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

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)

Top Diaries

Europe is Doomed: Snowpocalypse Edition

Explaining the world financial meltdown : a novel approach

European nights

More integrated than one (who?) would think

Yuletide thread

Building the shadow Internet

Stories of wonder for Christmas

Copper-Bottomed Investment

Recent Diaries

Explaining the world financial meltdown : a novel approach

Stories of wonder for Christmas

Yuletide thread

More integrated than one (who?) would think

Copper-Bottomed Investment

European nights

Europe is Doomed: Snowpocalypse Edition

Role Models

CIA yanks top spy from Pakistan after cover blown, death...

Building the shadow Internet

Party Polling Trends in Ireland

The Myth of 'Tax and Spend'

Some Nice light relief

The European Parliament is at it again

Was the Euro outright an anti-labour project?

Spain as 51st state

Barroso Flips Off A Million Signatures

EROI, ROIIC and The Collapse of Complex Societies

Photoblog No. 166

Turkish and Israeli Talks - Recent Developments

Occasional Series