries of origin.
By now we simply know that that’s not true anymore. Social mobility, in fact, is lower here [the U.S.A.] than it is in Europe. But the dream persists, fostered by propaganda. You hear it in every political speech, “vote for me, we’ll get the dream back.” [These days it is often phrased as Make America Great Again] They all reiterate it in similar words—you even hear it from people who are destroying the dream, whether they know it or not. But the “dream” has to be sustained, otherwise how are you going to get people in the richest, most powerful country in world history, with extraordinary advantages, to face the reality that they see around them?
Inequality is really unprecedented. If you look at total inequality today, it’s like the worst periods of American history. But if you refine it more closely, the inequality comes from the extreme wealth in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1 percent….’
According to capitalist mythologies such as The [Nation’s] Dream, the ways to gain wealth are:
- By thrift
- By hard work (i.e. not wasting money on sinful or too pleasurable pursuits; yes, there’s much that is Calvinistic about some Capitalist myths)
- To always chase the best deal (honestly, the myth adds)
- To take advantage of your competitors’ weaknesses (see Pretty Woman, the film, for an example of the capitalist Homo economicus at work, until love – and humanity – undoes him)
- To focus entirely on how much money you’ll make
- To do things that focus on enriching one’s self
There is no nation on earth where it’s version of The Dream speaks to, nor even implies that there are, or will ever be, systemic impediments to the legitimate accruing of wealth. The Dream alleges that anyone can make it big. And clean.
And yet, worldwide, environments are trashed, inequality is on the rise, rich people act with impunity, and wars are fought (or promised) over resources. Indeed there’s an entire litany of other examples of a soured and fraudulent set of promises from [your Nation’s] DREAM, too many to go into – you can simply add your own.
The reality is, that unless things change, the acquisition (or retention) of resources, land, and rights, including intellectual property rights, will only continue to serve to make a very small number of wealthy people wealthier. Perhaps a little of that wealth will trickle down… in time, and yet something in us lets it all go on.
The reality is that, in the 3rd decade of the 21st Century, the vast majority of people feel decidedly unDREAMY. (We may not understand all the systemic and cultural checks on the gaining of wealth – nor of course the mythic dream that this will somehow make you content – but we’re certainly feeling that it’s not really working for us.)
The Capitalist Dream assures H. economicus that he/she can make money and get ahead. In this way, H. economicus becomes the perfect dreamer ( and how perfect does that make him or her for the cyberworld of technofeudalism). Of course, all H. economicus’s dreams are of money; he or she is a worshipper of mammon, Midas like.
Things like austerity measures and the fact that the bulk of the world’s population remains poor – and that the gap between US and THEM grows ever wider – has demonstrably proven that The Dream is a falsehood.
It’s a common thing to hear the ‘poor’ being blamed for being poor; it’s their fault, the story goes. Yet the system is fairly obviously gaming them: Thrift doesn’t work too well as a means of acquiring wealth if your wages are minimal, kept that way deliberately, or even lowered by plutocratic management – or management doing plutocrats’ bidding. Our society thrives on myths that the poor are slothful, have poor habits (a lack of thrift chief among them) that they all take drugs or drink too much… And they sure don’t know how to manage their money; they are lazy – the ‘myth’ goes – not locked out of systems, By virtue of who they are, the poor are doomed to remain forever that way – that’s just the way it is.
Hard work never pays off if it is underpaid, or, more accurately, undervalued. Covid proved that undervaluation of exactly what constitutes essential service is endemic in capitalist societies, and that is – as we’ve said – virtually all societies. Global inequalities increased during and after the Covid rearrangement of society, not of course to the run-of-the-mill Homo economicus’s benefit.
From our capitalists’ p.o.v. (indeed it’s also our Technofeudalists’ view), Homo economicus is the ideal ‘human’. Homo economicus’s great strength, after all, is his/her rational pursuit of self-interest. He or she is the perfect consumer, not only of goods and services, but of his fellow humans (at least metaphorically, because he/she must rationally triumph in every deal). Homo economicus accepts as doctrine the capitalist mythologies such as The American Dream. The Capitalists love Homo economicus because, as John Stuart Mills notes, Homo economicus is ‘a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging the comparative efficacy of means for obtaining that end.’ (Mill, John Stuart. “On the Definition of Political Economy, and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It,” London and Westminster Review, October 1836. Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, 2nd ed. London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1874, essay 5, paragraphs 38 and 48)
But modern capitalism – most importantly – needs Homo economicus.
Why?
Three pillars support the modern (and its Schrödinger’s cat version, Big Tech) capitalist edifice, namely
- Economies of scale (bigger is better, because bigger can make or do it cheaper[1]) as an essential element of:
- Growth, and Economic Growth is the key mantra of modern day economies
- And enabling both i and ii, the requirement for not only large scale production but also – critically – large scale consumption.
Goods – and services – must be consumed virtually endlessly, if the amount of production required for ECONOMIC GROWTH is to be sustained. CAPITALISM needs CONSUMERS, and it does everything it can to ensure that Homo economicus rationally consumes all that he/she can ‘eat’. This requires endless advertising and eternal sales. It means things like built in obsolescence, and that failure of parts or modules, is built into goods manufacture. It means that some things – with clever manipulation of our ‘Cloud Serfs’ (like Apple iPhones, for example) become fashionably obsolescent. Services must be subscribed for on regular intervals, even if work is not really needed regularly.
CONSUMPTION, much of it unnecessary – is essential to modern capitalism. And Homo economicus – whose concerns are only about the rational accumulation of wealth (which he or she consumes) – is the perfect CONSUMER, our Technofeudalists’ “Cloud serf”.
[1] Bigger is better was the logic behind land Enclosure, which was critical to the success of the Agrarian and then the Industrial Revolutions. Enclosure of commons land enabled the use of productive agricultural machinery. So, for example with wheat, a bigger plot of land was ploughed and furrowed and planted much more effectively than small plots by hand.
Inkstained fingers 