The Fable of The Bees, 2012

The Fable of the Bees is a 1705 poem by Bernard Mandeville in which the author brings into being the counter-intuitive argument that better people make the world a worse place, since so-called vices such as egoism or greed stimulate social prosperity, whilst altruism or honesty result in collective atavism and disinvestment.

Shot in the guise of a You Tube homemade production, Jan Peter Hammer’s eponymous video shows an eager young professional unwittingly channelling Mandeville’s reasoning, providing a good illustration of the adage that “practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influencesare usually the slaves of some defunct economist.“ (J.M. Keynes)