《经济学的思维方式》课后习题答案.doc

Responses to the Discussion Questions of Chapter 1: This question highlights the significant but widely-overlooked fact that a great deal of important cooperation occurs among people who know absolutely nothing about one another. A married couple planning a vacation together typically cooperates by using extensive and detailed knowledge of each others preferences, habits, allergies, and so on. But the people who cooperated to make orange juice, cereal, milk, and coffee available to Boettke this morning didnt even know that Boettke exists or, for the most part, about the existence of the others whose cooperation helped to produce his breakfast. Economic theory is especially useful in explaining how cooperation occurs in cases of the latter sort, and also why cooperation sometimes fails to occur. Drivers would have little trouble deciding they were on urgent missions, and the urgent lane would probably be just as crowded as all the others. Even in a world of unselfish drivers, it would be impossible for drivers to assess the relative urgency of their own and other drivers missions. Moreover, the more inconsiderate drivers would be most ready to use the urgent lanes, so that such a system would end up providing a time subsidy to the projects of more selfish drivers through a time tax on the projects of more considerate drivers. Since Mother Teresa was interested in building a leprosarium, she clearly furthered her own interest in doing so. But it would be odd to call this selfish behavior. Acting in ones own interest is selfish only if ones interests are selfish. Contrary to what many economists carelessly assert, economic theory does not assume that everyone behaves selfishly. Perhaps economists even mislead people when they say that people act in their own interest. It might be better to say that people act to promote the projects in which they are interested. That avoids the misleading suggestion that economic theory postulates selfish or greedy behavio