Measurement in Economics

“You have an architect and a ditch-digger working together on a construction project. Who gets paid more, and why?” Does a tendency toward abstraction and quantification, a pretense of objectivity, obscure the character, situation and bias from which all economic and political theorems stem? Following the principle that arguments neither arise nor persist in a vacuum, that they live and die by their context and character, we can describe two sorts of response corresponding to two rather timeless worldviews, along with (...) their accompanying “mind-sets”. The degree to which these views indicate differing “kinds” in human nature, beyond which there can be no further reduction to common ground, whether conversely they simply reflect historical and economic circumstance, or to what extent they are both, will be left to the reader. One might discern in the sensibilities described some alignment along traditional epithets of “bourgeois” vs. “working class”, but this is not necessarily so. I will therefore avoid overwrought labels, but admit that such family resemblances speak to a longer historical view and a persistent problematic. (shrink)

The most rigorous framework for theorizing about the measurement and aggregation of value is the framework of social welfare functionals developed by Amartya Sen. In this framework, a social or overall betterness ordering is assigned to each possible profile of real-valued utility functions. Different possibilities for the measurability and interpersonal comparability of well-being are captured, in this framework, by invariance conditions, which require the same ordering to be assigned to profiles that are deemed informationally equivalent. But these invariance conditions are (...) highly restrictive and it is not clear whether they really follow from the underlying measurability/comparability possibilities with which they are associated. -/- The alternative framework developed in this paper cuts out the middleman of utilities, replacing them with the properties that utilities are supposed to represent. This allows us to define the measurability/comparability possibilities directly, without the use of any invariance condition, and to state social welfare functionals that violate the standard invariance conditions without requiring inadmissible information. This suggests that the invariance conditions cannot be justified in the standard way. But they do follow from a simple principle that can be motivated by some familiar considerations from the metaphysics of quantities. I conclude by considering the case for this principle. (shrink)

Philosophers of well-being have tended to adopt a foundationalist approach to the question of theory and measurement, according to which theories are conceptually prior to measures. By contrast, social scientists have tended to adopt operationalist commitments, according to which they develop and refine well-being measures independently of any philosophical foundation. Unfortunately, neither approach helps us overcome the problem of coordinating between how we characterize wellbeing and how we measure it. Instead, we should adopt a coherentist approach to well-being science.

This paper is about the role of interpersonal comparisons in Harsanyi's aggregation theorem. Harsanyi interpreted his theorem to show that a broadly utilitarian theory of distribution must be true even if there are no interpersonal comparisons of well-being. How is this possible? The orthodox view is that it is not. Some argue that the interpersonal comparability of well-being is hidden in Harsanyi's premises. Others argue that it is a surprising conclusion of Harsanyi's theorem, which is not presupposed by any one (...) of the premises. I argue instead that Harsanyi was right: his theorem and its weighted-utilitarian conclusion do not require interpersonal comparisons of well-being. The key to making sense of this possibility is to treat Harsanyi's weights as dimensional constants rather than dimensionless numbers. (shrink)

Matthew Adler's Measuring Social Welfare is an introduction to the social welfare function (SWF) methodology. This essay questions some ideas at the core of the SWF methodology having to do with the relation between the SWF and the measure of well-being. The facts about individual well-being do not single out a particular scale on which well-being must be measured. As with physical quantities, there are multiple scales that can be used to represent the same information about well-being; no one scale (...) is special. Like physical laws, the SWF and its ranking of distributions cannot depend on exactly which of these scales we use. Adler and other theorists in the SWF tradition have used this idea to derive highly restrictive constraints on the shape of the SWF. These constraints rule out seemingly plausible views about distributive justice and population ethics. I argue, however, that these constraints stem from a simple but instructive mistake. The SWF should not be applied to vectors of numbers such as 1 and 2, but rather to vectors of dimensioned quantities such as 1 util and 2 utils. This seemingly pedantic suggestion turns out to have far-reaching consequences. Unlike the orthodox SWF approach, treating welfare levels as dimensioned quantities lets us distinguish between real changes in well-being and mere changes in the unit of measurement. It does this without making the SWF depend on the scale on which welfare is measured, and in a way that avoids the restrictive constraints on the shape of the SWF. (shrink)

I appraise some areas of recent achievement in economic methodology by identifying four topics on which there will likely be heavy exogenously generated demand for methodological innovation over co...

Behavioural economics has taught us that human agents don't always display consistent, context-independent and stable preferences in their choice behaviour. Can we nevertheless do welfare economics...

