The Death of Homo Economicus

Homo Economicus is the mythical creature many economic models rest upon. This “economic human” acts with rational self-interest and makes choices that optimize long-term wealth in the pursuit of logical goals. If you give Homo Econ $5000 they will attempt to maximize the return on that money and therefore (maybe?) enjoy a happy, flourishing life of moderate wealth.

If you give a poet $5K…

The summer between my two years of poetry graduate school, I inherited AT&T stock from my great aunt that was worth, in 1993, about $5000. Had I left the money with AT&T, it would be worth $40,000 today. Instead, I went to China for the summer. I sprained my foot at the bottom of Tiger Leaping Gorge. After hobbling out of the gorge (long story), I became an extra in a film called The Young Monks of Shaolin. In this film I played to type as a Western tourist. About ten Westerners were scraped up from the Chengdu Traffic Hotel to spend a day on set. In our scene, we were told to run toward the young monks while snapping pictures. Then we were asked to pick up the little bald children and generally act gregariously “Western”. I think I ad-libbed “Oh, can I keep him!?!” while squeezing a strange child. I shall never forget the look of fear on the young monk’s faces, who had not been told they were about to be manhandled by several grubby foreigners with fanny packs.

The handler who brought us to the film set was an attractive young woman who spent the day beckoning to me to come close and whispering “Je t’aime”. When I got within a half meter of her, she would suddenly change her come hither look to a go yonder look and exclaim “Fuck you!” Naturally, I fell in love for a day or so.

But I digress. I should have kept the money! 40K! Alas, we simple sapiens don’t act as predictably as the models suggest.

Homo Poeticus: more A. Ginsberg, less A. Greenspan

Homo Econ would have let that $5K grow 700% instead of knocking around Sichuan Province. However, I was Homo Poeticus, inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s trip to China where (I was told by those who had witnessed it) he drew sex positions on a chalkboard during his poetry readings. Somehow, I doubt that any ECON 101 text could account for spending based upon “being inspired by something Allen Ginsberg probably did.” I mean, a young poet traipsing through China — the romance! The adventure! The waste of funds!

Homo Poeticus makes economic choices based on what’s most interesting to them. That’s why you find them in poetry school and not business school. They act irrationally in the ‘making money’ sense but not in the ‘having an interesting experience’ sense. (That this makes them somewhat insufferable is duly noted.) They act against economic ideas of logic, rationality, and long-term thinking. They can only act contrary, however, because there is a an equilibrium against which they can rebel. That equilibrium (that is, the markets being more or less stable in the long-term) ingests their “bad” choices and fits them into the economic system. Even Allen Ginsberg had a credit score. (Which, one imagines, he jacked-off upon.)

The long shadow of the Economic Self

As much as I acted like a Poeticus, my Economicus shadow self was always there. In college, Poeticus thought it would be neat to spell his name differently in anything consumer or government related. He thought his real name should be used in poetry and love, not credit cards and taxes. Economicus was not fooled. H. Econ noted the change and now, thirty plus years later, lists the alternate spelling as a ‘known alias’. Economicus has been with me my whole life. All-seeing Economicus gestated a credit score. Matured into a solid number. This number, the sum of my economic choices, is how I am consumed by a technological system that has little time for poetry, or love, or sickness, or human frailty, or kindness.

Poeticus made several poor economic decisions. Too many to be recounted here. These poor decisions were made by Homo Poeticus (that is to say, me) in reaction to the Reagan/Bush1-era exultation of money, greed, business, ‘deals’, etc. Whatever we were supposed to want circa 1990, I wanted the opposite. In typical, immature young person fashion I followed my passion which turned out to be: ‘not making money’. With hindsight, I see that I was reacting against the underlying principle of Homo Economicus, which is that the most rational, logical life has the ultimate purpose of creating the most possible wealth. Like Kevin Bacon in Footloose, I wanted to rebel, wear skinny jeans, have big hair, and dance. Screw money, greed, stocks, long-term interest… I gotta cut loose.

Enter Perverticus

It saddens me to report that Homo Economicus is dead or, at any rate, missing and presumed deceased. Not dead in the sense of there being no more credit scores, no more data profiles, no more sketchy loans to young people who will never pay them back, no more models based on humans as rational wealth-builders. No, the idea of Homo Economicus is still with us, but zombified. No Econ 101 professor in 2025 could preach that there is some version of an economic system that acts according to logical, rational, self-interested goals. Let alone that that system is exists in capitalism’s ultimate champion: the U.S. of A. Homo Economicus and Homo Poeticus can only thrive when there is logic in the economic system and some version of equilibrium in the markets.

Homo Perverticus is now in charge of the world’s largest economy. Called Perverticus because the goals of the rational economic actor have been perverted. It’s opposite-world now, where economic devastation for all but a few is the goal. The logic of ‘causing pain’ is the new economic model. For Homo Perverticus economic choices, from firing workers to shuttering science labs to imposing nonsensical tariffs, are good in relation to the amount of suffering they cause, economic and otherwise, to those within the system.

Perverticus is anarchic, chaotic, narrowly self-interested (perhaps narcissistic) and will turn all aspects of the system into money-making schemes for an oligarchical few. Well, not all aspects. Citizens will still be products. Whatever goes into the credit score will survive. Student loans will survive the collapse of education. The attention economy will survive the collapse of broadcast regulation. Social security tax will survive the end of social security checks. The poor will still have payroll taxes long after the IRS becomes a single chatbot on a slow dot-gov website. In other words, we will be expected to act to increase our credit score but without the promised reward those actions used to, rationally, bring.

I’m not the type to make predictions, but here’s one anyway: At some point, once the economic pain affects everyone but the wealthy few, Perverticus will sell the pain to us as a necessary product of efficiency and reform (probably the word ‘woke’ will be used to explain how necessary the economic pain is). A spoonful of arsenic to help the medicine go down.

Desire Paths is a bi-weekly newsletter about what it means to be human in an age of technology. All the words and photos in this post were Dr. Jonathan Gourlay’s. For youngsters: the photos were taken with a camera that used this thing called “film”; film was color or black and white, so that’s why some of the photos are black and white. (It’s not a filter.) If you liked this post, forward, like, screech, skeet, spit, or skate it over to your friends and enemies.