• Title/Summary/Keyword: homo economicus

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Appearance of Homo Economicus and Morals of Youth in Early Modern of Korea with reference to A Large River[Dae-Ha] (호모 이코노미쿠스의 출현과 주체적 각성의 사실성 - 김남천의 『대하(大河)』론)

  • Kim, Jongsoo
    • Cross-Cultural Studies
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    • v.35
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    • pp.79-95
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    • 2014
  • This article aims at rethinking on people of Modern styles in early modern period with reference to A Large River[Dae-Ha] written by Kim Nam-cheon at 1939. Park Sung-guoen could be called to Homo Economicus, first, have maximized of self-interest in rapid changes of Korea society with loan sharking, rising to upper class in new early modern era instead of traditional nobleman. Park Hyung-geol could be said romantic guy, second, have chased romatic love consist of three elements(love-sex-marriage). But he troubled his love affairs to his family members frustrated his will because of a bastard son. It is the model of situations, Kim Nan-cheon intended to describe, that Homo Economicus became an object of envy among people in early modern society as well as the choice has been hard in conflicting between family and lover, concretizing anachronism through history of family.

Reconsidering Robinson Crusoe as Homo Economicus ("호모 이코노미쿠스"로서의 로빈슨 크루소 재고)

  • Rhee, Suk Koo
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.64 no.4
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    • pp.629-649
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    • 2018
  • To date, one of the prevailing criticisms of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has seen the adventure novel as a celebration of the rise of mercantile capitalism and the beginnings of colonialism. From this point of view, the Englishman has often been interpreted as an early embodiment of the concept of the sovereign economic subject. Prominent social critics who took up this interpretation have included Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Within literary studies proper, the work of Ian Watt offered perhaps the earliest version of this point of view of the novel. Influenced by both Weber and Rousseau, Ian Watt argued that Defoe's wandering protagonist embodies the rise of economic individualism. More recent criticism has tended to challenge this dominant interpretation by laying greater stress on such countervailing factors as Crusoe's mental uncertainty and inner conflict. Drawing inspiration from Fredric Jameson's diagnosis of the ills of late capitalism, this paper analyzes the ways in which Defoe's hero, rather than championing modern rationality, can in fact be seen as suffering from many forms of emotional psychosis. Robinson Crusoe can, after all, be better viewed as a contradictory multi-layered text that, despite its outward valorization of economic individualism, portrays its hero as a victim of negative capitalistic forces, a hero driven by his desire to possess but haunted by a fear of loss, a hero who flaunts inflated feelings of self-worth even as he reveals deflated notions of material insecurity and mental persecution.

Local, Jobless Person, Homo Economicus, Three Axis of Kwak Hashin's Works (로컬, 룸펜, 경제적 인간, 곽하신 소설의 세 좌표)

  • Kim, Yang-Sun
    • Journal of Popular Narrative
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    • v.26 no.3
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    • pp.161-188
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    • 2020
  • This paper seeks to expand the scale of literary history by restoring and analyzing the whole aspect of Kwak Hashin's works, which has so far been studied little. For this purpose, I notice the rupture of discontinuity of his works which is greatly divided into the colonial period and post Korean war period. And the characteristics of each works can be analyzed based on the three axis, local(colonial period), jobless person(post-war period), and Homo Economicus(some short stories, and popular novels in post-war period). In Chapter 2, 'Local-the world of Munjang', I evaluated that Kwak Hashin's novel, which had been published in the late 1930s in the Journal of Munjang, embodied anti-modern aesthetic consciousness, as clearly revealing the sorrow for disappearing things, the pre-modern sense of time, and the preference for local. In Chapter 3, 'Jobless Person' and Chapter 4, 'The State of All People's Struggle against All People, The Appearance of Homo Economicus', the Korean society in late 1950s, which entered underdeveloped capitalist countries after Korean war, can be characterized by two contrasting male-gender, one is the jobless, incompetent male, and the economic man on the other hand. In the late '50s, Lumpen(=Jobless Person) novels showed the problems of the Korean economy through incompetent male character. The intelligent men took the path to survival rather than morality or intimacy, projecting their own incompetence and anxiety to women/wives. In the popular novels Women's Song and The Shadow of the Fig Tree, achievement-oriented male figures who betrayed their colleagues, and exploited women's sex by using love relationships to rise to the top appeared. They can be defined as the Homo Economicus who embody the state of universal struggle against all people. These novels showed the formation of the masculinity in post Korean war period, which pursued the survival of the fittest, borrowing form of popular novel. As we have seen so far, Kwak Hashin needs to be re-evaluated as an writer who expanded the modern literary history in the outside of literature. He was the last generation writer written in Korean late colonial period, and provided the model of postwar literature by borrowing the form of journalism and popular novels.

