“If you consider preferences exogenous, then it seems that a system that is efficient in a Pareto sense should be stable. By definition, nobody is worse off, and so everyone has a stake in system.”

Pareto efficiency != stability. Imagine a cooperative game in which any two of three players can dictate the allocation of X dollars. All distributions are Pareto efficient, but none of them are stable, since there always exists a blocking coalition to any proposed allocation.

Another example would be the peasant-dictator game. The equilibrium is for the peasant not to work, but that outcome is inefficient – they would both be better off if the peasant worked and gave some amount between 0 and X-c (where c is the cost of working and X is the surplus) to the Dictator.

Still, I see your point that preference endogeneity makes welfare analysis particularly difficult.

Your last question is a great one:

The trouble I’m having with folks who seem obsessed with the problem of specious stability is that I can’t quite make out what they’re using as the standard by which they wish to evaluate the quality of our present preferences.

This is what I’ve never gotten about the post-modernists, post-structuralists, post-fill-in-the-blank-ists: if everything is socially contructed and entirely relative, why lean left? Why oppose free market transactions? Why say that the employer-employee or salesman-customer relationship is any more oppressive than the community-individual, democracy-voter relationship? I’ve got no huge objection to the po-mo’s other than their strange preferences for social democracy, which, apart from a small handful like Rorty, they don’t admit is any more arbitrary than anything else (and even Rorty is not so great when it comes to things like “democracy” reinforcing its own legitimacy).

I think the Pinker pro-natural selection version of Chomsky is just about right. I believe in something like UG,and am a nativist about it.

Most of the work on endogenous preferences is leftwingish. Gintis & Bowles lead the field, I think. And there’s that book from the Z magazine guy. Bob Cooter at Berkeley may be your best bet for a more libertarianism persepctive. And of course there’s Hayek on cultural evolution and selection. Look at Doug North’s new book, too.

(I have absolutely no idea whether Chomsky is right or not; I just hear people say that he set the agenda, but was ultimately wrong.)

Also, I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind back-channeling me
( tpw a t alum dot dartmouth dot org)
Part of what I’m working on now involves adaptive preference change and equal opportunity, so I’m interested in cites for lit on endogenous preference change, particularly lit that might balance a more a more ‘leftist’ perspective.

But the key to this bit of Rawls in on p. 41 of the second edition of TJ.

“Now one may think of moral theory at first (and I stress the provisional nature of this view) as the attempt to describe our moral capacity; or, in the present case, one may regard a theory of justice as describing our sense of justice. . . .

“A useful comparison here is with the problem of describing the sense of grammaticalness that we have for sentences of our native language.[cite to Chomsky] In this case the aim is to characterize the ability to recognize well-formed sentences by formulating clearly expressed principles which make the same discriminations as the native speaker. This undertaking is known to require theoretical constructions that far outrun the ad hoc precepts of our explicit grammatical knowledge. A similar situation presumably holds in moral theory . . .”

This passage together with the cite to Chomsky make it pretty clear that Rawls is thinking of our sense of justice as something like a universal moral grammar.

But the key to this bit of Rawls in on p. 41 of the second edition of TJ.

“Now one may think of moral theory at first (and I stress the provisional nature of this view) as the attempt to describe our moral capacity; or, in the present case, one may regard a theory of justice as describing our sense of justice. . . .

“A useful comparison here is with the problem of describing the sense of grammaticalness that we have for sentences of our native language.[cite to Chomsky] In this case the aim is to characterize the ability to recognize well-formed sentences by formulating clearly expressed principles which make the same discriminations as the native speaker. This undertaking is known to require theoretical constructions that far outrun the ad hoc precepts of our explicit grammatical knowledge. A similar situation presumably holds in moral theory . . .”

This passage together with the cite to Chomsky make it pretty clear that Rawls is thinking of our sense of justice as something like a universal moral grammar.

(I have absolutely no idea whether Chomsky is right or not; I just hear people say that he set the agenda, but was ultimately wrong.)

Also, I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind back-channeling me
( tpw a t alum dot dartmouth dot org)
Part of what I’m working on now involves adaptive preference change and equal opportunity, so I’m interested in cites for lit on endogenous preference change, particularly lit that might balance a more a more ‘leftist’ perspective.

I think the Pinker pro-natural selection version of Chomsky is just about right. I believe in something like UG,and am a nativist about it.

Most of the work on endogenous preferences is leftwingish. Gintis & Bowles lead the field, I think. And there’s that book from the Z magazine guy. Bob Cooter at Berkeley may be your best bet for a more libertarianism persepctive. And of course there’s Hayek on cultural evolution and selection. Look at Doug North’s new book, too.

Your last question is a great one:

The trouble I’m having with folks who seem obsessed with the problem of specious stability is that I can’t quite make out what they’re using as the standard by which they wish to evaluate the quality of our present preferences.

This is what I’ve never gotten about the post-modernists, post-structuralists, post-fill-in-the-blank-ists: if everything is socially contructed and entirely relative, why lean left? Why oppose free market transactions? Why say that the employer-employee or salesman-customer relationship is any more oppressive than the community-individual, democracy-voter relationship? I’ve got no huge objection to the po-mo’s other than their strange preferences for social democracy, which, apart from a small handful like Rorty, they don’t admit is any more arbitrary than anything else (and even Rorty is not so great when it comes to things like “democracy” reinforcing its own legitimacy).

“If you consider preferences exogenous, then it seems that a system that is efficient in a Pareto sense should be stable. By definition, nobody is worse off, and so everyone has a stake in system.”

Pareto efficiency != stability. Imagine a cooperative game in which any two of three players can dictate the allocation of X dollars. All distributions are Pareto efficient, but none of them are stable, since there always exists a blocking coalition to any proposed allocation.

Another example would be the peasant-dictator game. The equilibrium is for the peasant not to work, but that outcome is inefficient – they would both be better off if the peasant worked and gave some amount between 0 and X-c (where c is the cost of working and X is the surplus) to the Dictator.

Still, I see your point that preference endogeneity makes welfare analysis particularly difficult.