Alternative Values and Mental Models: The Recurring Challenge of Inequality

Abstract

Compound interest calculations raise questions about the focus that economists place on measures of wealth, product, and income. Many parts of our current cultural, economic, and political rainbow are being reexamined. Thomas Malthus and others believed there was a limit to the growth of national and personal wealth. Ever-increasing happiness and welfare was a hoax perpetuated by economists.

Economists, of course, have not been blind to the absence of wealth—that is, to poverty. But the way economists ask questions about poverty calls for responses using the moral language of the discipline. Ask an economics question and you get an economics answer. Underlying value biases are ignored as being outside the expertise of the discipline.