How the man who optimises his own advantage systematically destroys the foundations of his existence
There is a figure that, over the past two hundred years, has had more effect than most political programmes combined. It was not proclaimed by a party, not preached by a religion, not enforced by any army. It spread through textbooks, vocational schools, administrative ordinances, corporate guidelines, later through tax systems, and finally through the self-description of every individual. This figure is called Homo Economicus. It is not the whole human being, it is a cross-section — the human who optimises his own advantage. But this cross-section has taken on a life of its own. It has moved from analytical model to a way of life that withdraws its own foundation from under itself.
This working paper investigates how that could happen. It does not ask whether the figure is morally reprehensible — that question has been asked and is not helpful. It asks about the logic of self-destruction. How can it be that an optimisation figure which makes its own welfare the highest measure ends up destroying precisely the welfare it sought to enhance? How can it be that the most rational of behaviours produces the most irrational of consequences?
The thesis of this paper is that self-destruction is not the failure of the figure but its logical consequence. Whoever optimises everything also optimises away that which makes optimisation possible in the first place. The preconditions — natural, social, anthropological, existential — drop out of view because the optimisation function does not register them. They lie outside the model, therefore outside perception, therefore outside concern.
Adam Smith formulated in 1776 in Wealth of Nations a thought that, in its simple form, still circulates today: that the wellbeing of society arises not from the benevolence of individuals but from their self-interest, when coordinated through markets. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. This was an analytical observation — Smith was a moral philosopher, not an ideologue. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments he described egoism as part of a broader spectrum of human motivations that also included sympathy, a sense of justice, and self-restraint.
What happened after Smith was a systematic impoverishment. Classical political economy took over the self-interest mechanism and left the other motivations behind. John Stuart Mill formulated in 1836 the concept of Economic Man as a methodological simplification — a human who exclusively pursues wealth, in order to better model economic phenomena. Mill knew it was an abstraction. He explicitly warned against taking it for a description of the real human being.
In the late nineteenth century, Léon Walras, William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger developed neoclassical theory. They formalised the model mathematically — utility functions, indifference curves, optimisation calculations under constraints. Homo Economicus became a precise construct: an actor with complete preferences, perfect information, unlimited computational capacity, and a single target variable — utility.
In the twentieth century the model became a programme. Milton Friedman argued in 1953 in The Methodology of Positive Economics that the realism of the assumptions was irrelevant; what mattered was only whether the model produced precise predictions. With that, the last reservation had fallen. Homo Economicus did not have to be true, he only had to work. With the Public-Choice school around James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock the model was extended to political behaviour — the voter, the politician, the bureaucrat also act as Homo Economicus. With Gary Becker it was extended to family life, education, crime, discrimination. There was no domain of life left that could not be captured by the optimisation function.
Most models of economic science stay in the lecture hall. Homo Economicus did not. He became a behavioural prescription because several institutions of transmission carried him out of the textbook into the world.
First — business administration. What had been a model in macroeconomics became practice in business administration. Managers were to act according to the shareholder-value principle that Milton Friedman had formulated in his famous 1970 essay in the New York Times: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits. What had begun as an analytical simplification became an ethical obligation of corporate leadership. A manager who did not maximise profits was supposedly acting unethically — violating his fiduciary duty to shareholders.
Second — the consulting economy. McKinsey, Boston Consulting, Bain and others have carried the optimisation logic over the past fifty years into every corporation, every administration, every hospital, every university. They transmitted not only methods but a worldview — everything is optimisable, everything must be optimised, whatever is not optimised is suboptimal and therefore in need of change. The consulting economy organisationally enforced the universal applicability of the Homo-Economicus logic.
Third — the education systems. Economic science became the largest university discipline in the Western world. In Germany more people study business administration than any other subject. What they learn is the optimisation logic in a thousand variations — cost accounting, investment calculation, human resources, marketing, strategy. They do not explicitly learn to be Homo Economicus. They become one by learning what counts as rational action.
