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Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life

Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life

Hardcover

Series: Suny Series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Liter

General ReferenceGeneral Psychology

ISBN10: 1438494092
ISBN13: 9781438494098
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: Aug 1 2023
Pages: 308
Weight: 1.37
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Breaks the spell of economic thought by interrogating the widespread language and logic of incentives in public life from a Lacanian perspective.

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.

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