Hawkes, David, "Artistic Economics"

Hawkes, David. "Artistic Economics." Rev. Economics and Culture by David Throsby, Cambridge UP, and Market Society by Don Slater and Fran Tonkiss, Polity. The Nation 274.2 (21 Jan. 2002): 28, 30-32.

Asserts that Throsby accepts current "quantification of all human experience," and uses for his (Thorsby's) argument the "notion of the 'stakeholder,' dear to Tony Blair [New Labor PM of UK], whose ambition to create a 'stakeholder society' is overt and unapologetic." Significant here is the definition of a stakeholder as one standing "in relation to the world as a shareholder does to a corporation," seeing only one's "stake" in one's surroundings and calculating how to "optimally maximize" benefit from that stake. "The stakeholder, then, is not human. He is rather a quantified abstraction from humanity, a machine designed for the calculation of marginal utility." Like «Economic Man», the stakeholder is not merely a theoretical construct; DH quotes Hannah Arendt on humans as seen in "neoclassical economics' cousin, behavioral psychology: 'The problem … is not that it is false but that it is becoming true'" (30).