The invisible head

I will try to make a very difficult point, and I'm not sure I will do a good job at it. Please bear with me if you find this a little obtuse. Adam Smith talked of the 'invisible hand', which guided the economy. What he really meant was that millions of individuals, acting in their own selfish interest, would promote the common good, through a systematic process that is not easily visible or definable. With new knowledge coming from behavioural economics, we now know a little bit about what he meant. The human being has three minds (all parts of one brain): limbic mind, social mind and human mind. The limbic mind is animal-like, standard in construction and unchanging - not able to learn. It's the most powerful and shuts down the other minds when it speaks up. Issues like self-preservation, ego, etc., are embedded here. Then there is the social (monkey) mind, which is part of the sub-conscious. It herds us together and we imbibe communication at the sub conscious level. We have a different personality in groups than we have when we are alone. And even this aspect has shades of grey and varies across small groups to mobs to markets. The social mind is more complicated and nuanced than the limbic mind but still relatively st

This article was originally published on June 09, 2018.