Economists have moral compasses that are suspect to being overruled by any variety of unrelated concepts: utility, loss, advantage, opportunity cost, maximisation, and so on and so forth. They claim to be disciples of the market, astute learners whose educations piqued in one area, and one area only. It is suprising, then, for an economist — much less a former banker — to be spotted using that dreaded word, ‘moral,’ which has caused many an economist unspeakable terrors. The man responsible for that is Raghuram Rajan, a professor at the University of Chicago, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and popular economist.1
Continue reading “Self-Interest as a Moral Maxim”
- Raghuram Rajan, ‘Pursue Self-Interest by Helping Other Economies Too’, Financial Times, 7 July 2020, July 7, 2020 edition, sec. Opinion, https://www.ft.com/content/cf12c2ad-616f-4c11-936f-d8ac1b0880bb. ↩