EC101 revisited - Mixing Economics with Altruism | 51 comments (51 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

There is a semantic trick hiding here. (none / 1)

When your professor said

"Well, we have to assume that, otherwise we can't do economics"

... "economics" is being defined as those question that can be addressed with a utilitarian maximizing model.

Suppose that, like any other social science or natural science, we were to define economics as a problem domain, rather than a field of application of one particular type of analysis. Say, "Economics is the study of the material provisioning of societies".

Well, then, there is absolutely no need to assume individualistic utilitarian maximising "in order to do economics", because "doing economics" would quite clearly include far more than just questions that can be addressed with a utilitarian maximising model.

Also, as a link to additional resources in addition to those given above, the Post-Autistic Economic Network.

Utsukushikereba sore de ii

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Tue Jul 24th, 2007 at 07:41:58 PM EST

Re: There is a semantic trick hiding here. (none / 1)

The guy was clearly uninterested in going into a lot of details. One could definitely do economics (and many people actually do it) assuming altruism. Even Barro and Becker - very neoclassical economists, and the people one would definitely define as conservative - would have utility of children in the parents' utility function.

On the other hand, I could sympathize with the guy - there's no way I could possibly talk about this stuff in Econ 101. For example, econometrics in this case becomes so much tougher - just check Durlauf pages... Maybe the honors class, though. Definitely we do have these kinds of things when we teach grad students.

by Sargon on Thu Jul 26th, 2007 at 12:24:04 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: There is a semantic trick hiding here. (none / 0)

I definitely would not talk about having the perceived welfare of others in an individual's utility function, because then I would have to go into the insuperable difficulties that are caused for the utilitarian approach by interdependence among utility functions.

So, I agree that it is mostly at third year level that one could go into things like the collapse of Walrasian General Equilibrium, the inability of traditional marginalism to offer a theory of culture, and similar topics for critical analysis.

At the introductory level, it would be more appropriate to simply discuss scientific approaches to studying altruism in economics, and leave to one side the complexities of vain efforts to incorporate it into marginalism.

Utsukushikereba sore de ii

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Thu Jul 26th, 2007 at 11:34:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]

EC101 revisited - Mixing Economics with Altruism | 51 comments (51 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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