Is Utilitarianism – the individual (and usually selfish) pursuit of happiness) – really the foundation of economics?
I argue very strongly that it is not – the confusion arises because maximising (optimising) utility (roughly, happiness) just happens to be a convenient way of formalising the outcomes of an evolutionary process – the continual pursuit of better fits with (political and social) environments – as a constrained optimisation problem. To imagine that economics necessarily implies that this is what people both do and should do is to confuse the replica with the original. Humans, behaving as economical people, no more pursue happiness than do the plants of the field or the birds of the air. Economics is, I argue, no more than a formal exposition of the principles of survival of the fittest – with the important addition that people are the authors of their own misfortunes – meaning, in this case, that we need to take care that our economies are at least economically sustainable. For that, we need the usual tools of macroeconomic management – to balance the flows of spending and income so that
