The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

41the myth of modern rationalityBut likewise in conservative America. S is bigger there than the officialP-Only theories would allow. The economy is embedded in society, and psychology—orrather “sychology,” to preserve the S as against the P. Thetough-guy American style of making decisions about the Big Dig in Bostonor about the Second Iraq War is a sacred thing, a matter of unexaminedS shrouded in cost-benefit ceremonies claiming P. Often enough it’s a matterof the masculine pride of the quarterback in charge. It is an enactmentof the simplicities of the American “redemptive self,” as Dan McAdams putsit, Jimmy Stewart filibustering the Senate in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,or George W. Bush in his maturity accepting Jesus as his personal savior. Whyelse would the Bostonians decide to bury a highway? Why else would thesecond Bush administration lie about the reasons for the Second Iraq War?A woman friend of mine, once a specialist in billion-dollar bank loans,told me that the merger of Bank One of Chicago in 2004 with MorganChase of New York was in good part an ego trip for the male CEOs involved—that,and a prudent plan to pick up the gains left on the street bythe irrationalities of Illinois banking law. Another woman friend, a big-timeaccountant in New York, told me that [male] egos as much as loopholes inthe American tax code determine the way offshore business schemes havedeveloped. John Maynard Keynes called the ego trips “animal spirits”—Peter Dougherty offers the phrase “hormonal capitalism.” 1 Keynes andDougherty do not mean that all investment is random. They mean merelythat the systematic part of the economist’s explanation, the part that dependson close calculations of interest rates and on rational expectations