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2015 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

The Merits of Merit Wants

verfasst von : Richard Sturn

Erschienen in: Individual and Collective Choice and Social Welfare

Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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Abstract

Merit wants are a multi-faceted concept cutting through a complex array of problems associated with different levels of analysis. They are considered in this paper as a shorthand notion for concerns that are respectable and important, assuming a broadly individualist conception of welfare. So why are merit wants not a firmly established part of modern normative economics, given that simplifying, but still meaningful notions are suitable as conceptual starting point for a research program? In this paper I try to link the answer to this question with making explicit three levels of problems (limits of reason, higher order preferences, collective choice) which may be useful to locate and scrutinize various interpretations of and approaches to merit wants.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Unequal Exchange, Assets, and Power: Recent Developments in Exploitation Theory

Nächstes Kapitel An Extraordinary Maximizing Utilitarianism

For an even narrower version of subjectivist individualism endorsed by Libertarian/Austrian Economics, the qualification added in parenthesis must be dropped (cf. e.g. [18, pp. 3–26]).

Broad rationality including reflective preferences can be taken into consideration in a manner which takes individualist concerns seriously and is combined with a clearly critical (but not a priori dismissive) stance regarding the normative status of reflective preferences. An example in case is the discussion of reflective preferences, p-preferences and m-preferences by Brennan and Lomasky [10], located in a merit wants context.

Andel [1, p. 635] credits Mugrave’s graduate student Charles Tiebout for having been involved in suggesting an analysis of merit goods based on “psychic” externalities [40, p. 414].

The contingent empirical fact that many people factually endorse an in-kind transfer policy similar to one which is, say, inspired by Rawls’s [28] conception of basic goods or Sen’s (e.g. [33, pp. 86–89]) capabilities and functionings could be taken as evidence that pertinent evaluative standards are supported by actual moral sentiments. That kind of support may be considered as important in the context of a theory of “justice as the first virtue of social institutions”, as Rawls [28, p. 3] puts it.

See Andel [1, p. 636] for a useful summary of the turn of the merit wants discussion towards the issue of so-called Pareto optimal redistribution in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In a programmatic article, Sen [31] discusses a whole range of issues pertinent to this level of merit want analysis, including the possible role of higher order preferences.

The status of minimal libertarianism is analyzed by Baigent [3].

A referee suggested to comment on the terminological ambiguity of merit wants vs. merit goods. In keeping with the German-language Public Finance tradition, in his early contributions Musgrave used the notion of merit wants as well as social wants (for public goods). As he was eager to get rid of terminological heritage which might hinder the development of a unified micro-based theory of market failure, he soon adopted the now common terminology. This terminological shift included merit goods, even though the latter are mostly explained in terms of properties of individual values or preferences, whereas rivalry and excludability are properties of goods rather than of wants.

Other authors using the concept of merit wants were not so much interested in conceptual issues but in implications not least for the economics of taxation. See e.g. Pazner [26], Besley [9], Schroyen [29], Capéau and Ooghe [11].

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Titel: The Merits of Merit Wants
verfasst von: Richard Sturn
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Buch: Individual and Collective Choice and Social Welfare
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-46438-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-662-46439-7

Copyright-Jahr: 2015
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46439-7_16

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