Paal Kvarberg (Recognised Student, University of Oxford)
Public Models of Welfare: On the Validity of Composite Welfare Indices and the Legitimacy of using them for Appraisal of Public Policy and Social Progress
A hybrid event for Uehiro Oxford Institute Members and Associates (booking not required).
Abstract
What knowledge is relevant to appraisal of policy and social progress, and how should public agencies interpret and present this knowledge to stakeholders and decision makers in liberal democratic countries? Spurred by deep criticism of traditional economic metrics of social progress as well as recent concerns over declining trust in the ability of scientific experts to guide public policy, this question has become a pressing concern to policymakers. This presentation addresses a series of interconnected issues related to this overarching question, beginning with the extent to which expert policy guidance should incorporate value judgements and contestable causal theories in appraisal of policy and social progress. Many have challenged the legitimacy and validity of public evaluative frameworks incorporating strong policy guidance in the form of comparative policy appraisals along a single North Star metric (Fabian et al. 2022; Thoma 2023). In a discussion of this critique, I identify criteria relating to political legitimacy, scientific validity and pragmatic feasibility which are relevant to evaluating public evaluative frameworks and defend the ideal of strong policy guidance on the grounds that it better satisfies these criteria than its alternatives. These criteria are used to evaluate models of welfare which may inform the development of composite welfare indices. The upshot of this discussion is that a value-alignment approach which seeks to incorporate the values of citizens into a public model of welfare (Haybron & Tiberius 2015; Alexandrova & Fabian 2022) compares favorably to preference satisfaction (Sunstein 2018) and subjective well-being (Layard and De Neve 2023) models.
Please attend in-person if you can. If you need to join online, the Zoom link is available from the Institute's Internal Google Calendar, or on request from axelle.duquesnoy@uehiro.ox.ac.uk
