SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature
Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life
- 304 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature
Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life
About This Book
Works like a Charm addresses a simple question: Why are "incentives" everywhere now? From inducements to work harder at our jobs to tax rebates for corporations, "incentive" names a general theory of motivation—according to economists, we are incentive-driven creatures. Yet far from being a neutral generalization, this understanding of human behavior smuggles in a quintessentially economic way of seeing the world. Works like a Charm applies Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic concept of retroactive causality to explain the metastasis of the language and logic of incentives: To discover an incentive is to place in the untouchable past an economic cause for a contextual, historical force. Tracing "incentive" from its roots in antiquity to its uptake by neoclassical and then Chicago-school economists, Robert O. McDonald diagnoses the spread of incentives across the social, cultural, and political field and warns readers of the dangers of handing over causality to the economists.
Frequently asked questions
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Metastatic Logic of the Incentive
- Chapter 1 Incentives, Retroactive Causality, and the Rhetorical Unconscious
- Chapter 2 This Is Not a Pipe, or Incentives from Antiquity to Modernity
- Chapter 3 Gary Becker, the Godfather of Incentives
- Chapter 4 “What Does Woman Want?” Equal Pay and “Women’s Incentives”
- Chapter 5 Nudge Theory and the Politics of Neurosis
- Chapter 6 Nudging Ourselves to Death
- Conclusion: Breaking the Spell
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Back Cover