senian

Some thoughts on Sen:

Underlying this skepticism towards the mainstream is not just dissatisfaction with what some see as an overly abstract, formal, and technical approach but, also, a much deeper suspicion: namely, that economists’ approach to human behaviour has- with their simple models and rigid conceptual framework-often been a spectacularly narrow one, an approach that is merely a "limited fragment of the whole"...

In 1987 Sen wrote a profound book entitled ‘On Ethics and Economics’ that reminded economists who were unaware of their own tradition that the origins of economics-or at least one of the origins- lay in moral philosophy (or what might loosely called ‘political economy’). It is worth recalling that it was only around the 1930’s , or possibly the early 1900’s if we include Pareto’s work, that economics made some headway in purging itself of psychological content and ethical considerations-or what some thinkers, perhaps taking the lead from the logical positivists, called "metaphysical nonsense". This development is famously encapsulated in Lionel Robbins’ words:

"It does not seem logically possible to associate the two studies [ethics and economics] in any form but mere juxtaposition"

Sen’s observations here are acute: not only should we be aware of the plural nature of the substantive theories of utility (is it happiness, desire-fulfillment, or pleasure?) but in practice, the tendency to assume that utility is both one’s welfare and the maximand in choice behaviour leads to the unlikely conclusion that one always sets out to maximize one’s welfare. This seems unreasonable because we may have limited cognitive capacities and foresight, or we may have limited information, time, and experience to make a sound evaluation of what is good for us; and even if do know what is good, we may still prefer what is bad, or lack the will to choose the good...

Amartya Sen’s work has reached a fairly wide audience in no small part as a consequence of his critique of utilitarianism, the dominant tradition in welfare economics, and his pioneering of another perspective which he called the "capability approach".