Social Economics
Categories: Econ
Step one: get blender. Step two: gather social theory, economic theory, and a pinch of philosophy to taste. Step three: blend. Enjoy your social economics!
Social economics, a.k.a. socioeconomics, is a branch of economics that uses human behavior as a framework to understand the economics we find ourselves in.
Economics isn’t like physics or chemistry. It’s us: people. People with monkey brains who have fragile egos, mob rule, moral codes, social norms...all kinds of strange behaviors. But hey, we woke up like this. That’s why social economics can also brush shoulders with evolutionary biology.
Socioeconomics takes individual identity into account, as well as all those irrational parts of humans that make all of our nice, pretty, rational economic models not pan out in the real world. It’s no surprise then that behavioral economics and socioeconomics are BFFs.
Social economics also inevitably includes politics. In a sense, that’s what politics is, right? It’s how we decide to set the laws of living (of the economy, in part) with our monkey-brain selves. Because we decided civilization is better than, uh...that other thing we were doing before.