Fourth — life conduct. Over the past half century the optimisation logic has migrated from the work sphere into private life. Self-help literature, self-optimisation apps, the coaching industry, career coaching, fitness trackers, sleep trackers, relationship trackers — all serve the optimisation of one's own life. The human being becomes his own little enterprise that produces efficiency, performance and output. Michel Foucault described this shift early on: the human of late modernity is the entrepreneur of himself.
The model that was originally an analytical assumption is today a real constellation. People actually behave like Homines Economici — not because they do so by nature, but because they have learned it. Economics has produced its own object. It has created the human being it claimed to describe.
The optimisation figure destroys on four levels that interlock with one another. It destroys the ecological foundation because it treats nature as costless. It destroys the social foundation because it converts reciprocity into exchange. It destroys the anthropological foundation because it reduces the human being to his utility function. And it destroys the existential foundation because it cannot stop, even when nothing remains to be optimised.
Homo Economicus optimises his utility under constraints. The constraints are prices. Whatever has no price does not appear in his optimisation function. Clean air long had no price. Drinking water had no price. Pollinating insects had no price. Soil fertility had no price. Climate stability had no price. Biodiversity had no price. All of this dropped out of the optimisation calculation — not as forgotten but as non-existent in the model.
The attempt to bring these externalities back into the optimisation — via Pigovian taxes, emissions trading, natural capital accounting — fails systematically. It fails not for technical impossibility but for the political logic of veto players. Whoever introduces a price for nature harms those who previously had free access. These losers have lobbying power. They prevent the prices from rising as high as they would need to. Even where prices are introduced — as in the European Emissions Trading Scheme — they remain significantly below the ecological damage costs.
The consequence is the ecological crisis of our time. It has not arisen despite economic rationality but because of it. The optimisation logic could not recognise the natural foundations because they were not in the target function. It consumed them without noticing. Only when the consequences became unmistakable — heatwaves, droughts, species extinction, permafrost thawing — did nature enter the calculation as a variable. But too late, because the damages are largely cumulative and partly irreversible.
Karl Polanyi described in 1944 in The Great Transformation what happens when the logic of the market is transferred to domains not made for markets. Labour, land and money are, Polanyi wrote, fictitious commodities — they were not produced for sale, but they are treated as if they were. This fiction destroys the domains in which it is applied.
Social relations function by a logic different from market relations. In a family one does not exchange, one gives and takes according to need. In a friendship what counts is not the equivalent return but loyalty. In a neighbourhood one helps without keeping accounts. These domains of reciprocity, of mutual obligation, of bonds without exchange are the social foundation of any society.
When the optimisation logic penetrates these domains, it destroys them. Whoever optimises a friendship no longer has a friendship. Whoever runs a family as an economic unit no longer has a family. Whoever organises neighbourhood as a network of exchange no longer has neighbourhood. What remains are functional relationships — effective but empty.
The empirical findings are unambiguous. Robert Putnam documented in Bowling Alone in 2000 how social capital in the United States eroded over five decades. Membership in associations declined, neighbourhood help diminished, trust in other people sank. Hartmut Rosa described in Resonance in 2016 how the regime of acceleration undermines the possibility of genuine relationships. Andreas Reckwitz showed in 2017 in The Society of Singularities how the optimisation of uniqueness leads to isolation.
Social destruction reflects back on Homo Economicus. Whoever lives in a society without trust must secure every transaction — through contracts, lawyers, insurance, surveillance. Transaction costs rise. The efficiency that optimisation was supposed to produce is undermined by the consequences of optimisation itself.
The human being is more than an optimisation function. He is a being who also acts without purpose, who plays, who loves, who grieves, who reflects, who simply is. These dimensions cannot be mapped within the optimisation logic. They do not appear as output, they are not a target function, they cannot be measured.
When the optimisation logic shapes self-understanding, the human being begins to see himself only in the categories the model prescribes. He asks: What's in it for me? He no longer asks: What am I? He optimises his career, his relationships, his leisure, his sleep, his nutrition — and in doing so loses what cannot be optimised. The capacity to be without purpose. The capacity to doubt. The capacity to be bored. The capacity to let something happen.
