You misread what I wrote. No, It is clear you did not allege that everyone is selfish. No, you attributed that allegation to me as an economist. And it was clear you oppose psychological egoism - but you assigned it to me, as an economist. And then you quote a fictional Wall Street tycoon's speech in a movie as justification for your position, which is sad. I thought you were more careful than that, which is why I engaged with you. And no, "economists" (as you lump all economists together) do not "keep quiet" about the greed of the 1%. There are many of us who are up in arms about grotesque income and wealth inequality that is the result of the "free market" laissez faire system that has hijacked a natural economic system for personal greed.

So you think that somehow economic theory has been proven accurate in modeling much of human behavior because - I'm still trying to get my head around this - we trained everybody to behave the way we predicted they'd behave? The science of economics does not have the ability to do much in the way of experimental analysis, because this is human behavior, not physical laws - economics is mostly limited to testing and analyzing observational data. But you are saying that we trained everybody first, then developed the theories to explain what we observed? Or maybe we created these theories and then somehow we economists, with our amazing ability to direct the economic culture, trained everybody to behave as we wanted them to? Really, Ben?

I'm a little surprised by this. I enjoy reading your discussions of atheism, you are an excellent writer and generally thoughtful and discerning and you mostly avoid making claims that are nebulous. The lack of understanding of economics is probably the norm in the general public, so I am not surprised when people make wild claims about capitalism, or socialism, based on what they think they know combined with what they think is right. I respect your opinions, or at least how you arrive at them. But I think you have jumped the shark on this one. I'm done with this discussion. Peace.