Many ethical theories, including in particular consequentialist moral the ories, require comparisons of the amount of good possessed or received by different people. In the case of some goods, such as monetary income, wealth, education, or health, such comparisons are relatively unproblematic. Even in the case of such goods there may be serious empirical measurement problems, but there appear to be no difficulties in principle. Thus Cooter and Rappoport (1984) maintained that there was no serious difficulty of making interpersonal utility comparisons for an earlier generation of economists who regarded utility as an index of “material welfare.”

In a recent article in this journal, Duijf claims to have proved that team reasoning can be viewed as a payoff transformation. His formalization mimics team reasoning but ignores its essential agency switch. The possibility of such a payoff transformation was never in doubt, does not imply that team reasoning can be viewed as a payoff transformation, and makes no sense in a game in which payoffs represent players’ utilities. A theorem is proved here that a simpler and more intuitive payoff transformation can mimic any theory that predicts what strategies players will choose in a well-defined game.

Is the procreation asymmetry intuitively supported? According to a recent article in this journal, an experimental study suggests the opposite. Dean Spears (2020) claims that nearly three-quarters of participants report that there is a reason to create a person just because that person’s life would be happy. In reply, I argue that various confounding factors render the study internally invalid. More generally, I show how one might come to adopt the procreation asymmetry for the wrong reasons by misinterpreting one’s intuitions.

Lexical views in population axiology can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating Transitivity or Separability. However, they imply a dilemma: either some good life is better than any number of slightly worse lives, or else the ‘at least as good as’ relation on populations is radically incomplete. In this paper, I argue that Archimedean views face an analogous dilemma. I thus conclude that the lexical dilemma gives us little reason to prefer Archimedean views. Even if we give up on lexicality, problems of the same kind remain.

Poverty indexes are essential for monitoring poverty, setting targets for poverty reduction, and tracking progress on these goals. This paper suggests that further justification is necessary for using the main poverty indexes in the literature in any of these ways. It does so by arguing that poverty should not decline with the mere addition of a rich person to a population and showing that the standard indexes do not satisfy this axiom. It, then, suggests a way of modifying these indexes to avoid this problem.

Statisticians have proposed formal techniques for evaluation of treatments, often in the context of models that do not explicitly specify how treatments are generated. Under such procedures they run the risk of attributing causation in settings where the implementation neutrality condition required for causal interpretation of parameter estimates is not satisfied. When treatment assignments are explicitly modelled, as economists recommend, these issues can be formally analysed, and the existence (or lack thereof) of implementation neutrality, and therefore quantifiable causation, can be determined. Examples are given.

Through most of the history of economics, the most influential commentators on methodology were also eminent practitioners of economics. And even not so long ago, it was so. Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Trygve Haavelmo, and Tjalling Koopmans were awarded Nobel prizes for their substantive contributions to economics, and were each important contributors to methodological thought. But the fashion has changed. Specialization has increased. Not only has methodology become its own field, but many practitioners have come to agree with Frank Hahn's (1992) view that methodology is a distraction to the practitioner, best left to the professional methodologists and philosophers, and of little practical import even when delivered from their pens. John Sutton's lectures, Marshall's Tendencies: What Economists Can Know, is a welcome return to the older fashion, for Sutton is an eminent practitioner of game theory and industrial organization. One of the main themes of these rich and nuanced lectures – and the one on which I shall focus – is the relationship of economic theory to econometric evidence. Sutton's reflections on econometrics appear to arise from the darker recesses of his practitioner's soul. While he affects a sunny disposition and ends on a hopeful note, his analysis articulates the lurking fear that econometrics is a hopeless project and that economics has little to learn from the interaction of theory and econometrics. Sutton's book is like a play in which virtue triumphs, but the villain gets all the good lines.

This essay begins by summarizing the reasons why unregulated health-care markets are inefficient. The inefficiencies stem from the asymmetries of information among providers, patients and payers, which give rise to moral hazard and adverse selection. Attempts to ameliorate these inefficiencies by means of risk-adjusted insurance and monetary incentives such as co-pays and deductibles lessen the inefficiencies at the cost of increasing inequalities. Another possibility is to rely on non-monetary incentives, including ordeals. While not a magic bullet, these are feasible methods for addressing the inadequacies of market provision of health care, such as moral hazard.