Animal personalities, individualism, and economics
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One of my hobbies is finding economics in unexpected places. The biologist and animal rescuer John Shivik’s 2017 book Mousy Cats and Sheepish Coyotes: The Science of Animal Personalities is a treasure trove of surprise insights. I examine some of them in a book review over at Liberty Fund’s EconLog,
Shivik’s stories about animals’ unique personalities guide him to unintentionally describe equilibrating processes, cartel models, and other economic phenomena. But Shivik’s real value-added for economists is in his emphasis on individual dignity. This is a lesson economists too often forget:
The homo economicus species that inhabits economists’ perfect competition models is an automaton. It has no individuality and no free will. Its sole purpose is to maximize utility. It has all the individual personality of an equation. This lifeless view of humans is similar to the mechanistic view that Shivik warns against when it comes to other animal species.
Humans have built civilizations and sent ourselves to space. Thanks to the written word, we can send messages thousands of years into the future. No automaton could have done this. People had to come up with new ideas. They had to build upon others’ work. They had to persuade other people that their new innovations were worthwhile. It took people demanding to be treated with dignity and agency, and treating others that way in return. In short, it takes personality.
Shivik is right about animal individuality, just as Adam Smith and James Buchanan are right about the importance of human individuality. These are two sides of the same coin:
While an enterprising economist could build all sorts of sophisticated models around the insights Shivik touches on, the most important lesson from his book is his reminder of the importance of individual dignity, for both humans and animals.
Our human individuality did not come from a vacuum. It emerged from a long evolutionary process. Diversity isn’t just an ingredient of humanity, it is an ingredient of life itself.
Read the whole review here.