We are allowed to follow our desires – Or: Why I became an economist

#318

My Dear Friend of Democracy,

You find economics boring?

Fair enough.

Can I still tell you why I don't?

We'd have to travel back a few decades to find out.

After school, I didn't know what to study. Only one thing was clear to me: I wanted to better understand human interaction. I considered psychology or sociology and tried political science, law, history, and economics. The latter appealed to me. Economics not only offers methods for explaining human interaction, it also works on solving problems.

Admittedly, other social sciences do this in various ways. However, there was another reason why I was fascinated by economics, a personal one.

I grew up in a Catholic household. My social self-conception was that people are good when they act selflessly, whereas, by nature, they are selfish and evil.

In short, that was my worldview before I came to university.

Economics (more precisely, Ordnungsökonomik or economics of order) taught me something new: Humans can and should follow their desires. It's in their nature. Whether something good comes from following one’s wishes depends less on the individual than on the rules a society sets for itself.

This was both fundamentally new and liberating for me. The idea that morality lies in the rules of society rather than in the individual. If these rules are set so that personal striving works for the common good, self-love and charity are two sides of the same coin.

To give an example:

Whether cross-border trade increases the prosperity of all or destroys the environment depends less on the individuals involved than on the conditions under which trade takes place – and also on how the prosperity resulting from trade is distributed.

In any case, the realization that the effects of self-interest and social interest can be congruent was my personal liberation theology.

Thus, economics freed me from a depressing socialization that believed a good person was only someone who did good to others. Now, the rule was that anyone who did good to themselves could also do good to others. That required only one thing: good rules.

These rules include, for example, that transactions may only be concluded if they are voluntary, and therefore it can be assumed that both parties benefit from them. Or rules that ensure that these transactions do not come at the expense of third parties.

Economics fundamentally changed my thinking more than three decades ago. It continues to do so today, again and again. Perhaps economics has never been more diverse; at least knowledge has never been more accessible.

With this knowledge, my hope grows. The hope that by spreading economic thinking, I can make a small contribution to ensuring that the rules of our society are preserved in principle and improved in detail so that everyone can live according to their wishes and ideas. And that people don't live at the expense of others.

That's what drives me. Because such a society is the best of all worlds.

And this society also has a name: democracy.

See you in Germany,

Johannes Eber

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📸 Me, in my parents' garden in the early 1990s.