All humans today are homo sapiens, the wise man – I know, unbelievable. Archaeology tells us that there have been multiple human species in the last two million plus years. Our last cohabitating cousin was homo neanderthalensis – a couple of tens of thousands years back. This is not that long ago in archaeological terms. The debate still is on if the extinction of the Neanderthals was down to them being less brainy than us such that we outwitted them, or if environmental factors played a more important role, like decease dynamics.

Gone is gone, and it’s probably normal that species come and go in the flow of time. However, the displacement of a species by another is unlikely to go without struggle. Drawing this analogy, I want to write about a struggle on a very different level, which I see as central to many societal ills of our days. It’s less about archaic forms of the survival of biological species, but about how we undermine our own successes and that we better see this for our own future’s sake.

The end of World War II was a watershed. First, much of what we call the Western world saw the proliferation of liberal democracy and unprecedented economic growth and, by historic standards, broad-based prosperity. Other parts of the world followed through to some extent, but let me focus on the ‘The West’ here. This place is the origin of a new species of human not seen in the wild and bigger numbers before, namely homo liberatis, or the freed man (no link to the history of slavery if people were thinking in this direction).

Homo liberatis is a great achievement. When they are born, they do not have to worry much about medical issues, so their life expectancy increased rapidly in the past decades. They get a basic, and often even higher, education. They are mostly free to choose their occupation, the place where they want to live and with whom, or how they want to live their life more generally, like with whom and how they want to have sex. This is an all-time high so far.

However, we see threads to these developments, in the sense that large parts of society are being increasingly excluded from them. For example, a poor boy in the UK can expect to live up to 10 years (!!) less than a rich kid. This is outrageous, and outrage is what more and more infiltrates public discussions, fosters polarisation, the creation of scapegoats, and ultimately has the potential to undermine our liberal democracies upon which much of our progress is built upon.

There is not a single reason for these divergences in fortunes. An important one is however talked quite little about because it is so pervasive that it is hidden in plain sight. From the 1980s onwards, an invention from economic theorists started to have great success beyond the ivory towers, namely homo economicus – another fictitious species of men (very much men in this case in particular).

Homo economicus is simple minded and efficient. He is smart and always knows how to take the best decision to get what he wants. He mostly is one of two breeds. A consumer who only works (which he very much dislikes) to make money to buy as much of the stuff he likes as he can. When not the hedonistic self-centred consumer, he is a profit maximising businessman who needs to keep wages down and prices up as much as possible. Both sound like nice people to have around.

Seeing the world in this way, makes responding to many complex questions in society more or less straightforward, and that’s why a large part of the economics profession keeps using him. This simplicity, or rather called parsimony in academic cycles, may have its right to existence to analysing problems from a theoretical point of view, e.g. to isolate a particular ‘channel’ how some effect, say a change in tax policy, operates in a specific situation. In this sense, homo economicus is a tool for scientific inquiry of a particular type, alongside several other tools. It is not my intention here to discuss homo economicus’ advantages and disadvantages within academic economics. This will be done in another piece to come.

However, homo economicus has become so much more nowadays than a scientific instrument, because it allows to explain a complex world in simple terms: first of all, only things which can be counted count, especially economic ones like income and consumption. Second, everybody is their own luck’s master. That is, if you are poor, or have a bad life in whatever way, you should work harder, have studied harder, or have taken whatever decision differently (your fault!). Third, there is no space for distributions, like those of income, wealth or life expectancy. If at all, distributions are the natural outcome of people’s own preferences and choices. Discussing them makes things unnecessarily complicated because of all the normative questions coming up.

From the above, it’s quite obvious how politicians thinking this way (many actually do!) may not be called the nicest words by large parts of the population. But, the influence of homo economicus goes deeper. Many people nowadays do or feel like struggling to meet the many demands of modern life. Homo economicus then tells you that this is your own fault, causing mental health issues, and if you don’t like this as people are mostly bad in admitting fault, you will project ‘your fault’ at somebody else, like illegal migrants, nefarious bureaucrats in Brussels, or the damn whole political system!

Don’t get me wrong here in case that your bullshit detector is running hot already. I won’t tell you that people should not take responsibility for whatever mess they have gotten into. Dedication and thoughtfulness are certainly virtues which deserve some more attention. Where I want to get to is that we need to see ourselves and society more as yet another species, let’s call them homo socialis, – a social being (not a socialist!). Nobody, not even the highest achieving billionaires of our times, would have any success without the society producing them.

Homo socialis is aware of herself, and the goals she wants to achieve in life and that she will have to work for them. At the same time, she also knows that her success and happiness will depend on many people along the way, and that everybody has a right to certain opportunities, but also that not everybody can have the same success and should be taken care of when needed.

This means that besides big talk about equality of opportunity (all the range on the political left) we need normative discussions about distributional issues in society (hated by the political right), and ultimately decide what we think is fair and appropriate. At the same time, those who are fortunately and hard-working to make it to the top need to have an autonomous sense of social responsibility – noblesse oblige!

Before rounding up, let’s look at two examples of how homo socialis can help us. We previously mentioned that life expectancy in the UK is closely linked to deprivation. At the same time, “the number of economically inactive people with a long-term illness is at its highest recorded level since comparable records began in 1993,” and our workforce is aging. Thus, investing in healthcare, including appropriate pay for the people working there and comprehensive prevention instead of expensive treatment, sounds like a no-brainer, both economically (larger and healthier labour force) and socially (more years of life well spent across the population). Part of the reason why we do not do this may be blaming others or ourselves for bad health outcomes as homo economicus tells us, and of the politicians follows his principles.

The second example is about how a world view of homo socialis can make us happier. We are social beings in the end. Long-term research suggests that having meaningful social interactions, which may crowd out some of our  individualistically minded endeavours, is likely good for us. So, stop doom-scrolling online and doing constantly long hours (myself as well!), and instead hang out with some real people for your own sake. I have talked about this in more detail here.

Keeping mostly with homo economicus will likely increase the discontent and the hate whose rise in Western democracies and beyond is very worrisome. This would needlessly undermine our own success. Additionally, like previous species of homo, economicus with his individualistic streak is not well suited to address shared existential challenges like the climate emergency. Homo socialis with her sense of compassion and joint responsibility will have the better chance of survival.