If you are dealing with a democratic organisation, or one where the members like the American Declaration of Independence, or go in for political correctness, that assumption might be useful.

It seems to me that there are other cases where it is not such a useful assumption. Ignoring the views of the old is common: they will be dead soon anyway – so their opinions don’t matter. Ignoring the views of the young is common: they are too inexperienced to know better – and so on.

In some circles, idea that “everyone is equal” is considered to be politically-correct nonsense – and if you are offering economic advice to groups of such folks, “efficiency” seems unlikely to be a good selling point.

http://arare-litus.blogspot.com/2009/04/efficiency-is-it-meaningful.html

I meant that it is easier monitor whether whether a simple heuristic is implemented than to monitor whether complicated arguments are implemented. Also, assessing the arguments for a heuristic is a one-time cost, while checking that new arguments are not trojan horses is an on-going cost.

Economists should continue to offer better advice than a simple heuristic can offer, and eventually prove ourselves worthy of being followed.

That completely ignores the public choice issues: better for whom?

The obsession isn’t with Sen’s example; the obsession is with why people give it any attention in the first place, since it’s so useless and so misleading as to be wrong. It amounts to saying:

1) Two arbitrary rankings can be different.
2) If you call one of them “liberty”, despite this being the opposite of what everyone means by the term, then liberty is bad.

And Sen isn’t saying that there’s a barrier to these potential deals; he’s saying the deals violate liberty!

Hint to Sen: If your position requires that waiving rights is the same as violating those rights, you made a mistake somewhere.

Heh — exactly who says this? Maybe I read the wrong sites or interact with the wrong people, but I rarely find anyone outside of econ giving considering economists “highly” (not that the converse is true, just that where is the “data” for this presumed reputation, cause I don’t see it).

The more that economists agree, and the further from politically charged topics, the more your can trust their advice.

HEH, to write this sentence in the current financial crisis is very amusing. Perhaps you ought to ask your colleagues on the religion of deregulation and what happened with that. It didn’t seem that there was much disagreement on this topic until things blew up.

As Phil mentioned — Taleb and many others seems to think very lowly of economics in general — so I find it puzzling you think economists have a good rap — cause I’ve never see anything to suggest that.

Economics influences market processes (perhaps more than it influences political ones?). Trusting a liberty heuristic or trusting some economists doesn’t seem to be mutually exclusive choice to me (especially since economics is a smorgasbord of ideas).