The observation that concepts used by social scientists are often problematic is not new; they have been described as Ballung concepts, cluster concepts, essentially contested, and reflexive; however, the need to work with these concepts remains. This article addresses the problem of variable choice in the social sciences by exploring and extending Woodward’s recommendations. This article demonstrates why Woodward’s criteria are difficult to apply in the social sciences and proposes an alternative, but complementary, framework for assessing variables.

Generating an account that can sidestep the disagreement among substantive theories of well-being, while at the same time still providing useful guidance for well-being public policy, would be a significant achievement. Unfortunately, the various attempts to remain agnostic regarding what constitutes well-being fail to either be an account of well-being, provide useful guidance for well-being policy, or avoid relying on a substantive well-being theory. There are no theory-free lunches in well-being policy. Instead, I propose an intermediate account, according to which (...) well-being is constituted by endorsed veridical experiences. This account refers back to theories of well-being but does so as agnostically as possible. An intermediate account of well-being is meant as a policy guiding compromise between the different theories of well-being that make claims regarding what constitutes well-being. An intermediate account does as well as can be hoped for in providing a basis for well-being policy. (shrink)

Volume 26, Issue 4, December 2019, Page 380-384.

Many economic measures are structured to reflect ethical values. I describe three attitudes towards this: maximalism, according to which we should aim to build all relevant values into measures; minimalism, according to which we should aim to keep values out of measures; and an intermediate view. I argue the intermediate view is likely correct, but existing versions are inadequate. In particular, economists have strong reason to structure measures to reflect fixed, as opposed to user-assessable, values. This implies that, despite disagreement (...) about precisely how to do so, economists should standardly adjust QALYs and DALYs to reflect egalitarian values. (shrink)

The notion of “worth” and “value” throughout human history was only partly dependent on economic reasons. Arrangements about what is considered an equivalent value/measure of wealth are the result of complex interdependencies of economic, social and cultural factors. For thousands of years people have used precious metals as universal equivalent and main measure of wealth; full-value metal money was, in fact, only reinforced by the authority of state (ruler) evidence of presence certain amount of precious metal. The rejection of valuable (...) coins and the provision of banknotes with precious metals (that is, the rejection of the gold and the silver standard) led to the fact that the circulating money signs in the society ceased to denote a concrete value, becoming an abstraction, putting the population in dependence on state’s monetary policy and financial stability of national economy. Bitcoin and its numerous alternatives arose as a response to the challenge of informatization, globalization and individualization of economic activity. This is an attempt to escape from control of state structures that are inclined to abuse their right to issue banknotes and to voluntaristic methods of managing the economy. To some extent, the cryptocurrencies reflect the nostalgia of market participants on the gold standard, which is surprisingly transformed into a complete denial of the materiality (including the metal substance) of money. This situation stimulates the search for new models for designation the equivalent value in the information society. (shrink)

Summary measures of health, such as the quality-adjusted life year and disability-adjusted life year, have long been known to incorporate a number of value choices. In this paper, though, I show that the value choices in the construction of such measures extend far beyond what is generally recognized. In showing this, I hope both to improve the understanding of those measures by epidemiologists, health economists and policy-makers, and also to contribute to the general debate about the extent to which such (...) measures should be adjusted to reflect ethical values. (shrink)

We reexamine some of the classic problems connected with the use of cardinal utility functions in decision theory, and discuss Patrick Suppes's contributions to this field in light of a reinterpretation we propose for these problems. We analytically decompose the doctrine of ordinalism, which only accepts ordinal utility functions, and distinguish between several doctrines of cardinalism, depending on what components of ordinalism they specifically reject. We identify Suppes's doctrine with the major deviation from ordinalism that conceives of utility functions as (...) representing preference differences, while being non- etheless empirically related to choices. We highlight the originality, promises and limits of this choice-based cardinalism. (shrink)

Policy-makers sometimes aim to improve well-being as a policy goal, but to do this they need some way to measure well-being. Instead of relying on potentially problematic theories of well-being to justify their choice of well-being measure, Daniel Hausman proposes that policy-makers can sometimes rely on preference-based measures as evidence for well-being. I claim that Hausman’s evidential account does not justify the use of any one measure more than it justifies the use of any other measure. This leaves us at (...) a loss as to which policy should be chosen in the non-trivial cases for which there is substantial disagreement between the different measures in their assessment of policy. (shrink)

