Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a

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4. Critiques and Debates 203 Before analysing the reach and limit of the capability approach in these various endeavours, a few general comments are in order about economics in general, and welfare economics in particular. Let us first ask: what is welfare economics? As Sen (1996, 50) writes, “Welfare economics deals with the basis of normative judgements, the foundations of evaluative measurement, and the conceptual underpinnings of policy-making in economics”. While, in practice, much of the economics discipline is concerned with policy advice, welfare economics is nevertheless a small subfield of economics, and is by some prominent welfare economists seen as unduly neglected or marginalised by mainstream economics (Atkinson 2001). One important reason is that welfare economics makes explicit the inevitable normative dimensions of economic policy analysis and evaluations, and most economists have been socialised to believe that ‘modern economics’ is value-free, and that anything to do with normativity can be outsourced to ethics or to a democratic vote. In reality, however, the imaginary science-value split that mainstream economists would wish for is, for many economic questions, impossible (Reiss 2013; Hausman, McPherson and Satz 2016). It would therefore be much better to face this inevitability upfront, and understand economics as a moral science (Boulding 1969; Atkinson 2009; Shiller and Shiller 2011) rather than as applied mathematics or a form of value-free modelling. But in economics, as in any other discipline, there are complicated sociological processes conveying views about authority and status, as well as unexamined beliefs about what ‘good science’ is and which type of objectivity is most desirable: one is not born an economist, but becomes one through one’s training, which is in part also a socialisation process (Colander and Klamer 1987; McCloskey 1998; Nelson 2002). Unfortunately, there is empirical evidence that many economists are unwilling to engage with these fundamental questions and hold on to the belief that economics is superior to other social sciences and has little to learn from other disciplines (Fourcade, Ollion and Algan 2015). Many economists who are interested in economic questions but are not endorsing the myth of value-free social science, or who crave more methodological and meta-theoretical freedom, have left for another discipline that offers
204 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice them those liberties. 15 After all, economists do not have a monopoly on economic topics, and there are many questions about such topics that are analysed by economic sociologists, economic historians, political economists, economic geographers, and economic philosophers. In my view, one cannot analyse the reach and limits of the capability approach in welfare economics if one does not acknowledge the high levels of discontent and methodological conservatism within economics, which cannot be found in any other discipline that engages with the capability approach. With this background in mind, we can now proceed to ask whether the capability approach can make a difference to welfare economics. First, in section 4.10.2, we will look at the main theoretical contribution of the capability approach to welfare economics: its contribution to the development of non-welfarist welfare economics. In section 4.10.3 we will analyse what kind of empirical analyses a capabilitarian welfare economics could make, and what its challenges and possibilities are. Finally, in section 4.10.4, we analyse what challenges the development of a heterodox capabilitarian welfare economics would face. The main theoretical contribution of the capability approach is that it contributes to the development of post-welfarism or non-welfarism in welfare economics. Welfarism is the position that social welfare depends exclusively on individual utilities, which are either understood in a hedonic or in a desire-satisfaction sense, and this has been the dominant position in economics for a long time. Post-welfarism broadens the informational basis of interpersonal comparison with non-utility information, such as deontic rights, or objective information such as people’s functionings and capabilities. In a series of publications, Sen has offered strong theoretical arguments to move from welfarism to non-welfarism (sometimes also called ‘post-welfarism’) and has inspired other welfare economists to work on a post-welfarist welfare economics 15 There are plenty of academic economists who have moved to history, development studies or philosophy in order to enjoy the greater methodological and paradigmatic freedoms in those disciplines.
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Contents Acknowledgements 3 1. Intr
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3. Clarifications 89 3.1 Introducti
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4.7 What about power and political
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Acknowledgements 5 the capability a
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1. Introduction Many people who en
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1. Introduction 11 Moreover, it bri
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1. Introduction 13 Countries Outsi
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