Epistemological criticism of the concept of individualism in conventional economies

Authors

  • Frederic Nalle Economics Study Program, Faculty of Economics and Business, Brawijaya University, Indonesia
  • Munawar Ismail Economics Study Program, Faculty of Economics and Business, Brawijaya University, Indonesia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22437/ppd.v12i1.30759

Keywords:

Collective psychology, Conventional economics, Culture, Economic paradigm, Individualism, Social norms

Abstract

This research critically examines the epistemology surrounding the concept of individualism within conventional economics, focusing on elucidating the influence of non-economic factors—namely culture, social norms, and collective psychology—on economic decision-making processes. This study endeavors to uncover the role of these factors in individual economic decisions by employing a methodology rooted in analyzing economic and sociological literature. The findings shed light on the discordance between the traditional notion of individualism and the multifaceted realities of contemporary society, where culture, social norms, and collective psychology significantly shape economic behaviors and preferences. By providing nuanced insights into how these non-economic factors impact individuals' economic choices and actions, this research underscores the imperative for a broader, more inclusive perspective within economic paradigms. This study contributes to a richer comprehension of the complexities inherent in individual economic decisions when viewed against non-economic influences.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Agassi, J. (2016). Methodological individualism. Journal Phisocologic, 26(3), 498–514.

Ainslie, G., & Haslam, N. (1992). Hyperbolic discounting. In G. Loewenstein & J. Elster (Eds.), Choice over time (pp. 57–92). Russell Sage Foundation.

Akerlof, G. A., & Kranton, R. E. (2000). Economics and identity. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115(3), 715–753. https://doi.org/10.1162/003355300554881

Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions. Choice Reviews Online, 46(02), Article 46-0969. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.46-0969

Arrow, K. J. (1978). Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care. In Moral hazard in health insurance (pp. 81–136). Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/columbia/9780231163804.003.0007

Bartley, W. W., & Kresge, S. (2020). The trend of economic thinking: Essays on political economists and economic history. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781138400122

Becker, G. S. (1962). Investment in human capital: A theoretical analysis. The Journal of Political Economy, 70(5, Part 2), 9–49. University of Chicago Press. http://www.nber.org/books/univ62-3

Bentham, J. (1789). A utilitarian view. In Animal rights and human obligations (Vol. 3, Issue 1). http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/bentham01.pdf

Birt, L., Scott, S., Cavers, D., Campbell, C., & Walter, F. (2016). Member checking: A tool to enhance trustworthiness or merely a nod to validation? Qualitative Health Research, 26(13), 1802–1811. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732316654870

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa

Bunn, E. (2020). Efficiency, entrepreneurship, and the market for lemons. University of Minnesota, Department of Economics, 4(2), 1–15.

Creswell, J. W. (2007). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches. Sage Publications.

Denzin, N. K. (2017). The research act: A theoretical introduction to sociological methods. Transaction Publishers.

Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2011). The Sage handbook of qualitative research. Sage.

Durkheim, É. (2024). Pragmatisme et sociologie. BoD-Books on Demand.

Elrick, J., & Thies, C. F. (2018). The social responsibility of business: Milton Friedman reconsidered. Journal of Markets & Morality, 21(2), 297–307.

Elster, J. (1989). Social norms and economic theory. In Handbook of Monetary Policy, 3(4), 117–133. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429270949-6

Fama, E. F. (1970). Efficient market hypothesis: A review of theory and empirical work. The Journal of Finance, 25(2), 383–417.

Flick, U. (2019). The concepts of qualitative data: Challenges in neoliberal times for qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(8), 713–720. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418809132

Gintis, H., van Schaik, C., & Boehm, C. (2019). Zoon politikon: The evolutionary origins of human socio-political systems. Behavioural Processes, 161, 17–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2018.01.007

Hausman, D. M. (2007). The philosophy of economics. In The philosophy of economics: An anthology. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819025.006

Hayek, F. (1944). The road to serfdom. Journal of Applied Economics, 66, 37–39.

