By Ezra
Quick note: Yes I'm in Brazil. Yes I'm occasionally blogging. Don't laugh at me, I have a problem. Also, I have nothing to do in the morning till the unwieldy organism that is my family decides what's on the agenda. And it's raining. And I want to hear Kathy and Chris's thoughts on this...
When Time picked the Man of the Century in 2000, they played it safe. Albert Einstein, baby. That wouldn't have been my choice. I'd have picked the Economic Agent.
It's the economic agent, after all, who's sat at the center of every economic current and fad in the last century. He's the oppressed worker or fattened landowner mindlessly pursuing his class interests. He's the hyper-rationalist merrily -- and nearly-infallibly -- pursuing self-interest and rendering free market economics viable. He's the "bounded rationalist" and imperfect creature whose blind spots and missteps require a community of similarly flawed beings to pool their resources and protect. He is, basically, everything. And it's only through imagining his preferences and extrapolating his actions that economics works. So it's quite kind of New School professor Duncan Foley to have charted (some) of the Economic Agent's many incarnations in the last few decades. Here he is, for instance, as Marx imagined him:
The economic agent of Classical political economy is thus basically a representative of his class, a Worker struggling to survive under the pressure of downward pressure on wages towards subsistence through a hand-to-mouth way of life, a Capitalist boldly building the future by obsessively accumulating the profits won from the exploitation of workers, or a Landowner parasitically and idly consuming rents by maintaining armies of unproductive personal servants and enormous numbers of horses. The individual behavior of these agents, such as they are, is of importance only insofar as they instantiate the social situation of their class.
And here she is as Milton Friedman imagined her:
