The Intimate Contest for Self-Command

Abstract

A striking characteristic of textbooks in economics is that the consumer is a single person. People who deal with income taxes and family welfare have always had to think of families as multi-person units, but theorists who deal with “social choice” have typically used as their model the political system, or a board of directors, rarely that ubiquitous small society, the family. The person who drinks and becomes vicious, or a bore, and is morose about it for days afterwards; the person who continually resolves to demand that increase in pay and never musters the courage. However authors choose sides between the two selves or diagnose the pathology of one or the other, there evidently is for many of a problem of self-management. The name, economics, comes through the Latin oeconomia from the Greek oikonomia, meaning household management and still has some of that meaning in its variant, “economical.”

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