Marc Kaufmann

I had been wanting to write something about the silliness of selfishness in economic modeling, not only from the point of view that I don't believe it is true, but also because economists are quite picky about what they mean by selfish. People are supposedly selfish on the market, pure utility maximising machines, but for some obscure reason, there set of actions is restricted to trading. So economic models don't usually include the easiest way of getting money (in the very short-term), that is kill and steal. But let's tune in to Cosma Shalizi, who is much funnier and eloquent.

And how did I sigh when I saw that he also made the very clear point about the uselessness of Pareto optimality as a guiding principle for just about anything.