Who is homo economicus?

If you’ve ever opened an economics textbook, you’ve likely met homo economicus—the so-called “economic man” said to live inside us all. He appears under the fluorescent lights of the supermarket aisle, armed with perfect information and an unwavering drive to maximise his utility. This rational, self-interested figure is the cornerstone of neoclassical economic theory, a character whose relentless pursuit of personal gain is said to produce efficient markets and desirable societal outcomes—aside from the occasional “market failure,” of course.

Utility, however, is an infuriatingly vague concept. For the business owner, it may mean profit; for the worker, a wage; for the consumer, it remains ambiguous and unmeasurable. Yet economics continues to treat it as a stable compass. More than just a theory of decision-making, homo economicus reflects—and reinforces—a moral worldview: one that normalises selfishness, instrumentalises relationships, and upholds the free market as both natural and optimal.

As Adam Smith famously put it, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” This quote, often stripped of its wider philosophical context, has come to symbolise the ideology that underpins homo economicus: that public good arises from private greed.

But if you’ve ever interacted with another human being—or simply been one—you know this model is incomplete. We care, we cooperate, we contradict ourselves. And yet, despite its narrow assumptions and poor empirical accuracy, homo economicus continues to haunt the public imagination. So, let’s meet this man properly—and begin to take him apart, piece by piece.

Perfect information

A foundational assumption of homo economicus is that he possesses perfect information, enabling him to make optimal consumption decisions. But do we really have all the information we need to make informed choices? Of course not—and even some neoclassical models admit this. Akerlof’s Market for Lemons, for instance, highlights how sellers often have more information than buyers, allowing them to charge above a product’s true value.

Yet this doesn’t go far enough. As Noam Chomsky once remarked:

“The whole point of advertising is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. And yet, markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices.”

This isn’t to suggest we live in a world as overtly dystopian as John Carpenter’s They Live, where “truth glasses” reveal subliminal commands like “CONSUME,” “OBEY,” or the more absurd “NO IDEAS.” But with global ad spending exceeding a trillion dollars, it’s naive to assume that consumer decisions are rational and unaffected by manipulation.

As Shoshana Zuboff details in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, smartphones and predictive algorithms have given advertisers unprecedented power. They can track everything—from how fast you swipe, to which emojis you use, to your typing style—in order to serve the most persuasive ad at the most vulnerable moment. This may be rational from a business standpoint, but it actively undermines the rationality of the consumer.

One might imagine that perfect information—especially about the human and ecological costs of the products we consume—would threaten an economy structurally dependent on endless growth. Perhaps that’s why such truths are so rarely made visible.

Self interest

Homo economicus would not be rational if he were not unashamedly self-interested. By this logic, the ethical dimensions of his consumption decisions are irrelevant. He need not concern himself with exploitative labour conditions or ecological devastation—only with personal gain. And, in truth, this often aligns with reality. Unless one lives in a village where the local river is visibly polluted, or where neighbours suffer gruelling underpaid labour, it’s easy to remain disconnected from the true cost of consumption.

This principle of self-interest is, of course, extended to business. As Milton Friedman infamously put it, “The business of business is business.” With the outsourcing of extraction and production, wealthier nations have built what Stephan Lessenich calls an externalisation society—a structure that offloads the costs of prosperity onto distant others. This mirrors Andre Gunder Frank’s dependency theory, where the global peripheries serve as zones of extraction, fuelling wealth accumulation in the metropoles.

This argument is echoed in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which shows how inequality has reached historic highs. Prosperity in the North, at the expense of the South, is what Brand and Wissen have described as an imperial mode of living. Revolutionary scholar Walter Rodney similarly showed how underdevelopment in the Global South is directly linked to the overdevelopment of the North. Is it coincidence—or meritocracy—that firms like Unilever, whose early expansion depended on forced labour on colonial palm oil plantations in the Congo, are now among the dominant players in global markets?

