ABSTRACT
It takes a total indifference to the human condition not to notice that there is something amiss with the model of men and women at the heart of neoclassical economic analysis. However, students give their textbooks the benefit of the doubt, assuming that more sophisticated versions of this model await them once they grasp the intricacies of the simpler version before them. That was, indeed, my own hope when I first came across homo economicus; in short, I imagined that, at the cost of some extra mathematical complexity, he could be …civilised.
