Summary

This paper responds to six contributions to a symposium on my 2018 book, The Community of Advantage. I defend that book's claim that most normative behavioural economics implicitly uses a psychologically ungrounded model of an ‘inner rational agent’. I also defend the claim that, given the contractarian approach taken in the book, opportunity is normatively prior to welfare and to particular ingredients of well-being, such as health and perceptions of agency. I show how the Strong Interactive Opportunity Criterion proposed in the book can be extended to allow comparisons between the extent of opportunity provided by different economic regimes.

Details: Journal of Economic Methodology 28:4 (2021): 419– 430.

Authors:   Robert Sugden