Summary: Economics excels at explaining markets, prices, and incentives, but has it overlooked the human beings at the center of economic life? Economist Bart Wilson argues that many of the discipline’s most important questions — from trust and reciprocity to choice and moral judgment — cannot be fully understood through mathematical models alone. Drawing on Adam Smith, experimental economics, and an unexpected cast of literary companions including Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, Mary Shelley, Milton, and Goethe, Wilson explains why the humanities belong alongside economics in the search to understand prosperity and human flourishing. The conversation explores the origins of humanomics, the limits of specialization, and how reading across disciplines can reveal questions — and answers — that neither field would discover on its own.
