"Human beings are supposed to be calculating machines pursuing Prudence and Price and Profit and Property and Power—“P variables,” you might call them. P-obsession begins with Machiavelli and Hobbes, is continued by Bernard Mandeville (the early eighteenth-century DutchEnglish spy and pamphleteer), is systematized by Jeremy Bentham (the utilitarian economist flourishing in the early nineteenth century), and is finally perfected by twentieth-century economists, including that same Paul Samuelson, who fully formalized the notion in a curious character known as Max U, and the great Gary Becker, who went about as far as he could go"