No economist of the 20th century would say that Adam Smith was their biggest intellectual influence, except Gary Becker. He's an outlier because he actually tried to treat people as social animals and most economists either don't find that methodologically appealing or they just think, oh, that's just such a small thing. And what I think there's two aspects of which were not just self-interested. One is I think we have principles. But we also care about our own survival many times over. We want to be part of something ideally transcendent but ideally transcendent too.
When the 20-year-old overachiever Johnathan Bi's first startup crashed and burned, he headed to a Zen retreat in the Catskills to "debug himself." He discovered René Girard and his mimetic theory--the idea that imitation is a key and often unconscious driver of human behavior. Listen as entrepreneur and philosopher Bi shares with EconTalk host Russ Roberts what he learned from Girard and Girard's insights into how we meet our primal need for money, fame, and power. The conversation includes the contrasts between economics and Girard's perspective.