Byung-Chul Han described this phenomenon in 2010 in The Burnout Society. Late-modern humans are no longer compelled to perform from outside, they compel themselves. They are exploiter and exploited in one person. This produces a new kind of exhaustion — burnout, depression, anxiety disorders. The statistics show it. Mental illness has increased many times over the past thirty years. In Germany it is now the most frequent cause of inability to work and early retirement.
It is not the stress that makes people ill. It is the logic that even the stress must be optimised. Whoever has burnout should train resilience. Whoever is depressed should learn mindfulness. Whoever is exhausted should improve their work-life balance. Suffering too is integrated into the optimisation logic. There is no longer any outside.
The fourth destruction is the gravest because it refers back to all the others. Homo Economicus destroys not only nature, society and himself — he also destroys the conditions of his own activity. Optimisation presupposes that there is something to be optimised. When everything is already optimised, the activity ceases to be meaningful. When the preconditions on which optimisation lives — natural resources, social trust, anthropological reserves — are exhausted, there is no longer any material on which optimisation could be applied.
Joseph Schumpeter described this paradoxical movement in 1942 in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Capitalism, he wrote, is creative destruction — it must permanently destroy in order to be able to create anew. But this movement has a limit. It lives off a substance it does not itself produce. When that substance is exhausted, the movement collapses in on itself. Schumpeter believed this self-destruction of capitalism would occur through internal forces — the intellectual class would turn against it, the adaptability of bureaucracies would decline, social acceptance would erode.
Schumpeter's prognosis was right in diagnosis but wrong in mechanism. Capitalism does not destroy itself through political resistance but through success. It optimises itself out of its own foundations. It consumes its own preconditions. It is threatened not by critique but by its own efficiency.
This is existential destruction. It is not on the horizon, it is here. We see it in climate data, in wealth distribution curves, in burnout statistics, in trust surveys, in birth rates. The reproductive conditions of the society Homo Economicus inhabits are being undermined by him. He saws at the branch on which he sits and calls it productivity.
Why does Homo Economicus not recognise self-destruction and correct it? Why does he see that he is consuming the foundations and continue anyway? The answer lies in the logic of the model itself.
Optimisation knows only one criterion: the target function. Whatever is not in the target function does not exist. Whoever applies the model has no way of perceiving anything outside the model. The destruction of foundations does not become visible as destruction within the model — it becomes visible, if at all, as a cost factor to be internalised. But internalisation comes too late, because the model itself has no early warning.
Added to this is the problem of temporal discounting. Homo Economicus weighs future costs against present advantages by discounting them. What happens in thirty years counts less in today's calculation than what happens today. At a discount rate of five percent, one million euros in thirty years is worth only 231,000 euros today. A climate catastrophe in fifty years becomes so small in today's calculation that it does not justify today's prevention costs. This is not error in the calculation but method. It is mathematically correct, anthropologically catastrophic.
Added to this is the coordination problem. Even if an individual Homo Economicus recognises that optimisation has destructive effects, he cannot opt out. Whoever does not optimise alone loses. Whoever as a corporation does not maximise profit is driven from the market. Whoever as a country does not grow falls behind in international competition. The logic produces a compulsion to participate that makes individual correction impossible. This is the classical prisoner's dilemma in its global variant.
What would be the solution? Theoretically a collective exit from the optimisation logic — an agreement that everyone simultaneously stops orienting themselves to it. Practically this is not possible, because such an agreement would itself be negotiated only through the logic of optimisation. The negotiating table is part of the problem. Whoever sits at it optimises their negotiating position. The climate negotiations of the past thirty years are the empirical example — everyone wants to save the climate, but everyone wants the others to contribute more than themselves.
Homo Economicus is not the inventor of the Megamachine, but he is its personnel. Lewis Mumford described the Megamachine as a structure that harnesses human activity into standardised functions. Homo Economicus is the anthropological precondition for this harnessing to succeed. Whoever understands himself as an optimisation function is more easily integrated into a larger optimisation machine than someone who grounds his activity in other sources.
