Plato argued that human beings have three main engines on the choices we make: I, Reason and Thymos. The first two make society progress as they are the basis on which inventions are born and improves quality of life. While thymos is the need for social recognition, personal, economic, but above all personal recognition. desire and reason proposed by Plato, use it to explain the theories of Adam Smith, simplifying its proposal assumes that the market can self-regulate through the sum of rational decisions taken individually. Try to explain this theory with an example: the price of housing. Buying a home is perhaps the most important investment a family can do throughout your life and therefore no one in sound logic is willing to invest their savings buying a house that is above its real price. If each of the individuals in a society act this way, the market regulates itself, because no one will pay more than what things are worth and so the prices are always in equilibrium. A logic. That's the beauty of economists, who often give the impression of design an economic system that works like a perpetual motion machine. A machine that is lost and never stops its operation or profit.
Yesterday, coming by car from Barcelona in a traffic jam trying to imagine the reasons why the bases of the model proposed by A. Smith (desire and reason) have not been applied to the movement of vehicles, as extrapolating the example of housing, sound logic nobody is willing to risk your life or your car (depends on the order of priorities), in an accident transit. This means that if we apply the model of self-traffic, speed limits in roads would not be necessary nor the priorities of way, not at the traffic lights, so the sense of the way if necessary because the system must channel their energy efficiently. However, this does not happen. The road rules is becoming more explicit, more clear and strict thymos trying to control the drivers.
If I compare the self-applied to traffic management and applied to the economy, I think economists should learn from those responsible for road safety in the sense give it the importance it deserves the thymos in our everyday decisions, it is that the main motivation we have to find the shortest and fastest path between two points, which pushes us to go first when the light turns green for a light or think I have priority in passing, that drives us to be the first to reach the next red light. If economists had realized that not only we desire and reason but also thymos, their models would come much closer to reality and move away from his fruitful imagination.
PD. Plato Plato only called ??... only one name or surname?
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