Humanomics
Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century

Articulates Adam Smith's model of human sociality, illustrated in experimental economic games that relate easily to business and everyday life.

Vernon L. Smith (Author), Bart J. Wilson (Author)

9781107199378, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 January 2019

234 pages, 31 b/w illus. 3 tables
23.6 x 15.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.46 kg

'… the authors of the book are world-class specialists, who 'have been reading and citing Adam Smith's 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments for well in excess of a decade' … one simply cannot miss reading it.' Jacek Klich, Central Banking Journal

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 range of human feeling, thinking, and knowing in everyday life. Smith and Wilson show how Adam Smith's model of sociality can re-humanize twenty-first century economics by undergirding it with sentiments, fellow feeling, and a sense of propriety - the stuff of which human relationships are built. Integrating insights from The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations into contemporary empirical analysis, this book shapes economic betterment as a science of human beings.

1. Humanomics spans the two worlds of Adam Smith: sociality and economy
2. Words and meaning in Adam Smith's world
3. Conduct in the social universe
4. Frank Knight preemptively settles the horse race
5. Axioms and principles for understanding human conduct
6. Propositions predicting context-specific action
7. Propriety and sympathy in a rule-governed order
8. Trust game discoveries
9. The ultimatum game as involuntary extortion
10. Designing, predicting, and evaluating new trust games
11. Reconsidering the formal structure of traditional game theory
12. Narratives in and about experimental economics
13. Adam Smith's program for the study of human socio-economic betterment: from beneficence and justice to the Wealth of Nations.

Subject Areas: Economic theory & philosophy [KCA], Economics [KC], History of ideas [JFCX]