This article illustrates how axiomatic social choice theory can be used in the evaluation of measures of group fitness for a biological hierarchy, thereby contributing to the dialogue between the philosophy of biology and social choice theory. It provides an axiomatic characterization of the ordering underlying the MichodSolariNedelcu index of group fitness for a multicellular organism. The MVSHN index has been used to analyse the germ-soma specialization and the fitness decoupling between the cell and organism levels that takes place during (...) the evolutionary transition to multicellularity. It is argued that some of the axioms satisfied by the MVSHN group fitness ordering are not appropriate for all stages in this transition. (shrink)

In traditional decision theory, utility is regarded as a mathematical representation of preferences to be inferred from agents hedonic experiences. Some go as far as to contend that utility is literally computed by specific neural areas and urge economists to complement or substitute their notion of utility with some neuro-psychological construct. In this paper, I distinguish three notions of utility that are frequently mentioned in debates about decision theory and examine some critical issues regarding their definition and measurability. Moreover, I (...) provide various empirical and conceptual reasons to doubt that economists should base decision theoretic analyses on some neuro-psychological notion of utility. (shrink)

This article explains some moral dimensions of a transnational feminist research project designed to provide a better standard or metric for measuring poverty across the world. The author is an investigator on this project. Poverty metrics incorporate moral judgments about what is necessary for a decent life, so justifying metrics requires moral argumentation. The article clarifies the moral aspects of poverty valuation, indicates some moral flaws in existing global poverty metrics, and outlines some conditions for a better global metric. It (...) then explains the methodology used in our project, providing its moral rationale and discussing some remaining moral concerns. (shrink)

The World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development has recently confirmed the widely held belief that women across the world tend to perform different work from men who otherwise are situated similarly. Women also work longer hours than similarly situated men. In analyzing the justice of these gendered disparities in time-use, WDR 2012 uses a moral framework that is largely distributive. Although this framework illuminates some aspects of the injustice of the situation, I contend that it obscures other crucial (...) aspects, making the analysis inadequate overall. I argue that a more comprehensive and illuminating moral understanding can be reached by analyzing these time-use disparities in terms of global gendered exploitation. This alternative framework also better enables identifying those politically responsible for the injustice and points toward a vision of global gender justice that is morally more plausible. (shrink)

This article reflects critically on the methodology of one feminist research project which is ongoing as we write. The project is titled “Assessing Development: Designing Better Indices of Poverty and Gender Equity” and its aim is to develop a better standard or metric for measuring poverty across the world. The authors of this article are among several philosophers on the research team, which also includes scholars from the disciplines of anthropology, sociology and economics. This article begin by explaining why a (...) new and better poverty metric is needed and why developing such a metric requires an alternative methodological approach inspired by feminism. It then describes our methodological goals and strategies and summarizes our research findings, showing how they diverge from standard assessments as a result the feminist methods we used. We conclude with some methodological lessons we learned and questions that we think remain to be addressed. (shrink)

The main arguments currently held for and against the use of self-reports in economics are presented in their relation to well-known events in the history of the discipline: the ?measurement without theory?, the ?full-cost?, and the ?economic expectations? controversies. Doing so, the paper highlights the so far neglected role of George Katona's behavioral economics in these methodological discussions.

The thesis studies the problem of measuring freedom of choice. It analyzes the concept of freedom of choice, discusses conditions that a measure should satisfy, and introduces a new class of measures that uniquely satisfy ten proposed conditions.

During the last two centuries, the way economic science is done has changed radically: it has become a social science based on mathematical models in place of words. This book describes and analyses that change - both historically and philosophically - using a series of case studies to illuminate the nature and the implications of these changes. It is not a technical book; it is written for the intelligent person who wants to understand how economics works from the inside out. (...) This book will be of interest to economists and science studies scholars. But it also aims at a wider readership in the public intellectual sphere, building on the current interest in all things economic and on the recent failure of the so-called economic model, which has shaped our beliefs and the world we live in. (shrink)

The financial crash of 2008 following the selling of fictitious derivatives was a crisis of both rationality and values whose aftermath has thrown the legitimation of deregulated markets, and governments, into question. This paper critiques the Becker metaphor of human capital and submits that human value is central to and the fulcrum of both economic and social values. It illustrates that Hume and Adam Smith directly countered the Hobbesian hypothesis that human nature is based only on self-interest, distinguishes market values (...) from social values, explicit from implicit values and parallels Sen in adopting an ordinal ranking of what people value rather than a search for cardinality. It draws on cognitive psychology, neural research, revealed preference theory and a principle of implicit verification. It also outlines implications for what Adam Smith centrally valued as concern for the welfare of the whole of society. (shrink)

This essay presents a new measure of opportunity, understood as the freedom to choose whatever one may reasonably prefer to choose.

