Barbara. She is also a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.
Lundberg applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, How Economics Discovered Women: Bringing Gender Economics into the Twenty-First Century, and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test gets only a partial pass. This book is a history and critique of how the growth of gender economics since the 1970s has been hampered by the persistence of simple conceptual models in the face of an explosion of empirical research that contradicts them. A reader of page 99 would be dropped into the middle of a discussion about preferences that is more formal than most of the book, but that illustrates the most important theme—that it’s time to revisit some of the foundational assumptions of economics.Visit Shelly Lundberg's website.
Economic analysis focuses on how behavior responds to changes in constraints such as prices and regulations with the preferences of these actors simply taken as given and unchanging. To economists, people want what they want and getting what they want increases their wellbeing. This assumption makes our theories very simple and is foundational to our evaluations of social programs, but runs counter to extensive evidence that, in fact, preferences are molded by social forces and evolve in response to economic and political events.
This assumption has been debated in economics in the past, but without generating any substantive change. Page 99 occurs in the middle of a discussion of one past attempt to shift the discussion—Amartya Sen’s rejection of a traditional approach to assessing the wellbeing of women in societies in which their ambitions and independence have been stifled for generations—he argues that, since gender norms are adaptive and respond to cultural pressures, the fact that women acquiesce to these constraints do not imply that freeing them would not improve their wellbeing.
Page 99 begins with philosopher Martha Nussbaum placing Sen’s critique in the context of an older questioning of economics’ non-judgmental approach to preferences. What if preferences are based on misinformation? Are clearly irrational? What if someone’s preferences are downright wicked? This discussion needs to be revisited, since,…many models of domestic violence in economics attribute this phenomenon to, at least in part, the preferences for violence of the perpetrator. If we treat all preferences “on a par” for purposes of welfare analysis, then we are forced into the uncomfortable position of concluding that efficiency requires a positive quantity of violence between some intimate partners. (p. 99)This is abhorrent, and recent work on domestic violence has been relentlessly atheoretical in response, but we can’t tiptoe around the problem forever—the contradictions between facts on the ground about the role of gender in economic behavior and our models need to be faced.
--Marshal Zeringue