Reasonable Homunculi Can Disagree: The Impossibility of Welfare Economics

I’ve just uploaded a new working paper, which is a slightly edited version of a chapter from my thesis, to SSRN. Here’s the abstract: This paper draws on the “preference reversal” literature in psychology and behavioural economics to argue for the impossibility of welfare economics. The effect of normatively-irrelevant contextual factors shows that humans do [...]

Quote of the Day: Mises Edition

Another from the “I want to make a note of this for future reference and a blog post seems like the easiest way to do it” files. From Theory and History, chapter 7: In the world of reality, life, and human action there is no such thing as interests independent of ideas, preceding them temporally and [...]

Where my Georgists at?

Many libertarians accept that government, and therefore taxation, is necessary. If taxation is unavoidable, the economically literate libertarian should prefer a tax system with minimal distortionary effect and injustice. I think the Georgist idea of a single tax on the unimproved value of land is clearly the best tax on both counts, but is seldom [...]

Holcombe on the Foundations of Welfare Economics

I haven’t yet read it, but this paper by Randall Holcombe in the latest Review of Austrian Economics, ”A reformulation of the foundations of welfare economics“ looks like a very important contribution. The abstract: Neoclassical welfare economics takes an outcome-oriented approach that uses Pareto optimality as its benchmark for welfare maximization. When one looks at the [...]

Smoking Bans and Norms

Henry Farrell has an excellent post at Crooked Timber on smoking bans and public norms: I haven’t seen any research on this (if someone knows of any, let me know in comments), but my best guess in the absence of good evidence would be that the success of the ban reflected instabilities in previously existing [...]

Quote of the Day: Bigotry and Utilitarianism Edition

There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a religious bigot when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their abominable [...]

Pluralism, Subjectivism, and Welfare Economics

Some recent posts by Rauparaha at The Visible Hand in Economics have got me thinking about the problems of subjectivism and value pluralism in welfare economics. Rauparaha is using widely-accepted methodology and taking the conventional view on this, so my criticisms are not directed at him particularly, but at the general approach taken by most [...]