Bernard Mandeville

Bernard Mandeville is introduced in 【旧番重听】蜜蜂经济学 through The Fable of the Bees. The episode uses his hive metaphor as an early economic imagination of how private appetite, self-interest, or even vice could produce public prosperity.

In the source, Mandeville is not treated as evidence about beekeeping itself. He is the first step in a sequence that moves from moral parable to James Meade’s positive-externality model and then to 张五常’s empirical look at pollination contracts. That contrast makes him useful as background for Externality Internalization and Pollination Service Market rather than as an agricultural industry source.

Connections

• 【旧番重听】蜜蜂经济学 — source episode that uses Mandeville as the opening economic-history reference.
• James Meade and 张五常 — later figures in the episode’s theory-to-contract sequence.
• Externality Internalization and Pollination Service Market — concepts that emerge after the episode moves beyond Mandeville’s metaphor.