Philosophy of Social Sciences

How should one discount utility across time? The conventional wisdom in social science is that one should use an exponential discount function. Such a function is a representation of the axioms that provide a well-defined utility function plus a condition known as stationarity. Yet stationarity doesn’t really have much intuitive normative pull on its own. Here I try to cast it in a normative glow by deriving stationarity from two explicitly normative premises, both suggested by the philosophical thesis of temporal neutralism. Putting the argument in this form helps us better understand exponential discounting and challenges to it.

Several authors have recently argued that the overly strong focus on equilibrium models in mainstream economic analysis prevents economists from providing accurate representations of the complex and dynamic nature of real economic systems. In response, this paper shows that, since many economic systems are the products of more or less deliberate and centralized human design, there are reasons to think that many economic systems are, in fact, often well represented with equilibrium models. People can and do build and support social institutions so that they create predictable economic systems—i.e., ones that have stable equilibria.

There remains no consensus amongst social scientists as to how to quantify and understand forms of information deprivation such as misinformation. Measures of information deprivation typically employ a deficient conception of truth that should be replaced with measurement methods grounded in certain idealized norms of agreement about what kind of information ecosystem a society’s participants wish to live in. A mature science of information deprivation should include considerable democratic involvement that is sensitive to the value-ladenness of information quality and that doing so may enhance the predictive and explanatory power of models of information deprivation.