TBNO Theory: Basic Formulation

Abstract:     
Of all species, selfishness is a nature, not a motivation. Then, economic man hypothesis is wrong; in the academic circles, it is disproved by 1500 ultimatum game experiments; in real life, it conflicts with some of plain common sense, such as jealousy, “a dog in the manger”, bad news traveling fast while good news staying at home, and feeling frustrated when a neighbor is better off while enjoyable when a workmate is worse off. In fact, human root motivation has been unknown since Aristotle and Plato; so human root happiness has been misunderstood; as a direct result, such wrongness is unavoidable. In this paper, the genuine Homo economicus is constructed. Human root motivation indicates, due to our recognition, that everybody wants to be number one among his or her acquaintances in every important field, including power, wealth, reputation, educational qualifications, intelligence quotient, face appearance, children’s number and children’s education; so human root happiness depends mainly upon people’s advantage-to-disadvantage ratios in all significant areas. It is the motivation to be number one that leads all the four basic types of social behavior (selfishness, cooperation, altruism and spite) to evolve in humans; namely, it is the motivation to be number one that is the major driving force to human evolution. Constructed for all human variables, our model is available for all subdisciplines of social science; recognized even though in individual level, human root motivation itself can be generalized flexibly to those scenarios involving a group of social communities, corporations, nations, financial products, journals of economics, or the like. For example, every journal of economics would like to be number one in impact factor, an important variable of all academic journals.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 23

Keywords: Human root motivation, Human root happiness, To be number one, TBNO theory, Homo economicus

JEL Classification: A12, B41, C65, D01, D11

working papers series