Hayek, F. A. (2013). The use of knowledge in society. In Modern understandings of liberty and property (pp. 27–38). Routledge.

Hofstede, G. (2010). Dimensionalizing cultures: The Hofstede model in context. National Cultural Dimensions, 2(1), 2–7.

Kahneman, D. (2003). Maps of bounded rationality; Psychology for behavioural economics. American Economic Review, 93(05), 1449–1474.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979a). On the interpretation of intuitive probability: A reply to Jonathan Cohen. Cognition, 7(4), 409–411. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(79)90024-6

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979b). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas in Late Antiquity, 47(2), 293–298. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1kr4n03.21

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1984). Choices, values, and frames. American Psychologist, 39(4), 341.

Kirzner, I. M. (1997). Entrepreneurial discovery and the competitive market process: An Austrian approach. Journal of Economic Literature, 35(1), 60–85.

Laibson, D. (1997). Golden eggs and hyperbolic discounting. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112(2), 443–478.

Hamilton, L. (2009). Amartya Sen. In Amartya Sen. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511800511

Lucas, R. E. (1978). Methods and problems in business cycle theory. Journal of Monetary Economics, 9(2), 508–523.

Mahmoud, O. (2015). Book review: Misbehaving: The making of behavioural economics. International Journal of Market Research, 57(6), 961–963. https://doi.org/10.2501/ijmr-2015-074

Malkiel, B. G. (2003). The efficient market hypothesis and its critics. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 17(1), 59–82.

Marshall, A. (2009). Principles of economics: Unabridged eighth edition. Cosimo, Inc.

Maxwell, J. A., & Chmiel, M. (2014). Generalization in and from qualitative analysis. In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis (pp. 540–553).

Mill, J. S. (1859). On liberty. Universidad de Los Andes.

Mintrom, M. (2016). Administrative behaviour: A study of decision-making processes in administrative organization. Political Science, Public Administration, Political Behaviour, 8(3), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199646135.013.22

Muthukrishna, M., Bell, A. V., Henrich, J., Curtin, C. M., Gedranovich, A., McInerney, J., & Thue, B. (2020). Beyond Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) psychology: Measuring and mapping scales of cultural and psychological distance. Psychological Science, 31(6), 678–701. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620916782

Newman, P., & Friedman, M. (1954). Essays in positive economics. Economica, 21(83), 259. https://doi.org/10.2307/2551326

Nordhaus, W. D. (2017). Revisiting the social cost of carbon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(7), 1518–1523. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1609244114

North, D. C. (1990). A transaction cost theory of politics. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2(4), 355–367.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Harvard University Press.

Patton, M. Q. (2014). Qualitative research & evaluation methods: Integrating theory and practice. Sage Publications.

Pigou, A. (2017). The economics of welfare. Routledge.

Piketty, T. (2015). Putting distribution back at the center of economics: Reflections on capital in the twenty-first century. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(1), 67–88. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.29.1.67

Rajan, R., & Zingales, L. (2003). The road to prosperity: Saving capitalism from capitalists. Transition, 14(7–9), 1–3.

Rieger, M. O., Wang, M., Phan, T. C., & Gong, Y. (2022). Trend following or reversal: Does culture affect predictions and trading behaviour? Global Finance Journal, 54, 100769.

Shiller, R. (2002). The irrationality of markets. Critical Review, 3(2), 51–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/08913818708459487

Rodrik, D. (2018a). New technologies, global value chains, and developing economies. NBER Working Paper Series, 25(64), 1–28.

Rodrik, D. (2018b). Populism and the economics of globalization. Journal of International Business Policy, 1, 12–33.

