What’s Love Got to Do with Economics?

In Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Ludwig von Mises explains how enlightened self-interest, rather than love, is the lubricant of social collaboration: 

Social cooperation has nothing to do with personal love or with a general commandment to love one another. People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.

Mises’s argument is near-universal among economists. Given the narrow focus of their concerns, it’s not wrong. Why does the shoemaker sell me shoes? Because he doesn’t want me to go unshod? Maybe, but neither he nor I need his empathy. He sells because I pay, and he can use that money to pay for things he needs. Why do I pay him? Because I want him to have enough money to feed his family? Perhaps, but, once again, fellow-feeling is unnecessary. I pay because I don’t want to suffer the pain and shame of walking barefoot. Love’s got nothing to do with it.

Still, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It implies that what we count as the deepest and most noble human emotion has no place in the acts of production, distribution, and consumption that occupy the bulk of our waking lives. The bad taste turns emetic when we consider the imperialism of recent economic theory. In a joint 1977 manifesto, Nobel Prize economist Gary Becker and his Chicago colleague George Stigler dismiss the “traditional view” that economics must stop at the boundary of taste, which isn’t subject to economic analysis. In their view, on the contrary, economists never have to yield terrain to psychologists or anthropologists or other -ists, since “differences in prices or incomes [can] explain any differences or changes in behavior” (my emphasis). Elsewhere, Becker writes, “the economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behavior.” Becker is relentless, applying the logic of prices and income to marriage, child-bearing, and, well, everything. Love, it seems, has nothing to do with anything.

Common as it is, Mises’s observation is at best limited, at worst fundamentally mistaken. We need to push the question, “Why does the shoemaker make and sell shoes?” from the realm of means to that of ends. Gathering money from shoe sales isn’t, after all, the shoemaker’s ultimate goal. He doesn’t sell shoes to fill his mattress with cash, but to pay for food, clothes, shelter, and other goods for himself, likely also for others—his wife, children, guests in his home, perhaps the church food bank. And how does he decide how much to distribute to each? Can we answer that question without introducing love? Can we answer without the category of “gift”?

In his Redeeming Economics, John D. Mueller makes this point by analyzing the “Mother’s Problem,” a favorite thought experiment of the Victorian economist Philip Wicksteed. A mother has a scarce supply of milk to meet a range of demands. The cats want milk, so do her children; she likes a splash in her tea, and she wants to treat her husband to dessert every now and again. She doesn’t decide how to apportion her milk by abstractly balancing supply and demand; she decides by considering the relative value of the recipients. Whatever good she’s got, she’s always weighing two things: “the relative significance of each user of milk” as well as “the value of each use of milk.” Her decisions aren’t simply about means, but about ends. Most everyone on earth has “zero significance” as regards her distribution of milk, but she’s willing to sacrifice for those she loves. She’ll make sure her kids get their milk even if she has to drink her tea black. Everyone is that mother. Every economic action, every human action, is concerned with the relative values of both means and ends, with use of scarce resources and the persons who ultimately receive them.

One might, if so inclined, insist that the mother’s attention to her kids and cats is self-interested. She expects some return on her expenditure, intangible though it may be: Gentle purring from the cats, grateful respect from the kids. That doesn’t work. No matter how irritable she may be, she won’t starve her children to fatten the cats; or, if she does, she’s deranged, her loves disordered. In Mueller’s Augustinian formulation, “all human action is ultimately motivated not by utility but by love for some person or persons.” This, Mueller argues, was the holistic vision of Scholastic economics, which asked not only how humans determine the value of scarce resources, not only how goods are produced, not only how they’re fairly exchanged, but also how humans make decisions about distributing gifts and goods. 

For several centuries, “final distribution” has been amputated from economic theory and, with it, love. For several centuries, economics has suffered from the amputation. Love’s got everything to do with it. Final ends never appear late in the game. The final cause is the first cause: We determine the aims of our actions (whipping up dessert), and then work out means to achieve them (purchasing a quart of milk). And the final end is a person, myself or a beloved other. By deleting love from the calculus, economists give us a theory, and eventually a practice, of aimless production, exchange, and consumption—literally, purposeless abundance. Theories such as Mises’s run aground both normatively and descriptively. They describe a loveless society few wish to inhabit, but, fortunately for us, the dismal world they describe isn’t the real world.