This is the mutual conditioning. The Megamachine needs Homo Economicus as a building block. Homo Economicus needs the Megamachine as an organisational form in which his optimisation can be realised. Both support each other. Both reproduce each other. Both cannot be separated, because they are two aspects of one constellation.
Mumford saw this without using the term Homo Economicus. He spoke of the monotechnic narrowing of the human — the reduction to a single dimension that is machine-exploitable. His counter-term was polytechnics — the human in his diversity, who acts with various tools, in various roles, with various purposes. For Mumford, polytechnics was not a romantic longing but the only conceivable alternative to monotechnic self-destruction.
Homo Economicus is the monotechnic human. He has one tool — the optimisation calculation — and applies it to everything. Whatever this tool cannot grasp falls outside his field of perception. This makes him productive in a narrow sense and blind in a broad one. The Megamachine into which he is built multiplies this blindness, because it consists of nothing but blind components. There is no point in the system at which the perception of the whole would be possible.
This working paper diagnoses without promising solutions. Several questions remain open.
First — how does today's self-destruction differ from earlier civilisational crises? History knows many examples of societies that have consumed their foundations — Maya, Easter Island, Mesopotamia. What is new about today's constellation is its planetary scope. Earlier collapses were regionally bounded; other societies could continue. Today's self-destruction has no external reserve.
Second — are there signs of a different anthropology? In recent years several alternative anthropologies have emerged — the care economy, the concept of the commons, Kate Raworth's doughnut economics, the post-growth movement. They are all attempts to offer a different optimisation function — one that includes social and ecological foundations. Whether they can develop enough force is an open question.
Third — what role do technologies such as artificial intelligence play? AI is the next stage of optimisation. It improves optimisation performance by orders of magnitude. It can therefore accelerate self-destruction — or, theoretically, it can serve to make visible the domains that have not been optimised. Both possibilities are open. It depends on who builds the AI and for whom.
Fourth — what does this mean for individual life conduct? Even those who share the diagnosis cannot simply opt out. The compulsions remain real. The question is how one can, within an optimisation society, create domains of life that are not permeated by it. This is not a question of strategy but of practice. The answers are individual and collective at once.
Fifth — what comes after Homo Economicus? If the figure withdraws its own foundations, another figure must take its place. It is not predictable. The hope lies in the fact that history has already known other anthropological figures — the Homo Politicus of antiquity, the Homo Religiosus of the Middle Ages, the Homo Faber of early modernity. Perhaps from the rubble of Homo Economicus a figure will emerge that determines its relationship to its own foundation differently. What it will be called we do not know. That it must come is certain.
The diagnosis of this paper is hard, but it is not hopeless. It does not say that nothing can be done. It says that what can be done cannot be found in the mode of optimisation. Whoever wants to meet self-destruction with better optimisation — more efficient climate protection, optimised social policy, smarter education systems — is part of the problem they seek to solve. What is needed is a different kind of activity. It will not be called optimisation. What it will be called is open. That it must come is not negotiable.
Perhaps it begins with some people stopping optimisation and starting to look around. They notice then how much there is that was not in the target function. They notice that things go on without optimisation. They notice that existence itself need not be optimised in order to be valuable. This is not a revolution. It is a different attention. It can be contagious.
Smith, A. (1776): An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London.
Smith, A. (1759): The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London.
Mill, J. S. (1836): On the Definition of Political Economy. London and Westminster Review.
Friedman, M. (1953): The Methodology of Positive Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Friedman, M. (1970): The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits. New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970.
Becker, G. (1976): The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Polanyi, K. (1944): The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Schumpeter, J. (1942): Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Foucault, M. (1979): The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979.
Mumford, L. (1970): The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Putnam, R. (2000): Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Han, B.-C. (2010): The Burnout Society. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz (English edition Stanford University Press 2015).
Rosa, H. (2016): Resonance. A Sociology of the Relationship to the World. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Reckwitz, A. (2017): The Society of Singularities. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Raworth, K. (2017): Doughnut Economics. London: Random House Business.