ABSTRACT Twenty years ago Leif Lewin made the case that altruistic motives are more common than selfish motives among voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. We propose that motives and beliefs emerge as reactions to immediate feedback from technical-causal, material-economic, and moral-social aspects of the political task environment. In the absence of certain kinds of technical-causal and material-economic feedback, moral-social feedback leads individuals to the altruism Lewin documents, but also to righteousness (moralized regard for the in-group and disregard for the out-group) and (...) myopia (disregard for distant consequences). The mix of altruism, righteousness, and myopia increases the focus on winning the next high-stakes election rather than on discovering or enforcing socially productive institutions. (shrink)

An individual's preferences are interdependent when they can be influenced by the behaviour of other agents. This paper analyzes the internal dynamics of an approach in contemporary economics allowing for interdependent preferences, the extended utility approach, which presents itself as a mild reform of neoclassical economics. I contend that this approach succeeds in broadening the policy perspectives of mainstream economics by challenging neoclassical policy stances. However, this success comes with a limitation: the EUA is unable to supply new consensual policy (...) stances as alternatives to the challenged ones. The reason for this limitation is that the EUA opens the possibility of a wide variety of specifications for the utility function, and policy conclusions are sensitive to the details of these specifications. (shrink)

Over the last decades, empirical research on subjective well-being in the social sciences has provided a major new stimulation of the discourse on individual happiness. Recently this research has also been linked to economics where reported subjective well-being is often taken as a proxy measure for individual welfare. In our review, we intend to provide an evaluation of where the economic research on happiness stands and of three directions it might develop. First, it offers new ways for testing the basic (...) assumptions of the economic approach and for going about a new understanding of utility. Second, it provides a new possibility for the complementary testing of theories across fields in economics. Third, we inquire how the insights gained from the study of individual happiness in economics affect public policy. (shrink)