As human beings, we are naturally social and creative. The inherent curiosity that drives us to innovate is ultimately a testament to the creative impetus that resides within all of us. And the richness and flexibility of human behavior, including our capacity for cooperation and adaptation, further allow us to envisage and create a world that far outstrips the current economic and political models many regard as immutable and take for granted. Consider the standard economic model of human behavior, which holds that we are naturally self-important, rational consumers, simply striving to achieve maximum individual utility.
Yet, this is problematic; it has limited the capabilities of generations of human beings, especially under the auspices of narrow Western strictures that have allowed economic avarice and social greed to imperil the world around us. Many thus enter a world complicated by political and economic systems that leave them “born free” into the world, while remaining – as Rousseau so famously observed – “everywhere … in chains.”
We human beings are more creative and intelligent than this, and at the very least, if we capitalize on anything, we must capitalize on our creative potential to achieve a future in which life is capably sustained—a future in which we might thrive rather than slowly, but inevitably, perish.
That the dominant Western economic paradigm assumes people simply use information to decide how to best allocate scarce…