Human Goods, Economic Evils does not claim that the basic economic activities of laboring and consuming are the most important things in life, but they are literally vital, and as such deserve to be studied and understood through a more morally sympathetic view of human nature. With this in mind, Human Goods, Economic Evils provides both lay readers and policymakers the intellectual tools necessary to judge what is right and what is wrong about the modern economy, and returns the study of economics to its proper, more humanistic sphere.

I say:
Since its pre-history in the 18^th century, the discipline of economics has been built almost entirely on the philosophical foundation created by John Locke and David Hume: empiricist and anti-transcendental. Utilitarians contributed to economics a faith in the ability of numbers to describe the human good in a meaningful way. Neoclassical economists took the field on a journey to a land of equations and assumptions far from any actual society.

Despite many valiant efforts to make economic theory more realistic, the discipline still pays little attention to the human meaning and moral value of the various activities that can be identified as economic: labour, production, allocation and consumption.

Human Goods, Economic Evils is based on a much more realistic anthropology than that of the “economic man” of classical and neoclassical theory. The human who labours and consumes is treated as the same person who loves, studies, wonders and worships. The economic good, once studied in these broad terms, is different in important ways from the conventional notion, centred on something like a maximisation of utility. In the new view, money is irrelevant, GDP is simplistic and even unemployment cannot be understood without reference to the human search for meaning.