Questions on data, policy design, and usefulness of assumptions

ENAR

Economic man is a curious construct. Once thought to be a being superior to the common human in his pursuit of value creation and profit generation, the image of this specialized imaginary human subspecies has fundamentally changed. In fact, economic man has reached a point where some contemporary economists describe this model as emotionally dysfunctional—proposing that economic behavior today requires old paradigms of social paternalism to be replaced by models of social maternalism that might have the power to heal societal cleavages. Such a genderized ideological spin, however superior a social maternalism model could turn out to be in comparison with the historic male economic models and their many inequities, entails its own riskiness if one considers that any exclusionary assumption of absolute or merely relative superiority engenders dangers for social integrity—whether under current strivings for improved gender sensitivity, greater economic equality, and elimination of racism, or under older concepts