Overview

Grisold and Theine are concerned about what they call endogenous preferences. Endogenous preferences are ones that are shaped by the economic system (Grisold and Theine 2020, 1074).

Textbook economics, by contrast, assumes that people bring their preferences to the economic system. Does this matter? Well, I assume that it would make a difference to how we think of the demonstrations that markets yield efficient distributions of goods if the market mechanism created the preferences of the participants in the market. That seems to be the idea.

As an example of this phenomenon, they study how Piketty’s book was presented in twelve major European newspapers. The idea is that the presentation of research about inequality will shape people’s political preferences about inequality.

What I think

I won’t try to summarize our discussion beyond saying that I appreciated Yasmine’s point about the graphs. It made me realize that the bar charts in figure 1 should have probably been vertical rather than horizontal (Grisold and Theine 2020, 1078). The point of the figure is to invite us to compare the two charts and that would be easier to do if they were side by side. It would also help if the y-axis were the same for both: 0-40 rather than 0-20 for one and 0-40 for the other.

As for the content of the piece, it seems to me that the authors did not show that the presentation of Piketty’s work influenced anyone’s preferences. They have categorized the ways that the book was presented in the twelve newspapers they looked at. But did that make a difference to how anyone thinks? Got me!

We assume that the news media influence how people think. There must be something to that. But there is a fair amount of pressure going the other direction as well. People have strong preferences about what they read and listen to. If the New York Times started publishing articles that were at odds with the values and preferences of college educated people, it would lose readers. This would happen even if those articles contained facts and opinions that those readers would not otherwise encounter. If the readers wanted to learn about the world, they should welcome that. But they don’t. For that reason, I think it is unlikely that a newspaper, TV show, or website could fundamentally shape the opinions of its readers or viewers. People get the news they want.

My guess is that the readers of each of those papers got pretty much the take on Piketty’s finding that they expected and so no one’s minds changed at all.

They might say that it is the whole economic system, or, more plausibly, the whole culture, that works to determine what people want. Media coverage is just one example of how it works. That is true. But it’s a banal point, isn’t it? Our values and beliefs are influenced by the people we live with. Of course they are. There is no other way.

That leads me to wonder about the usefulness of their concept of endogenous preferences. I take it that the idea is that the preferences that are influenced by the market system are not authentic preferences of the individuals who have them. Rather, they are imposed by something outside of the people who hold them, namely, the economic system. But I am not sure there is an alternative world in which people form their preferences without external influence. At least, I think I would need to understand what it would be like in order to decide whether I think endogenous preferences are sinister or benign.

Size of Majors as of Spring 2023

Since it came up, I thought I would put out some facts about the size of the different majors. I got these numbers from the Registrar’s Reports and Statistics page.¹

The first thing to note is that these data contradict what both Prof. Brown and I believe, namely, that Media Studies is the largest humanities major. At the end of the spring 2023 term, it was, indeed, English. Score one for Dylan and demerits for us. (But I could swear I saw something putting Media Studies first recently. These things can change.) Also, Philosophy is a respectable fourth. That is my home team. Woo hoo! Well, my other home team. There were 188 division 1 majors in spring 2023.

When we turn to Division 2, the natural sciences, you can see why Pomona is called a STEM school. There were 439 majors in this division in spring 2023. The sixth largest major in this division would be the largest major in the humanities. And look at Computer Science!

Division three is led by Economics, the second largest major in the College. The numbers for Politics are misleadingly low because that department does a lot of the work for interdisciplinary majors such as EA, IR, PPA, and good old PPE. The alphabet soup majors. Of course, Economists play leading roles in IR and PPE, so assigning exact credit is tricky. Anyway, those two are obviously the heavyweights in this division. There were 205 majors in division three in spring 2023.

Where is PPE? In the interdisciplinary majors. Where in the interdisciplinary majors? On top! Well, for now. Did I say things change? They do. The class of 2024 put us there. Take a bow people! But it is unusually large. There were 182 students in interdisciplinary majors in spring 2023.

Finally, for the sake of completeness, there were 754 students with no declared major in spring 2023.