Opportunity meets self-constitution
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Opportunity meets self‑constitution Christian Schubert1 Received: 24 July 2020 / Accepted: 17 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In his book “Community of Advantage,” Robert Sugden elaborates upon his opportunity criterion that is supposed to be rooted in economics’ liberal tradition, while also being compatible with basic behavioral economics insights, particularly into the inconsistency of real-world preferences. Some missing parts are identified in that criterion, and an alternative criterion is suggested, which is informed by Buchanan’s notion of individual self-constitution. Keywords Opportunity criterion · Preference learning · Buchanan · Agency JEL Classification D91 · D01 · D04
1 Introduction Robert Sugden’s book “Community of Advantage” (Sugden 2018) sums up and continues work he has engaged in over the last 20 years or so, when he set out to construct an approach to normative economics that is both rooted in economics’ liberal tradition and compatible with basic insights of behavioral economics. At a fundamental level, behavioral economics challenges standard normative or “welfare” economics1: Specifically, the lack of well-behaved or “integrated” preferences—along with all kinds of well-known older objections (e.g., Hausman and McPherson 2009; Hausman 2012)—make preference-satisfaction decidedly unattractive as a measure of well-being.2 Real-world preferences are evolving and context-dependent—in one word, they are too messy to serve as a reliable foundation on which to build evaluative statements on economic outcomes and processes. In their stead, Sugden 1
I will use those terms interchangeably. For Hausman and McPherson (2009), preferences express an agent’s subjective evaluative judgments about alternative outcomes; as such their satisfaction does not constitute well-being. Rather, those judgments provide information on (or indicate) what does determine that agent’s well-being. 2
* Christian Schubert [email protected] 1
German University in Cairo (GUC), Cairo, Egypt
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puts people’s chances to choose out of as many options as possible—a notion he calls the opportunity criterion. This made its first prominent appearance with Sugden (2004).3 His is an explicitly contractarian approach, with the ambition to offer a notion of improvement that every single citizen can readily accept as serving his or her interests. Sixteen years on, work at the intersection of welfare economics and ethics that is explicitly informed by behavioral insights is still rare—which makes Sugden’s contribution all the more valuable and inspiring. In this note, I will try to give a very brief summary of what I consider to be the key points of Sugden’s opportunity criterion. Then, I will outline what, in my view, is missing in his approach. I think the missing parts are relevant insofar as they risk making the whole criterion less attractive to the general public than might be the case with the alternative approach that I
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