School, P. W. (2018). Emotional intelligence and social and emotional learning: (Mis)interpretation of theory. Tourism Recreation Research, 19. Retrieved from http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/8705/

Schrank, Z., & Running, K. (2018). Individualist and collectivist consumer motivations in local organic food markets. Journal of Consumer Culture, 18(1), 184–201. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540516659127

Sen, A. (1999). Supersymmetric world-volume action for non-BPS D-branes. Journal of High Energy Physics, 1999(10), 8.

Shiller, R. J. (2002). Bubbles, human judgment, and expert opinion. Financial Analysts Journal, 58(3), 18–26.

Simon, H. (1955). A behavioural model of rational choice. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 69(1), 99–118.

Simon, H. A. (1990). Bounded rationality. Socio-Economic Review, 8(2), 377–383. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwq002

Skousen, M. (1997). The perseverance of Paul Samuelson’s economics. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 11(2), 137–152.

Smith, A. (1793). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. In Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective. https://doi.org/10.2307/2221259

Ster, N. (2008). The economics of climate change. American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, 98(2), 1–37. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/29729990%0AJSTOR

Stiglitz, J. (2012). Der Preis der Ungleichheit: Wie die Spaltung der Gesellschaft unsere Zukunft bedroht. Siedler Verlag.

Stiglitz, J. E. (1987). Pareto efficient and optimal taxation and the new welfare economics. Taxation, March, 1–69.

Stiglitz, J. E. (1996). Whither socialism?. MIT Press.

Stiglitz, J. E. (2010). Risk and global economic architecture: Why full financial integration may be undesirable. American Economic Review, 100(2), 388–392.

Thaler, R. H. (1999). Mental accounting matters. In Choices, Values, and Frames (Vol. 206, Issue September 1998) (pp. 241–268). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511803475.015

Thaler, R. H. (2015). Misbehaving: The making of behavioural economics. WW Norton & Company.

Thaler, R. H. (2018). From cashews to nudges: The evolution of behavioural economics. American Economic Review, 108(6), 1265–1287.

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2019). Nudge: Comotomar decisões sobre saúde, dinheiro e felicidade.

Thiel, A., Adamseged, M. E., & Baake, C. (2015). Evaluating an instrument for institutional crafting: How Ostrom’s social-ecological systems framework is applied. Environmental Science and Policy, 53, 152–164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2015.04.020

Tsai, H.-T., Bagozzi, R. P., & Ross. (2014). Contribution behaviour in virtual communities: Cognitive, emotional, and social influences. Iss Quarterly, 38(1), 101–103.

Tülüce, N. S., & Yurtkur, A. K. (2015). Term of strategic entrepreneurship and Schumpeter’s creative destruction theory. Procedia-Social and Behavioural Sciences, 207, 720–728.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207–232.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. In Cambridge University Press (Vol. 8, Issue 2). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781912282562

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1992). Advances in prospect theory: Cumulative representation of uncertainty. WiSt - Wirtschaftswissenschaftliches Studium, 35(6), 331–334. https://doi.org/10.15358/0340-1650-2006-6-331

Umiyati, E., & Zulfanetti, Z. (2021). An effect of credit to entrepreneurship and micro small and medium enterprises performance in Jambi Province. Jurnal Perspektif Pembiayaan Dan Pembangunan Daerah, 9(5), 433–446. https://doi.org/10.22437/ppd.v9i5.11225

Walras, L. (2013). Elements of pure economics. Routledge.

Weber, M. (2007). On the critique of the subject of development: Beyond proprietary and methodological individualism. Globalizations, 4(4), 460–474. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747730701695703

Yin, R. K. (1999). Enhancing the quality of case studies in health services research. Health Services Research, 34(5 Pt 2), 1209–1224. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10591280%0Ahttp://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=PMC1089060

Downloads

Published

2024-04-25

How to Cite

Nalle, F., & Ismail, M. (2024). Epistemological criticism of the concept of individualism in conventional economies. Jurnal Perspektif Pembiayaan Dan Pembangunan Daerah, 12(1), 67 - 90. https://doi.org/10.22437/ppd.v12i1.30759