Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper responds to six contributions to a symposium on my 2018 book, The Community of Advantage. I defend that book's claim that most normative behavioural economics implicitly uses a psychologically ungrounded model of an ‘inner rational agent’. I also defend the claim that, given the contractarian approach taken in the book, opportunity is normatively prior to welfare and to particular ingredients of well-being, such as health and perceptions of agency. I show how the Strong Interactive Opportunity Criterion proposed in the book can be extended to allow comparisons between the extent of opportunity provided by different economic regimes.
Highlights
I am pleased and honoured that The Community of Advantage (CoA: Sugden, 2018) is the subject of this symposium
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, when Vilfredo Pareto stripped out the original psychological underpinnings of neoclassical economics, mainstream economic theory has been based on a priori models of rational choice and rational belief – an approach that was consolidated by the introduction of game theory in the second half of the twentieth century
The starting point for CoA is an interpretation of the evidence accumulated by behavioural economics and psychology as showing that the processes by which human beings form judgements and make decisions are not directed towards creating that kind of consistency
Summary
One of the pleasures of writing a book, rather than articles for journals, is having space to develop larger themes – to express what the first President Bush famously called the ‘vision thing’. The starting point for CoA is an interpretation of the evidence accumulated by behavioural economics and psychology as showing that the processes by which human beings form judgements and make decisions are not directed towards creating that kind of consistency. The elitism it opposes is the rationalist presumption that it is only as the attitudes of rational agents that people’s preferences, beliefs and judgements warrant respect. This way of thinking allows attitudes that fail to fit a template of rationality to be dismissed as morally irrelevant errors. It is the hubris of an intellectual community that is overrating the importance of the abstract analysis of rationality and reasoning in which it specialises
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