Source: The Bleeding Heart Libertarian
by Matt Zwolinski
“Economists like to say that people respond to incentives. And by ‘incentives,’ they usually mean to refer to some kind of self-interest, whether narrow or ‘enlightened.’ … If you push really hard, you can cram the phenomenon of wanting to be liked until it fits into this model. But that’s probably not the easiest or most helpful way of understanding things. Wanting to be liked be others isn’t just one preference among a whole bunch of others, like a taste for chocolate ice cream, that we collectively refer to as a person’s ‘self-interest.’ It’s something more fundamental and unique — something that competes with (and often defeats) self-interest as we usually understand it.” (01/24/25)
https://bleedingheartlibertarian.substack.com/p/on-wanting-to-be-liked