Questioning Layard
In my notebook I see my notes for the question that I asked Layard at the Brookings talk last week, and which I meant to blog. Here’s more or less what I said/asked.
Well, context first. . . Layard had promoted abandoning the theory of revealed preference as the basis of economic inquiry and policy analysis and recommended substituting his brand of normative hedonism/eudaimonism.
I said:
You said we should give up on the idea of theory of revealed preferences. I want to defend it, and hear your response.
Perhaps the fact that people behave in ways that don’t maximize their happiness is evidence that people don’t always demand happiness. This raises two points, one scientific and one political.
The scientific point: Social science based on taking a side in hotly contested arguments about the metaphysics of value doesn’t count as science.
The political point: In a pluralistic society where people have fundamental disagreements about the nature of value, taking a side and basing policy on one philsophical conception of value is inappropriate.
Layard’s answer? He seemed to me to avoid the question. He reiterated a point he had made earlier to the effect that we can’t tell what makes people happy by observing their revealed preferences, or that individual behavior when scaled up to the macro-level can have results that fail to maximize happiness, or some such thing. (If someone who was there can remember just what he said, please do correct me, or elaborate.) Whatever it was, he didn’t even approach the scientific and political points, which I think deserve to be taken seriously.
How would you respond?
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When you have time to write stuff down, and think about it first, and second guess it, and re-write it…well…that’s different from when you’re standing in front of a not-necessarily-friendly audience, sweating in your suit under the lights, probably getting filmed (or at least tape-recorded,) and making up answers on the spot for whatever not-so-friendly questions get thrown at you.
Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s a great, zen-samurai, adversarial tradition.
But taking a *well-thought-out* question and comparing it to an *off-the-cuff* answer is kinda ‘apples’n'oranges,’ innit?
What do you think your ol’ pal Rawls would say about that? (Well, gee…if we pretend we’re all gonna find ourselves in one spot or the other, how many of us would rather play the questioner? All of us? Right. Therefore….)
That said….
We could argue about the definition of “happiness, people’s pursuit thereof.”
Or we could skip all that definitional crap, and argue about whether it’s possible to do science or politics without passing judgment on anything.
After we agree it’s not, we could argue about whether taking sides in scientific and political disputes is a necessary exercise of judgment, or (because ones interlocutor is on the other side) a display of poor judgment.
Eh, that’s about all I got on this one.
Cheers!
P.S. That was me, McClain, talking all that trash just now. Don’t know why my name didn’t show up….
Good points, McClain.
These broad questions always seem less…something than specific questions.
What area of happiness are we talking about? Drug use, polygamy and speed limit laws curtail people’s fun in the name of some religious or public safety grounds. It seems like it’s easier to pass laws that limit happiness than it is to overturn them.
Isn’t the right to pursue happiness in the constitution?
I wish!
No, it’s just in the Declaration.
Close, but not enough to justify case law….
My question is: if the theory of revealed preferences is true, how are we to judge when a person is behaving myopically or acting against his/her true interests?
Javier, I’m not Will, but my answer would be something like this. Obviously there are times when people act against their true interests. But to judge when any particular person is doing so, you need a lot of very specific local knowledge about who that person is and what they have striven for in the past: that is, you need to be intimately close to them. Parents, siblings, and close friends have some skill at recognizing myopic behavior, though even they are very error-prone. Large impersonal agencies are hopelessly bad at it.
So, even if revealed preference theory is false at a low level, any large impersonal agency ought to act as if it were true, because such an agency cannot know any better.
Isn’t part of the problem that using revealed preferences is taking sides in “in hotly contested arguments about the metaphysics of value”, and a particularly unpopular side as well?
As for the political point, people disagree about justice, yet we still enforce that. What’s the difference?
I mean both of these as devil’s advocate positions, rather than disagreeing.
Rob, Well I meant the question as a devil’s advocate position. I don’t buy into all the assumptions of the questions.
Let me try (hand raised from front of class, ignoring eyerolling from cool kids):
1. Scientific question: We measure well-being by asking people how they are feeling. Or maybe we visit them on their death beds and inquire whether they had a full life. Neither is perfect, but they both probably give different results than seeing if they are getting what they want.
2. Political question: What Rob said. My longer version would be imagine we are disembodied undergraduates in the Original Position. We are given a choice between a society where everyone is happy and a society where everyone gets what they want. I can’t say I know what would happen, but if it was immediate unanimous agreement that the society where everyone gets what they want is better than I would suspect the OP bull session had been salted with Cato interns.
Beer-lovers would rather pursue hoppiness.