The concealed gift

If homo economicus exists anywhere, surely he must be found among financial traders. Amid the shouting and shoving of trading pits and the manic clicking and phone slamming of electronic trading desks, the atomized, rational, self-interested agency of neoclassical economic theory appears to emerge. Ethnographers of traders have refuted atomism and instead proposed a socially embedded but still rational and self-interested agent: an embedded homo economicus. I take this critique a step further and argue that traders are neither rational nor self-interested. Certainly, traders present themselves as rational and self-interested, but a ‘thick’ understanding of their social performances and cultural forms proves otherwise. My analysis focuses on the practice of friendly betting among Chicago traders. Despite its competitive appearances, friendly betting constitutes a non-rational, non-self-interested system of gift exchange and evinces why the myth of embedded homo economicus is both beguiling and false. This conclusion cuts to fundamental issues of agency and practice, and calls for widespread scepticism of theories of rational self-interest. As neoclassical economic theory and market ideology spread around the globe and rational self-interest becomes increasingly normalized, we must be wary of confirmation bias and remember the old ethnographic principle that people aren’t always what they say they are.