If one is an egalitarian, what should one want to equalize? Opportunities or outcomes? Resources or welfare? These positions are usually conceived to be very different. I argue in this paper that the distinction is misconceived: the only coherent conception of resource equality implies welfare equality, in an appropriately abstract description of the problem. In this section, I motivate the program which the rest of the paper carries out.

When economists pay homage to the wisdom of the distant past (not the most common of professional exercises) it is more likely that a work two decades old is being admired than one two centuries old. Economics is a science, and the sciences are noteworthy for their digestion and assimilation of the work of previous generations. Contributions remain only as accretions to the accepted body of knowledge; the writings and the writers disappear almost without trace. A conspicuous exception to this rule of professional cannibalization is Adam Smith. Since 1776 he has not lacked for honors that have escaped even his most illustrious peers. Who, after all, wears a David Ricardo necktie? So to the author of The Wealth of Nations, all praise!

Ever since its first publication in 1970, Amartya Sen's paper “The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal” (reprinted in Sen, 1982) has served as the starting point for almost all discussions of liberty in social choice theory. However, a number of people, myself included, have argued that Sen's theorem rests on a misleading characterization of liberty (Nozick, 1974, pp. 164–166; Bernholz, 1974; Sugden, 1978, 1981, pp. 193–198; Garden-fors, 1981; Levi, 1982). In a recent paper, addressed to a philosophical audience, Sen (1983) has provided a careful defence of his theorem against this charge. I shall argue that this defence does not work.

The study of intrapersonal economic relations, or economics, is still at the programmatic stage. There is no generally accepted paradigm, or even as well-defined set of problems that constitute it as a subdiscipline within economics. Some questions are, however, emerging as foci of interest for a small but increasing number of writers, not just in economics, but also in psychology and philosophy. The writings of Thomas Schelling on self-management, of George Ainslie on self-control, and of Derik Parfit on personal identity testify to this convergence.

In the final sentence of the "Preliminary Remarks" to the Principles of Political Economy (1848), John Stuart Mill declares

The laws of Production and Distribution, and some of the practical consequences deducible from them, are the subject of the following treatise. (1848, p. 21)

It is almost two hundred pages before Mill asserts that

The laws and conditions of the Production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them. … It is not so with the Distribution of wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. (1848, p. 199)

The central argument of this interesting paper is that Popper appears to be inconsistent: on the one hand, he preaches methodological monism-scientific method in the social sciences is identical to scientific method in the natural sciences-and on the other hand he advocates “situational analysis” as the unique method of the social sciences. Situational analysis is nothing but our old neoclassical friend, the rationality principle-individual maximizing behavior subject to constraints-and thus, Popper seems to be saying, neoclassical economics is the only valid kind of social science.

It is easy for a professional philosopher who reads Learner's essay “Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics” to find a great deal in it that seems contentious, cavalier, or objectionable. Philosophers may even be puzzled as to what the fuss is all about. My guess is that the sorts of complaints philosophical readers are likely to make about Learner's paper are more the result of style than substance. The substance is very important.

My essay “Let's Take the Con out of Econometrics” is intended to be an amusing, titillating, and even annoying distillation of ideas that I have published in a more formal, academic style in many different locations over the course of several years. As far as I could tell, these ideas were widely ignored until I adopted the more contentious style of “Con,” which, since its publication two years ago, has been reprinted in two volumes and excerpted in two others. There is something to be learned from this episode about the sociology of ideas. Notoriety, however, is a mixed blessing, since now I find myself spending too much of my time trying to explain what I meant.