What are we investigating?

A glance ahead to the empirical chapters of this book will reveal that we concentrate heavily upon one particular investigative approach. Our approach may at first appear to be unconventional, and so one might well ask what it could achieve that cannot be covered by more conventional methods of economic investigation. Why go to the trouble of developing a specialised strategy for one specialised branch of welfare economics? The short answer is that what conventional methods can do inevitably misses a number of important issues completely: we show that our methodology fills a gap in the body of evidence about values and preferences in economics. We shall also argue that the approach can be useful in other branches of economics.

Consider the nature of ‘evidence’ in economics. The usual form of evidence is simply empirical corroboration – for example, in studies of consumer demand or of firms’ costs. Obviously there is a variety of substantive issues to be addressed before accepting this sort of testimony in any economic debate: there are methodological issues about what constitutes a satisfactory ‘test’ of an economic theory; behavioural models may have to be put into desperately simple forms in order to be estimated empirically; particular data sets may have defects or even be downright shoddy.