This article develops a new measure of freedom of choice based on the proposal that a set offers more freedom of choice than another if, and only if, the expected degree of dissimilarity between a random alternative from the set of possible alternatives and the most similar offered alternative in the set is smaller. Furthermore, a version of this measure is developed, which is able to take into account the values of the possible options.

The value of a statistical life (VSL) is an important tool for cost?benefit analysis of regulatory policies that concern fatality risks. Its proponents claim that it measures people's risk preferences, and that VSL therefore is a tool of vicarious governance. This paper criticizes the revealed preference method for measuring VSL. It specifies three minimal conditions for vicarious governance: sensitivity, fairness and hypothetical compromise, and shows that the VSL measure, in its common application in policy formation and analysis, violates these conditions. (...) It therefore concludes that the revealed preference VSL measure, in its current form, is not a tool of vicarious governance. (shrink)

We would like to thank Ian Carter and Matthew Kramer for their challenging reply to our recent article. Dowding and van Hees is one of a series of articles in which we try to address measurement issues with regard to individual freedom. Our aim is to provide a conception of freedom that will eventually yield a way of measuring the relative freedom of groups of people within a society and a relative measure of freedom across societies. In doing so, we (...) draw upon the important work of Carter and Kramer, but as should be clear, we also depart from it in several respects. (shrink)

Social thinkers frequently remind us that people differ on what constitutes personal well-being, but that even when they don't differ, they disagree over the extent to which one person's well-being can be permitted to be traded off against another's. They tell us that political differences are to be traced to differences in people's conceptions of personal and social well-being. We are given to understand, in other words, that people's ethics differ.

The incomparability of alternatives is thought to pose a problem for justified choice, particularly for proponents of comparativism better than,worse than,equally good,roughly equalon a par. namely, rejection of the transitivity of the relation In this paper, I argue that proponents of comparativism need not incur this cost. I defend the possibility of justified choice between incomparable alternatives on grounds that comparativists can accept. The possibility of incomparability has been met with resistance, in part because of the intuitive appeal of comparativism. (...) By defending the possibility of justified choice between incomparable alternatives on grounds that comparativists can accept, this paper supports further inquiry into the subject of incomparability. (shrink)

Numerous instruments have been developed to elicit numerical values that represent the strength of preference for different health states. However, relatively few studies have attempted to analyse the reasoning processes that people employ when they are asked to answer questions based on these elicitation methods. The lottery equivalents method is a preference elicitation instrument that has recently received some attention in the literature. This study attempts a qualitative analysis of the use of this instrument on a group of 25 relatively (...) highly educated respondents. For each of three health states considered in the study, a substantial number of respondents refused to trade the chance of survival for a possible improvement in the health state. Therefore, many respondents violated an assumption that is necessary for the lottery equivalents instrument to generate cardinal health state values. These findings place a question mark against the usefulness of the lottery equivalents method, and add weight to the suspicion that ‘preferences’ are constructed according to how questions are framed. (Published Online July 31 2007). (shrink)

One response to Derek Parfit's invokes the relation of . Since parity is a form of in John Broome's terms, three doubts which Broome raises about accounts involving incommensurateness in Weighing Lives pose a challenge for this response. I discuss two of these. They emerge from a discussion of various intuitions about . I argue that an account based on parity may be no less consistent with Broome's intuitions than is his own vagueness view.

Conventional economic theory assumes that people care only about ultimate outcomes and are indifferent to the decision and allocation processes by which outcomes are brought about. Building on Sen (1997), I relax this assumption, and investigate the formal and philosophical issues that arise. I extend the formal apparatus of preference theory to analyse how processes may enter preferences, and investigate whether traditional invariance requirements like the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference are still satisfied in this new setting. I show that (...) it is, provided certain conditions of separability hold, and I discuss the plausibility of these conditions. Further, I argue that processes are often valued in a mode that diverges from the conventional modes of instrumental and intrinsic/independent valuation. I introduce the notion of dependent non-instrumental valuation, and show how processes could depend on their instrumental function for their value – making their value dependent – and yet derive their value from something else – making it non-instrumental. Dependent non-instrumental value, I argue, can be explained by symbolic and evidential relations between processes and outcomes. (Published Online July 31 2007) Footnotes1 This article is based on the third chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation (Sandbu 2003). I would like to thank Richard Tuck for many discussions over several years, which helped me develop and elaborate the ideas presented here. I am also very grateful to Amartya Sen, Nien-hê Hsieh, Luc Bovens, and Xaq Pitkow for their close readings of various versions of the paper and their incisive comments, questions, and suggestions. Further thanks go to Christopher Avery, Matthias Benz, Jerry Green, Waheed Hussain, David Laibson, Robert Sugden, Alan Strudler, Justin Wolfers, and seminar participants at Harvard University and the Wharton School of Business. Akshay Jashnani provided helpful research assistance. Most of the ideas in the present article were developed while I was the recipient of a doctoral grant from the Research Council of Norway, which I gratefully acknowledge. (shrink)

