Economics has a problem--the discipline cannot distinguish the causes of human action from the consequences of human action. Economists deal with matters of fact, not with feelings and morals. They model representations of optimal agents, not flesh-and-blood human beings in ordinary life. By assuming that incentives and self-interest are sufficient to explain economic activity, economic science proceeds as if the human mind does not matter. But the origins of our actions--ideas--do indeed ...

What is property, and why does our species have it? In The Property Species, Bart J. Wilson explores how humans acquire, perceive, and know the custom of property, and why this might be relevant to understanding how property works in the twenty-first century. Arguing that neither the sciences nor the humanities synthesizes a full account of property, the book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: Property is a universal and uniquely human custom....

While neo-classical analysis works well for studying impersonal exchange in markets, it fails to explain why people conduct themselves the way they do in their personal relationships with family, neighbors, and friends. In Humanomics, Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon L. Smith and his long-time co-author Bart J. Wilson bring their study of economics full circle by returning to the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith. Sometime in the last 250 years, economists lost sight of the full ...

Economics has a problem—the discipline cannot distinguish the causes of human action from the consequences of human action. Economists deal with matters of fact, not with feelings and morals. They model representations of optimal agents, not flesh-and-blood human beings in ordinary life.In Meaningful Economics, Bart J. Wilson challenges economics to directly engage human beings as we really are, not as economists ideally assume. Wilson argues that economic science is as mu...

What is property, and why does our species have it? In The Property Species, Bart J. Wilson explores how humans acquire, perceive, and know the custom of property, and why this might be relevant to understanding how property works in the twenty-first century.Arguing that neither the sciences nor the humanities synthesizes a full account of property, the book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: Property is a universal and uniquely human ...