SELF-INTEREST AND INCOMPETENCE

Abstract. All social science’s schools have a common assumption: self-interests is the central variable explaining human behavior in society. The author has no contention about that. But says that in contemporary societies a second variable is turning increasingly relevant when one is willing to explain social outcomes: policymakers’ technical and emotional incompetence. Incompetent policymakers, who fail to choose the alternative more consistent with their own objectives, even when interests were neutralized, always existed. But now, that an increasing number of social outcomes are dependent on government policy, competence turned strategic. Besides self-interest, competence must be assessed when one evaluates social outcomes. Social sciences have always been the playing field of controversy. Some advances are eventually achieved, some issues are overcome, and the object of controversy changes. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, for instance, the main divide, within sociology, was between conflict (mostly Marxist) and functionalist views of society; within economics, between the Keynesian and neoclassical schools. Today the major divide is between methodological individualism and methodologica