Zu Chongzhi Research Seminar

Date and Time (China standard time): Wednesday, April 15, 4:00 – 5:00 pm

Location: IB 2028

Title: On the Ethics of Economic Theorizing: Perspectives from Psychoanalytical Theory 

Speaker: M. Ali Khan (Department of Economics, Johns Hopkins University)

Abstract: On taking Michael Oakeshott’s 1974 distinction between the theorist and the theoretician, and the analogy of the theorist-theorized, to the psychoanalytic category of analyst-analysand, I explore the ethics of economic theorizing. I draw on the work of Hans Loewald and argue how his categories and modifications of Freudian psychoanalytics lead to a novel viewpoint of the process of theorizing under which it changes the theorist and that which is being theorized. My argumentation relies on Walrasian competitive and Cournotian game theory by projecting them to the formalization of actions taken by, and within, a family and a firm, and thereby connecting self-interest and self-deception to a possible ethics of (economic) theorizing. 

Bio: M. Ali Khan is Abram Hutzler Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University since 1988. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1973. His research centers on economic interaction over time and under uncertainty, with particular attention to the relationship between formal theory and everyday social language. He studies general equilibrium, dynamic and strategic settings with finite and continuum agents, and the role of information in shaping individual and collective outcomes.