4.0

Average Course Rating

What is economic justice? What does economics have to do with ethics? And how should a society concerned with the wellbeing of its members choose between multiple ‘equally efficient outcomes’? These are some of the main questions we’ll be tackling in this course. One of John Maynard Keynes more famous quotes appears in the final pages of The General Theory and encapsulates the motivation behind this course. It goes, “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood...Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” While there’s no doubt a bit of exaggeration in the above quote, it is true that at the core of the study of Economics as the ‘science of scare resource allocation’, are value judgments, birthed from moral (and consequently political) philosophy, so deeply embedded, that we often, naively, erroneously and deleteriously, assume that they are not there at all. This course is, in part, an advanced introduction to welfare economics: the branch of economics concerned with understanding how to assess and improve wellbeing of members of society. It incorporates debates and insights from other fields of economics and philosophy and has influenced theory and practice in many fields of economics, including political economy, public economics, development economics, environmental economics, labor economics and feminist economics, to name a few. The goals of this course then are to ensure that by the end of it, you are able to understand, assess and critically examine the philosophical origins of contemporary economic theory and ideas, the debates among them and the implications of these theories and debates for considerations of welfare, equality, justice and freedom across a variety of economic events and policy topics.