Professor Paul Dolan, Professor of Economics, presents his Inaugural Lecture: The public gets what the public wants but how do we value what society’s got?
Abstract: In their song Going Underground, The Jam sang that “the public gets what the public wants”. Typical of their lyrics, they were largely right. Markets are particularly good at satisfying our wants, or desires. In valuing non-market goods, such as health and the environment, economists have developed methods which seek to express what we want in relation to different future profiles of health etc. The trouble is that there is good evidence that we make systematic errors when we predict how things will affect us in the future. As a result, some economists are beginning to value non-market goods by considering the effect they have on how much we enjoy life. The Jam said they wanted nothing that society’s got but in this lecture I will show that valuing what society’s got using enjoyment might lead to better public policy decisions than basing valuation on the satisfaction of our desires.
Biography: Paul Dolan is Professor of Economics at Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London. The general theme of his research activities is how individual and social well-being should be defined, measured and distributed for the purposes of informing public policy. He has held academic appointments at the Universities of York, Newcastle and Sheffield, where he became Professor of Economics in 2000. Professor Dolan was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Economics in 2002 for his contribution to health economics and was a visiting fellow at Princeton University in 2005.
A pre lecture tea will be served in the Lower Ground Foyer, Tanaka Business School from 16.45.