Egonomics

Choice and consequence
by T. C. Schelling
“Economics” comes through the Latin oeconamia from the Greek oikonomia, meaning household management (oikos, house, and nomos, managing) and still has some of that meaning in its variant, “economical.” My suggestion is to recognize a comparable art or science of “self-management” possibly as part of economics-or possibly not, but related. Maybe we could attach the Latin ego to the Greek nomos, and make egonomics. What scope such a discipline would have I don’t know. I am interested only in the part that might be called strategic egonomics, consciously coping with one’s own behavior, especially one’s conscious behavior. As a motto, my colleague David Hemenway has suggested, “No Thyself!” My suggestion is that we get help from comparing self-management with the way one tries to manage another, another who is in a special relation to one’s self. Many of the skills and maxims and stratagems for coping with one’s own behavior become less mystifying and more familiar if we can recognize them as the same principles and stratagems that apply to managing someone else someone in a close relation, with a paternalist or senior-junior quality like that between parent and child, teacher and pupil, missionary and convert, master and apprentice, or guide and follower.