Politics and the economist-king: Is rational choice theory the science of choice?

Journal of Moral Philosophy

Volumn 1, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 177-196

  Landemore, Hélène ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34247121437     PISSN: 17404681     EISSN: 17455243     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/174046810400100204     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. William H. Riker, 'Political Science and Rational Choice', in James Alt and Kenneth Shepsle (eds.), Perspectives on Positive Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 177
2. Readers interested in the ideology of RCT and its historical conditions of emergence, see S.M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
3. Bernard Grofman, 'On the Gentle Art of Rational Choice Bashing', in B. Grofman (ed.), Information, Participation, and Choice: An Economic Theory of Democracy in Perspective (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 239-42
4. See for example Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science Without Legend, Objectivity Without Illusions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)
5. James Bohman, New Philosophy of Social Sciences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 67; emphasis added
6. As in Donald Davidson's philosophy of action, from a RCT point of view, reasons can be causes. See D. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)
7. This seems to be what John Ferejohn and Debra Satz say when they describe the received view of RCT as one for which ' [i]t does not matter what reasons the agent has for her preferences or indeed why she has come to hold them at all' (J. Ferejohn and D. Satz, 'Rational Choice and Social Theory', The Journal of Philosophy 91.2 [February 1994] ,pp. 71-87 [73])
8. Cf. John Ferejohn and Debra Satz: 'On the received view, one cannot be a rational choice-theorist without also being a methodological individualist' ('Rational Choice and Social Theory', p. 73). The authors impute this 'received view' to philosophers, but they acknowledge that this interpretative option is legitimate. In my view this reading is in fact not only legitimate, but also the most 'mainstream' reading of RCT
9. Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 7, my emphasis
10. Cited in Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 32
11. Joseph Heinrich et al., 'In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-scale Societies', American Economics Review 91.2 (May 2001), pp. 73-78
12. E.g. Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky (eds.), Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
13. According to the terminology of Donald Green and Ian Shapiro in Pathologies of Rational Choice: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994)
14. Herbert Simon, Models of Man: Social and Rational (New York: Wiley, 1957)
15. Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter Todd and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
16. Gigerenzer et al., Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
17. Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 21
18. Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell, Fairness Versus Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)
19. The complete strophe, which I cannot resist giving in its entirety, reads as follows: 'Choice of a wife shuts up that peacock-fan/The future was, in which temptingly spread/All that elaborative nature can/Matchless potential! But unlimited/Only so long as I elected nothing;/Simply to choose stopped all ways up but one/And sent the tease-birds from the bushes flying'. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Marvel Press and Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 54
20. Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten (eds.), Bounded Rationality: The Adaptative Toolbox (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001)
21. Cf. The results of tournaments opposing different strategies summarized by Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Cooperation (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1990)
22. Jon Elster, Rational Choice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 26. Noteworthy is the fact that public choice raises somewhat similar problems for RCT. As far as it attempts to combine the individualist and institutionalist, or holist, approaches, it is not entirely consistent; but where the theory is successful, it can no longer be said to be purely 'rational choice'
23. Cf. Lars Udehn, The Limits of Public Choice: A Sociological Critique of the Economic Theory of Politics (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 173
24. Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)
25. Gerd Gigerenzet, 'Striking a Blow for Sanity in Theories of Rationality', in M. Augier and J.G. March (eds.), Models of a Man: Essays in Memory of Herbert A. Simon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, in press)
26. Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization (New York: Macmillan, 2nd edn, 1957)
27. The interesting fact is that looked at in this novel way, apparently stable cognitive illusions can be made to disappear and reappear by varying crucial structures of the environment. For instance, research has pointed to the ecological reasons for people's difficulty in following Bayes's rule when reasoning about conditional probabilities. Bayesian reasoning can be strongly improved when the information is not presented in probabilities but rather in natural frequencies, which correspond to the environmental input that humans have received during most of their evolution. Cf. G. Gigerenzer and U. Hoffrage, 'How to Improve Bayesian Reasoning Without Instruction: Frequency Formats', Psychological Review 102 (1995), pp. 684-704
28. James D. Johnson, for example, denies any convincing success to RCT as a positive science and proposes to redefine it as a 'reconstructive theory' with no predictive ambition. Cf. J.D. Johnson, 'Rational Choice as a Reconstructive Theory', in Kristen Renwick Monroe (ed.), The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical Assessment of the Theory of Rational Choice (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 113-42 (119)
29. Alexander Rosenberg, Economics: Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 235
30. Examples given by Robert Merton, cited by George D. Romanos, 'Reflexive Predictions', in Michael Martin and Lee C. McIntyre (eds.), Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 149
31. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 180: 'For we are dealing with freely acting beings to whom one can dictate in advance what they ought to do, but of whom one cannot predict what they actually will do, and who are capable, if things go really badly and they experience evils incurred through their own actions, of regarding these evils as a greater incentive to do better than they did in the past' (original italics)
32. Cf. J. Kagel, 'Economics according to the Rat (and Pigeons too): What Have We Learned and What We Hope To Learn', in A. Roth (ed.), Laboratory Experimentation in Economics: Six Points of View (New York: Cambridge, 1987)
33. cited in Ferejohn and Satz, 'Rational Choice and Social Choice', p. 77. This type of study suggests that a good theoretical reason to support the axioms of choice in their applications to human beings, even when the latter are repeatedly empirically falsified, is that they work well to describe and predict animal behaviour. But why would one want human beings to act as rats or pigeons? It seems that the legitimacy of this type of study for economics needs to be supported at least by a normative theory justifying the endorsement of animal rationality to not only describe and predict, but also prescribe human behaviours
34. Rosenberg, Economics
35. James B. Rule, Theory and Progress in Social Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
36. In politics, for example, a first-order question would be: 'What conditions foster international peace, and which lead to war and other forms of conflict?' (Rule, Theory and Progress in Social Science, p. 45)
37. Udehn, The Limits of Public Choice, p. 124. The gist of the theory is that, in a two-party system, parties tend to converge on the centre of an ideological continuum to suit the median voter
38. Elster, Rational Choice, pp. 26-27
39. Stephen Marglin, 'Economics as an Ideology of Knowledge', in idem, Economic Myths (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2003), ch. 9
40. In other words, the key to a well-functioning society need not be the replacement of direct democracy with a committee of expert voters; or the education of the electorate, which generally lacks the time and inclination for town-hall meetings and the reading of political prospectus. It might be instead to focus on the dissemination of heuristic cues that have proved able to elevate the slacker to the level of a more informed voter. I borrow these suggestions from a proposal by Michael S. Kang, 'Democratizing Direct Democracy: Restoring Voter Competence through Heuristic Cues and "Disclosure Plus" ', UCLA Law Review 50.5 (1993), pp. 1141-88