> On the first day of my Economics 101 class I was introduced to "economic man" or to make it more academic "Homo economicus." Of all criticisms you could make

> On the first day of my Economics 101 class I was introduced to "economic man" or to make it more academic "Homo economicus." Of all criticisms you could make, this is pretty iffy. Did you complain in your physics class when they said "calculate speed of an object and assume no air resistance"? Or when they tell you to "consider it as a point mass"? Here they are making the assumptions they work with apparent. You can't define exactly how people are, so we need to make some assumptions. That lets us clarify where and when these things might work or not work, and possibly look for explanations when our results are completely wrong. Imagine if they were to teach the same material, without the disclaimer "this only works if you make the assumption of homo economicus". Any science works with models, and we need to define those models to be able to determine if they are useful or not. "The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat." --Norbert Wiener