KIM KIERKEGAARDASHIAN, who tweets as @kimkierkegaard, is Twitter at its wittiest, a marriage between an icon of contemporary American culture and the angst-ridden 19th century Danish father of existentialism. Thanks to tweets such as “Rise & grind! Busy day!! Gym then packing 4 Paris again! This is the despair of finitude, when the self is lost to the temporal, the trivial” s/he stole the show at an unusual gathering in New York to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the philosopher’s birth on May 5th. That Soren Kierkegaard would have been great on Twitter was one conclusion of the event, co-hosted by the Centre for Capitalism and Society and the Department of Religion at Columbia University. He had a gift for the catchy soundbite in less than 140 characters. “Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.” “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” Given his love of irony and habit of exploring different world views by writing using pseudonyms (Johannes Climacus, Constantin Constantius, etc) he surely would have authored both @realkierkegaard and @fakekierkegaard.

The other main conclusion, supplied by Edmund Phelps, a Nobel prize-winning economist, was that Kierkegaard was the “first philosopher of the modern economy”.

Now that academic economists are rapidly abandoning the always rational, utility maximizing avatar that is homo economicus who for so long dominated the profession, turning to a philosopher who wrestled with the paradoxes of the human condition and advocated taking a leap of faith was perhaps the inevitable next step after behavioural economics and neuroeconomics. Welcome to existential economics.

For Mr Phelps, Kierkegaard has lots of useful insights for economists about the “dynamics of the individual and the importance of choices and decisions in human life.” In particular, he argued that since the knowledge human beings have is limited, every true decision “represents a leap of faith that must be made without any clear understanding of the consequences. This is why true decisions provoke anxiety,” summarises Mr Phelps.

Over the years, economists have explored many aspects of decision making in conditions of uncertainty, none more so than Frank Knight in his 1921 masterpiece about the life of an entrepreneur, “Risk, Uncertainty and Profit.” It would be interesting to compare how Kierkegaard understood the leap of faith with Knight’s view of the motivation of entrepreneurs, as well as Joseph Schumpeter’s “psychological” theory of innovative entrepreneurship and the “animal spirits” described by John Maynard Keynes as “a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”

But Kierkegaard’s leap of faith has far broader importance than understanding entrepreneurship, adds Mr Phelps. “What is striking to me is that, in Kierkegaard’s view, if I understand it, the impossibility of truly knowing the best decision, time and again, is not an unavoidable difficulty of living. Neither is it a difficulty made avoidable by the nanny state. It is instead an invaluable well-spring of experiences that can provide us full personal growth.”

The current fashion for trying to measure well-being and “gross domestic happiness” misses a crucial point, if Kierkegaard is right. If he had been alive today, Kierkegaard might well have been made to feel happier with a prescription from Prozac, but that would have robbed his life of its deeper meaning, which he believed came from making tough choices to believe in and obey God (even though there was no rational basis for doing so). As Mr Phelps puts it, “Kierkegaard insists that anxiety is not an illness that can be cured by psychoanalysis or pills, but is the mark of an open future and the price individuals pay for being personally responsible for their lives.” A gross domestic anxiety index, anyone?

Meanwhile on Twitter, Andrew Sentance, a British economist, learned of the Kierkegaard conference and tweeted his surprise at discovering that the Dane was not featured in the famous Monty Python song about drunken philosophers. What would the lyric have been, if he had been featured? This correspondent suggested, “Kierkegaard liked his liquor hard”, but that was no match for this ditty tweeted by Clive Crook, formerly of The Economist and now a writer on economics for Bloomberg View: “Sodden Kierkegaard, when he’d had a few, could bore you senseless about what is true.” Not every economist shares Mr Phelps’s enthusiasm for the late philosopher, it seems.