Is Homo Economicus a Psychopath?

The answer is yes, in the current form of human economy. A non-psychopathic personality type has approaching zero percent chance of meritocratic reward beyond a certain glass ceiling. There are, of course, exceptions, but they do not make the rule. The rule is that the overwhelming majority of the most "successful" beneficiaries of current and past human economy have all been far more psychopathic personalities than not.

The ironic thing is that it's one of those things that is so blatantly obvious and right in front of people's face that they can't see it; the proverbial forest in spite of all the trees.

"Homo economicus, is a creature of coldly calculated selfishness, dispassionately maximizing its best interests even if that comes at the expense of others."

For the second time today, I get to point out that in economics is neutral about "best interests" and is metaphorically happy to accommodate people whom consider happiness or other such "soft" things as part of their personal value function. If your definition of "homo economicus" is a psycopath... well, you're the one who stuck a psychopath there, so ultimately this is a circular argument in which one asserts that economics is based on the idea of a psychopath that you put there in the first place. Not exactly a surprising result there.

There is absolutely no contradiction between "most people act in what they believe to be their best interests" and "most people take care of their family", because obviously most people consider "taking care of their family" to be in their "best interests".

Homo Economicus is still a fictional being, but it's not because "not everyone is a psychopath", it's because not everyone is perfectly rational all the time, and humans do have some weaknesses on the rationality front. It was (and really is) a good approximation because on the whole, people do act amusingly rationally in a surprising array of situations. (I say "amusing" because they will often act perfectly rationally in some circumstance, then cite as their reason some astonishing bullshit reason. Nevertheless, their actions are often quite rational.)

It's still supposed to be "Homo Economicus" and not "Robo Economicus" or "Vulcan Economicus".

Following Betteridge's Law of Headlines, the answer the article answers is "no", but it is a qualified "no".

Homo Economicus according to the article "is a creature of coldly calculated selfishness, dispassionately maximizing its best interests even if that comes at the expense of others".

The researchers concluded: "We see a person who is intelligent, driven to excel and to dominate other people, and capable of impulse control and of working toward long-term goals. In other words, Homo economicus is the prototypical member of the social and economic elite."

I wish the researchers went further and went back to the biographies of their participants to evaluate whether or not their conclusion fit the participants' social and economic standings.

Nonetheless, this is one of the few better-controlled and quantified studies I've seen about the over-representation of sociopathic and psychopathic traits in leadership. Keep this in mind the next time you work under/alongside them. Many hackers tend to have a meritocratic ideation of how the world should work, but the reality is sociopaths and borderline psychopaths are mostly the ones that rise to the top, and many a hacker is easily taken advantage of until they learn how the world really works (for now, at least).

My biggest gripe about the concept of Homo Economicus is the huge ideological component that often gets ignored. The article mentions it, but doesn't focus on it.

An ideal HE behaves rationally, yes, but that doesn't tell the whole picture; being rational is about discussing with oneself all the possible behaviours, choosing the one that gives him the outcome closest to his desires. But also, and this is very important, it seems like the only thing an HE cares about is his own benefit, especially his own monetary benefit. So he has friends only because "who you know" is valuable and can help him get more money; he doesn't care about poor people because their misery doesn't affect him; the welfare of society in general is not relevant unless he can benefit from it; etc. Many people, including me, find all this very troubling, since this is the kind of people that makes this world far worse than it could be. And yes, I would say that it's clearly psychopathic behaviour.

Some economists that present, either tacitly or openly, the HE as a positive ideal, try to hop over this troubling issue by using the ill-defined term "utility", saying that an HE is someone who maximizes the perceived utility; and then they proceed to basically define the behaviour of the HE as economically-oriented, making the whole "utility" concept useless.

Contrast with this Marxist slogan: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. One can be perfectly rational and follow it; it's just about using reason to fulfill a completely different goal. So being rational is about means to attain a goal, while being an HE also includes the goal of hoarding money and not caring about what happens to other people.

You're responding to the claim that "classical economics does not actually assert that individual humans behave in a purely rational and fully-informed manner" with an argument that it is impossible for individual humans to behave in a purely rational and fully-informed manner.

The only part of your comment that addresses the actual point of disagreement is "(Actually, classical economics does.)"

As an aside, Keen's argument is silly. "Rationality" does not require that one must perform a search through every possible permutation of items. One might as well claim that it's impossible to draw a straight line from A to B because there are infinitely many lines from A to B we must search through to find the one we're looking for.