View source for The Embarrassment of Economics/Individualism

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[[Category:Robert Heilbroner]]
[[Category:Ideology Underlies Economics]]
[[Category:Joseph Schumpeter]]
[[Category:Methodological Individualism (propaganda)]]
[[Category:Individualism]]
{{Quote
| text = [...] the irreducible atom of economic life consists of the "individual," whose activities we put under the microscope -- not the macroscope. What is this individual presumed to be constantly doing? Maximizing utility. I will avoid the easy task of exposing the vacuity of the words "maximizing utility." The phrase is consistent with all possible observed behavior and refutable by none. I ask instead that we watch the individual perform his allotted task and inquire why he is engaged in this balancing act. Almost invariably, he is deciding how to spend his income among the various options before him. And what is so ideological about that? It is the unnoticed intrusion of the innocent word: income. For you cannot have an income unless it comes from someone else. Hence the individual is an absurd -- dare I say "ideological" -- representation of the irreducible atom of economic life. Is there not something profoundly suspicious about taking a monadic individual, not the societal dyad, as the representative agent for capitalism?
| cite = [[Robert Heilbroner]], "{{Link |The Embarrassment of Economics}}"
}}