This paper is about the measurement of specific freedoms freedom functionbeing free to performconditional probability of success.negative freedom is membership of powerful coalitions.”.

The question of when people may impose risks on each other is of fundamental moral importance. Forms of “quantified risk assessment,” especially risk cost-benefit analysis, provide one powerful approach to providing a systematic answer. It is also well known that such techniques can show that existing resources could be used more effectively to reduce risk overall. Thus it is often argued that some current practices are irrational. On the other hand critics of quantified risk assessment argue that it cannot adequately (...) capture all relevant features, such as “societal concern” and so should be abandoned. In this paper I argue that current forms of quantified risk assessment are inadequate, and in themselves, therefore, insufficient to demonstrate that current practices are irrational. In particular, I will argue that insufficient attention has been given to the cause of a hazard, which needs to be treated as a primary variable in its own right. However rather than reject quantified risk assessment I wish to supplement it by proposing a framework to make explicit the role causation plays in the understanding of risk, and how it interacts with factors which influence perception of risks and other attitudes to risk control. Once an improved description of risk perception is available it will become possible to have a more informed debate about the normative question: how safety should be regulated. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright views models as blueprints for nomological machines? machines that, if properly shielded, generate law?like behaviour or regularities. Marcel Boumans has argued that we can look for devices inside models, which enable us to measure aspects of these regularities. Therefore, if models do produce regular behaviour, they might perhaps generate numbers about phenomena in the world, provided we can locate a good measuring device in the model. How do they do this? Models are often understood to consist of internal (...) principles and bridge principles. Both of these play a role in the measuring process. This paper suggests that we can understand the internal principles to be responsible for generating the regularities displayed by the model? and for many users of the model, this is sufficient use. The bridge principles are a matter of picking the right mathematical representation to make the model work with respect to some real world case at hand. These?real? bridge principles may enable the model to generate numbers and so serve to make the model into a measuring device. This paper explores this construction of a measuring device of duration dependence of unemployment. Since search theory cannot be made operational for this purpose duration models, which model of the outflow process of unemployment with a Weibull function, are taken as a representation of reservation wage setting in search models. As I show, this Weibull function serves as a bridge principle to make a measure of the elasticity of response between unemployment benefit and duration of unemployment. It enables measurement to take place by modelling behaviour according to some assumptions, which operate as constraints. While this Weibull function serves this purpose, its assumptions are arbitrary rather than connected to theory, and measurements generated with this bridge principle turn out to be highly sensitive to its specification. The Weibull function does enable the model to function as a measuring device, but the lack of ability to make newly invoked unobservable variables operational makes it of dubious worth. (shrink)

This paper examines how people assess inequality of income distribution and how inequality could be measured. We start from the philosophical analysis of Temkin, who distinguishes nine plausible aspects of inequality. His approach is based on the concept of ‘complaints’ or distances between incomes. We examine the Temkin approach by means of the questionnaire-experimental method pioneered by Amiel and Cowell to find out whether the aspects of equality have any plausibility for student respondents and, if so, whether there are aspects (...) which are more appealing than others. Both the numerical and verbal responses show that a considerable majority of the respondents might be influenced by the intuitions included in the combination of the Weighted Additive Principle and the Average view of complaints. The questionnaire results also shed some empirical light on the acceptance of the Transfer Principle and the attitudes towards the Sequence. Footnotes I would like to thank Erik Schokkaert, Frank Cowell, and Liema Davidovitz for various suggestions which have led to improvements in this paper. I am very grateful for helpful comments from seminar participants and an anonymous referee. I remain responsible for any remaining error. This paper was written while the author enjoyed the hospitality of Sticerd, LSE, London and he acknowledges the financial support provided by the Training and Mobility of Researchers Program of the European Communities, grant #ERBFMRXCT980248. (shrink)

