General Approach and Application of Metaeconomics

(Last update: 04/01/03.  You are at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA)

• Applicable to  problems normally analyzed using microeconomics, while also widening the field 
• Use methods for testing developed in social psychology for measuring attitudes and social norms: Metaeconomics posits the measurement of latent multiple utility with these indices.
• Default from testing the null hypothesis "no other-interest" is microeconomics.  If the other-interest norm, or commitment to an other-interest,  is not found a substantive factor, microeconomics  better explains the target behavior. 
• Especially applicable in economic policy and law (as well as regulation, and rule-making). Law is largely a reflection of the joint voice of the people, the norm(s) as it were, with policy flowing from law (or leading to it) reflecting these norms underlying the pursuit of the other-interest. 
• Metaeconomics holds the potential to be a more true policy economics, in that it suggests the reality that policy is about norms. As philosopher John Dewey  purportedly said, it is values that are the "one thing worth disputin."  We perhaps need to dispute them within an economic framework.
• Specific applications, see list of metaeconomics papers, especially Lynne and Casey, 1998, suggest that:  environmental regulatory policy from the top down does not generally work  
• Applications also suggest that using only a market mechanism will not work, either.  
• The same applications suggest that economic incentive payments can also be inordinately expensive when norms are not understood/ modeled in economic analysis of cost share/ other incentive programs. 
• Metaeconomics suggests the focus in environmental policy be shifted away from both government control and from the market, to the complex middle ground: Build community, with shared values and norms.
• See:  "Agricultural Industrialization: Metaphors by Which We Live (See Review of Agricultural Economics paper)." Value shifts in the USA make the current path of industrialization questionable. Food system wide megalogues are needed to ensure a viable food system.  
• Farmers/ranchers at the bottom of the chain are in special difficulty.  Even though food is in high demand,  prices at retail do not move with farm prices, giving empirical support for the need for megalogues. 
• Metaeconomics focuses attention on the ethics of profit sharing within the food channel, without controlling said distribution, and suggests it is economically efficient and rational to consider the joint other-interest in sharing profits.
• See a Seminar Presentation about integrating thermodynamics and socioeconomics, Methodology and Worldview: New Directions in Resource and Environmental Economics  (PowerPoint  presentation).
• See a discussion paper on Enhancing Rural Social Sciences:  Macro Forces.  (Encouraging dialogue about building the Rural Studies potential at UNL / in the NU system).
• See an application of metaeconomics ideas to the question of balancing Outreach and Service as someone moves toward tenure:   Service Responsibilities:  When to say "YES"  --- How to Say "NO  (Also, PowerPoint presentation)
• See Social Capital, Rationality and Community, a University of Nebraska - Lincoln Interest Group
• See Websites on Carbon Storage and Markets; Water Conservation and Markets for further applications of metaeconomics.
• See Seminar Presentation:  "The Human Side of Water Conservation."   Presented on March 7, 2001, in the UNL Water Resources Seminar Series (PowerPoint presentation).

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