Still, there are cracks in the narrative. The very existence of charity, care work, and everyday acts of solidarity challenges the idea that humans are purely self-interested. Some economic models have begun to incorporate altruism as a behavioural variable. But this doesn’t address a deeper concern: what impact has orthodox economics had on how people see themselves?

Homo economicus is more than a model—it’s a moral script. When self-interest is framed as a socially beneficial virtue, people internalise it. Altruism becomes irrational, even naive. To build an economy that truly serves all, we must reconceptualise the economic actor—not as a rational egoist, but as a relational being shaped by collaboration, reciprocity, and care.

Independent and atomised

Staying on a similar thread, we are told that we are atomised, independent individuals. But without farmers producing food, doctors providing care, or teachers educating the next generation, what kind of world would we have? Do we not, then, have a moral duty to one another—within the fabric of society—to ensure that everyone has enough?

In complex systems, interdependencies are easily overlooked. Yet it is precisely these mutual dependencies that make life possible. Ignoring them leads us into abstraction, a kind of disconnection from the real world. There is a term for this condition: alienation. And there is a term for what must follow: the resocialisation of economic relations.

We must begin to see goods and services not as outcomes of isolated individual striving, but as part of a shared, cooperative effort to support collective wellbeing. When we don’t, we fall into the traps of division. Language itself becomes a weapon. As Gil Scott-Heron once put it, “semantics always was a bitch.” Labels like benefit claimant, economic migrant, or voluntarily unemployed obscure our shared conditions and sow separation. But is the worker not also the consumer? Is the taxpayer not also the patient?

Homo economicus is all of these at once—worker, consumer, taxpayer, patient. So when he seeks to maximise his own utility at the expense of others, he often harms himself in the process. This is not just a theoretical contradiction, but a practical one. It reveals a deeper truth: that economics is, at its core, about priorities and resource allocation. And if that’s the case, then we must return to the question: who gets to decide?

The answer must be collective decision-making. If the economy is a social construct, then we have the right—and the responsibility—to reshape it in line with values of equity, care, and solidarity. Not one forced upon us by corporations or inherited from outdated models, but one co-created to serve the needs of people and planet alike.

Utility

Perhaps my biggest quarrel with homo economicus is his self-assured sense of what he wants—that slippery, ambiguous notion of utility. Orthodox economics would have us believe that people aim to maximise wealth. But is that really what drives us?

If money were the true measure of utility, why do so many leave high-paying, high-stress jobs in search of meaning, balance, or time? Why choose community, care, or risk over security and profit? Clearly, utility is not simply a number—it’s something murkier, more human.

Desire, as Žižek argues through Lacan, is not about obtaining a fixed object—it’s sustained by lack, by the thing we can never fully have. This is why I see utility less like a quantity and more like Thelonious Monk’s piano playing. Monk rarely lands on the note you expect—he skirts around it, stretches time, keeps you waiting. And yet you’re hooked. If he played predictably, he’d be just another pianist. It’s the very disruption, the refusal of easy resolution, that draws us in.

Likewise, utility isn’t a clean endpoint. It’s not stable. It shifts with time, mood, place, and politics. And yet, homo economicus insists he knows what he wants. He claims to be rational, calculating, predictable. But humans are not spreadsheets—we are improvisations. Economics alone cannot account for this, and so it will continue to misread the world it claims to describe.

What, then, remains of homo economicus once we strip away the myths of perfect information, pure self-interest, and stable utility? Not a realistic model of human behaviour, but a caricature—one that flattens our emotional complexity, obscures our interdependence, and undermines our capacity for solidarity.

This figure persists not because he reflects who we are, but because he serves a particular vision of how society should be: individualised, competitive, and governed by markets. In this way, homo economicus is less a scientific model than an ideological weapon—one that justifies inequality, privatisation, and the withdrawal of the state under the guise of “efficiency.”To build an economy that serves people and planet, we must start with a more honest reflection of ourselves. One that recognises care, reciprocity, vulnerability, and desire—not as irrational leftovers, but as the very foundations of social life. That means not only deconstructing homo economicus, but reimagining economics altogether. And that begins by asking: what kind of humans do we want to become?