Economists have often attempted precise measurement of phenomena which involve vague predicates. Difficulties emerge in such attempts if vagueness is not explicitly acknowledged at the methodological level. In this paper, various accounts of vague concepts are used to think about the economics of poverty measurement. Approaches to dealing with vagueness in this context tend to involve 'epistemic' and 'fuzzy set theoretic' approaches. Indeed, only the fuzzy set theoretic literature takes on vagueness explicitly. It is argued that both these approaches encounter (...) significant difficulties, and that fuzzy set theoretic measures are hard to interpret intuitively. A 'supervaluationist' approach to the vagueness of poverty is developed. It is argued that this approach has much to recommend it and that some fuzzy measures can be interpreted intuitively as measures of vulnerability on this account. (shrink)

James Griffin (1986, 1997, 2000) and Ruth Chang (1997) have argued that alternatives (and values) can be comparable when it is neither true that one is better than the other, nor true that they are exactly equal in value. The relation which holds between them has gone under various names: the alternatives are (Griffin) or (Chang). In this paper, I give a formal analysis of this relation. This analysis allows us to distinguish between two slightly different notions of . It (...) is argued that the distinction between these notions is important for discussions of rationality, as is the distinction between or and incomparability. (shrink)

This note suggests that the exercise of measuring poverty in a society is greatly aided by clarity on precisely what one means by “the extent of poverty”. The latter concept may refer to the extent of poverty normalized for population size, or to the extent of poverty not so normalized. Absence of clarity on this distinction – which is both simple and non-trivial – could lead to rather straightforward problems of coherence and consistency in the measurement of poverty.

This paper discusses and develops an important distinction drawn by Jevons, viz . that between natural and fictitious quantities. This distinction provides a basis for a theory of economic concept formation that aims at picking out families of models that are phenomenally adequate, explanatory and exact simultaneously. Essentially, the theory demands of an economic quantity to be natural that (1) it is explained by a causal model, (2) it is measurable and (3) the measurement procedure is justified. The proposed theory (...) is tested against two case studies, one historical and one contemporary. (shrink)

The notion of ‘revealed preference’ is unclear and should be abandoned. Defenders of the theory of revealed preference have misinterpreted legitimate concerns about the testability of economics as the demand that economists eschew reference to (unobservable) subjective states. As attempts to apply revealed-preference theory to game theory illustrate with particular vividness, this demand is mistaken.

'Data mining' refers to a broad class of activities that have in common, a search over different ways to process or package data statistically or econometrically with the purpose of making the final presentation meet certain design criteria. We characterize three attitudes toward data mining: first, that it is to be avoided and, if it is engaged in, that statistical inferences must be adjusted to account for it; second, that it is inevitable and that the only results of any interest (...) are those that transcend the variety of alternative data mined specifications (a view associated with Leamer's extreme-bounds analysis); and third, that it is essential and that the only hope we have of using econometrics to uncover true economic relationships is to be found in the intelligent mining of data. The first approach confuses considerations of sampling distribution and considerations of epistemic warrant and, reaches an unnecessarily hostile attitude toward data mining. The second approach relies on a notion of robustness that has little relationship to truth: there is no good reason to expect a true specification to be robust alternative specifications. Robustness is not, in general, a carrier of epistemic warrant. The third approach is operationalized in the general-to-specific search methodology of the LSE school of econometrics. Its success demonstrates that intelligent data mining is an important element in empirical investigation in economics. (shrink)

review of Ruth Chang's collection in which I argue that the apparent agreements between the authors disguise underlying important differences.

The concept of well-being is central to the subject matter of moral philosophy as well as economics. According to some moral theorists morality is about the maximization of social well-being. According to others, notably John Rawls we ought to give particular priority to the worst off members in society. Both these and other moral positions, whatever the priority they attach to different members of society in arriving at moral judgements, require an account of well-being or advantage. The concern with well-being (...) is thus of foundational importance in moral philosophy, even if well-being is not thought of as all that matters. Furthermore, those who want to distinguish ‘morality’ from ‘self-interest’ must furnish us with an account of human interests, so that we can distinguish the moral realm from that of self-interest or prudence. The concerns of moral philosophers, here, clearly overlap with those of economists. Economists are much concerned with questions of how well people are doing, with their ‘standard of living’ or ‘quality of life’. However, there are very different ways of thinking about each of these ideas. Indeed, we need to discriminate between different views of the quality of life and to decide which is the most appropriate for the purposes of moral theory and the normative parts of economics. (shrink)