An Alternative Approach for Environmental Education to overcome free rider egoism based on the Perspectives of Prisoner's Dilemma Situation (죄수딜렘마(PD) 게임상황을 활용한 환경교육의 가능성)

  • 김태경
    • Hwankyungkyoyuk
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    • v.13 no.2
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    • pp.38-50
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    • 2000
  • We are evidently Home Economicus, egoistic rational utility maximiger, and all the capitalism economic situation make us adapt to such life, and recognize that it is rational to act like that. This can be demonstrated in Prisoner′s Dilemma(PD) which always select the non-cooperative choice for free rider in rational selection process of public goods. This paper notice the "what is problem\ulcorner"The problem is not in free rider itself but in free rider egoism. The practical behavior of free rider egoism can be explained by way of Prisoner′s Dilemma. In PD situation, the prisoner makes a rational choice, non-cooperative alternative, but he doesn′arrive at preto-optimality. It is dilemma. Why can′t he arrive \ulcorner Because he is isolated from other prisoner. So we call it prisoner′s dilemma. The PD situation can be compared with our real economic life, which, we think, have kept by rational choice of the public goods. We actually have made our life as an individual one although we organized communities of capitalism. Of course, we know each others as members of same society, but each individual being can′t secure the belief, which has composed basis of community. So, it is very similar and common between PD situation and our real economic life in the production of public goods. We conclude that this non-cooperative process of PD situation can be utilized as instrument of EE. So this non-cooperative process can show us the effectiveness of EE as follows. \circled1 Game situation life PD can be used as good instrument for explaining the rational selection dilemma(error) to Homo-Economicus, the rational agent, with the optimal and rational language. \circled2 We can show that the selection result is dilemma, not arrive pareto - optimality. \circled3 The dilemma can be resolved with accomplishing the good communal life based on the belief, not on the isolation.

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Disappearance of Accountability and Sympathy in Economics, and the Possibility of Their Restoration (경제학에서 책임과 공감의 실종 및 그 복원 가능성)

  • Choi, Jung-Kyoo
    • Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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    • v.26 no.1
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    • pp.69-96
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    • 2015
  • This study investigates the history of economics for answering how the discipline originating from a sub-discipline of moral philosophy ended up being an amoral science. I show that economic theory, at its first stage of development, has retained a place in which morality could play a role within liberalist framework, but has removed the very place as it developed into its current image. I argue that it is the Walrasian paradigm that completed this amoralizing process in economics. One theoretical assumption of complete contract in the Walrasian paradigm, creates the institutional environment where economic agents are free from any moral consideration. I show that if the assumption is relaxed, the problem of economic agents' morality should reappear in the stage. Accepting the assumption of incomplete contract opens a way to restore the room for economic agents' moral considerations in economic discourses. Finally I breifly survey the recent discussions on the role of sympathy in economics.

Digital Creative Labour -A Perspective of the Ethics of Labour and Subjectivity of the Younger Generation in Korea (디지털 창의노동 -젊은 세대의 노동 윤리와 주체성에 관한 한 시각)

  • Kim, Yeran
    • Korean journal of communication and information
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    • v.69
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    • pp.71-110
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    • 2015
  • Beyond the technological behaviorism-oriented notion of prosumers, the current study explores the question of digital creative labour of the youth in the interrelated context of post-capitalist crisis and neoliberal ethos of selfhood. This analysis is situated particularly in the social conflicts and struggles in Korea, where the problems related to the precarization of the younger generation have been increasingly aggravated (in the realm of embodied reality) whereas their digital activities have been highly expressive (in the realm of mediated reality). The contradictions embedded in the question of the labour of the youth are delineated in the respect of the subjectivities of young free labour, or 'digital creative labour' in proposed terms: the precarious young free labour in Korea is the compound of social fragmentation, economic polarization, expansion of cognitive and emotion labour, boom of hedonistic consumerism, economic-cultural celebration of creativity and self-entrepreneurship, technological saturation of digital media, subjective/collective affects around excitement and ambition but also of anxiety and fear. The ambivalence and complexity of the young free labour is converged at the emergence of homo-economicus (Michel Foucault) through the subjectivation of the social (con)fusion of post-capitalist crisis and neoliberal governmentality of selfhood.

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