On the further meanings of David Cameron: “The 20th Century saw a growing tendency for various authors, including the writers of such ordure as Freakonomics, to extend them as universally as possible. Freakonomics (and its Super- sequel) discovers a market logic behind a bewildering variety of social phenomena. Gary Becker finds that market logic explains a wide range of phenomena including crime and punishment. For Robert H Frank, “economics explains everything”, and he encourages his students to find ways to apply market laws to all manner of questions. Everything up to and including romantic relationships can be understood in terms of utility maximization. Thus, the search for a partner can be interpreted as a petty entrepreurial activity in a competitive market, in which - acting on information and incentives - couples form property-based relational contracts as a means for effectively utilizing resources, and the relationship is only sustained for as long as each maximises the utility that the other receives.

…

This kookiness, where it is not merely circular and vulgar, descends into absurdity when the suitability of the theory can only be established through an ad hoc proliferation of conceptual innovations, as when - for example - Becker explains criminal recidivism in terms of a “preference for risk”. This naturalises and universalises the cut-throat self-advancement of career-minded bourgois WASPs, distilling it into a set of puerile anthropological axioms. Middle market books such as The Economic Naturalist probably aggrandise the narcissism of the bourgeois, allowing them to read about themselves and their conduct in flattering terms, giving it a metaphysical twist, endowing it with transcendent validity. And small wonder that such people like to hear that everyone else has exactly the same petty, criminal mentality that they do - it is not capital that is self-maximising, it is humanity itself! - and that they have merely been more successful utility-maximisers than the majority of humankind.”