Economics

Economics has much to say about The Human Condition because economics dominates modern life. Important themes:

• How the markets work because of human nature, how competitive status-striving and social cooperation interact synergistically to create cultural evolution (both social and technical) that has entirely transformed the human environment. This differs in several ways from standard economic assumptions, most obviously because economists have chosen a wildly inaccurate model of human behavior, but also because economic behavior needs to be understood where there are additional cultural macro-elements such as behaviorial norms that are at least as important as the markets in determining individual behavior. There's a lot more going on than just the market and the individual.
• How economic life is also deceptively unsatisfying because our instincts entice us in to pouring our efforts into paid work, but the expect increase in happiness is not forthcoming because once the basic need for food clothing and shelter is satisfied we pour most of our money into trying to win the status game, which is of course a zero-sum game few can win.
• We must strongly resist getting sucked into contemporary politics because we don't fit on the tired left-right axis. Picking any particular policies to endorse also seems like a mistake, but it does seem valuable to discuss interesting new economic policies or new evolutionarily-informed ways of understanding old policies. The point is not to comprehensively discuss all policies good and bad, but to pick out interesting policies that make sense from our viewpoint and contrast them to other conflicting policies.
• A particular area of interest is the idea of sustainable economics. The idea that we should reduce our consumption and not strive so hard for greater happiness is compatible with the idea that we should reduce our consumption so as to not deplete our resources or degrade our environment.

Problems with sustainability as it is currently understood:

1. The idea of limits to growth and resources exhaustion don't have much credibility in economic circles because catastrophe has been predicted over and over again and has failed to appear. Advocates of limits to growth would do well to study this long history of failed predictions before blithely claiming that “this time it's different.”
2. The whole concept of what sustainable use of nonrenewable resources would mean bears some thought. How long are we planning to sustain life on earth?
3. it's hard to see how the sort of change some envision could come about without either unlikely changes in human nature or enviro-totalitarianism.
4. There seems to be some tendency to suppose that some government hierarchy of eco-mandarins must take over from the markets, directing what must be produced and how for the good of the masses (who would otherwise choose something else.) This fails to consider something that economists know well, which is that central planning is inevitably less efficient and less innovative because it can only draw on a small faction of the knowledge and skills present in the society as a whole.
5. Economics has some things to say about conservation, especially the Jevons_paradox, that increases in efficiency that pay off quickly rarely reduce energy consumption by as much as you would suppose, and may even increase consumption.

In other words, there is another difficult straddle here between the worlds of traditional economics and the world of human subjective value, meaning and satisfaction.