“Homo economicus” is the hypothetical “perfectly economically rational” person that economic models often assume us all to be, despite the fact that we are demonstrably not perfectly rational.

The economists who built models based on homo economicus understood that its assumptions were unwarranted, but that’s OK! As the “Nobel prize”* winning economist Milton Friedman famously wrote:

"Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have “assumptions” that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

• The economics prize is a fake Nobel that was made up in 1968 by economists who were desperate to have their work recognized as an empirical science on par with, say, physics.
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Behavioral economics — the fastest moving and widest reaching econ subfield — consists primarily of researchers carefully checking to see whether people actually behave like homo economicus and concluding, “nope”:

https://news.uchicago.edu/explainer/what-is-behavioral-economics

Which is a good thing! Homo economicus is a total asshole.

Elon Musk is taking a step back from politics — technically.

“I think I’ve done enough,” he announced at the Qatar Economic Forum Tuesday, saying he’ll cut back on the massive political spending that helped bring President Donald Trump (and, well, himself) to power. That followed a POLITICO report on Musk largely fading into the background of the White House amid his growing unpopularity.

Liberal writers wasted no time dancing on his political grave, with The Atlantic tracing “The Decline and Fall of Elon Musk” and a New York Times op-ed declaring that history “broke him.” (It wasn’t just liberals: Musk fan and Trumpian culture warrior Christopher Rufo took a moment to lament that “Washington Got the Better of Elon.”)

All of them might want to pump the brakes a little.

Episode 3 of “Understood: Who Broke the Internet?” (my new CBC podcast about enshittification) just dropped. It’s called “In God We Antitrust,” and it’s great:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16147052-in-god-we-antitrust

The thesis of this four-part series is pretty straightforward: the enshittification of the internet was the result of an enshittogenic policy environment. Platforms always had the technical means to scam us and abuse us. Tech founders and investors always included a cohort of scumbags who would trade our happiness and wellbeing for their profits. What changed was the consequences of giving in to those impulses. When Google took off, its founders’ mantra was “competition is just a click away.” If someone built a better search engine, users could delete their google.com bookmarks, just like they did to their altavista.com bookmarks when Google showed up.

Policymakers — not technologists or VCs — changed the environment so that this wasn’t true anymore:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

In last week’s episode, we told the story of Bruce Lehman, the Clinton administration’s Copyright Czar, who swindled the US government into passing a law that made it illegal to mod, hack, reverse-engineer or otherwise improve on an existing technology:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry

DOGE DATA TRACKER — POLITICO just launched a new Pro tool to track the latest actions by Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. A look at April and May alone reveals over 5,000 new contract, grant or lease cancellations. Pros can search new cuts, additions, and modifications by government agency, contractor, or congressional district. Stay in the loop by adding “DOGE data” to your POLITICO Pro news alerts to get updates as they drop. Or contact an account manager to get set up.

The Trump administration’s apostle of cutting-edge science laid out a sweeping vision this week for blending the White House’s ongoing conservative culture war with continued American technological dominance.

“Science cannot be subject to ideology, nor should scientists march blindly in lockstep,” Office of Science and Technology Policy director Michael Kratsios told the National Academy of Sciences Monday. “Blindly trusting in The Science, with a capital T and capital S, is inimical to free inquiry and open debate and is thus the enemy of scientific progress. The beginning of knowledge is the knowledge of ignorance … It is convention, dogma, and intellectual fad that resist revision and correction.”

Kratsios’ comments were the clearest articulation yet of how the second Trump administration thinks it can serve three political constituencies that often seem at odds: hardcore budget raiders like Office of Management and Budget chief Russell Vought, culture warriors obsessed with fighting “wokeness” and the ascendant, venture capital-powered tech right.