Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
When my son, Joshua, was three years old, he reflected on what he would like to be when he grew up. He thought maybe he would be an “aphosopher,” or perhaps he would drive a gravel truck, or maybe he would “ride horses and shoot animals.” Out of all the adult careers he knew, he was trying to figure out which he preferred. He has since considered other alternatives, and he is not a philosopher nor a truck driver nor a killer cowboy.
This book is about preferences, principally as they are and ought to be understood in economics, but also as they figure in everyday language and action, as they are understood in psychology, and as they figure in philosophical reflection on action and morality. It clarifies and assesses one concept of preferences and its role in explaining, predicting, and evaluating behavior and states of affairs, particularly in economics. Its assessment of what economists do – that is, of the ways in which they invoke preferences to explain, predict, and evaluate actions, institutions, and outcomes – is largely positive. Its assessment of what economists say about what they do is less favorable, and it criticizes some misconceptions that distort the interpretations economists have offered of their practice. Along the way it articulates some of the relations between the version of rational choice theory that economists employ and accounts of human action discussed by philosophers. This book also assembles the materials out of which models of preference formation and modification can be constructed, and it comments on how reason and emotion shape preferences.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Preference, Value, Choice, and Welfare , pp. ix - xivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011