Driven by the Invisible: The economics of the unseen

Abstract

In this short paper, I review some recent work by myself and other economists – including the authors of the ensuing papers in this Special Issue – that takes seriously the proposal that the sources of human motivation seen as valid targets of investigation for the economist include not only visible and material sources, but unseen and intangible sources as well. Unseen motivations like love, loyalty, identity, and religious belief heavily drive resource allocation all over the world and have done so for thousands of years, and in this paper I review some recent evidence of what they produce in terms of particular economic choices and outcomes. With this paper and this Special Issue, I want to encourage young economists to take up the gauntlet of examining the unseen motivations of economic actors in more detail, abandoning the “as-if” defence of exclusively materialist models of humanity, and thereby pushing the discipline to engage more deeply with its core subject: real human beings.