Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) aims to offer a unified study of philosophy, politics and economics in order to analyse issues such as the (political) tradeoff between equity and efficiency. These three disciplines have been taught together in Britain since the University of Oxford started their PPE programme in the 1920s, and is now offered at many universities around the world. It combines the normative inquiry inspired by political philosophy and insights from political science on the various forms that politics takes with the formal tools of analysis derived from economics. The separation between philosophy and economics, and between philosophy and political science occurred only recently, as in the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill these three disciplines were still united.

In this PPE course, different theories of contemporary political philosophers are studied and evaluated from the perspective of economics and politics. How do these theories operationalise equity? How do they deal with the trade-off between equity and efficiency? And how can they be incorporated in economic models? With respect to politics, to what extent can policies supported or advocated by different political parties be linked to political philosophy? We will focus in particular on Dworkin’s theory of equality of resources and Roemer’s theory of equality of opportunity. Dworkin’s theory makes use of devices such as auctions and hypothetical insurance markets that economists are very familiar with. Roemer has shown that his theory can be formulated in terms of a mathematical economic model and moreover be tested empirically in different domains (e.g. income, education, health care).
 
Format
Lectures and working groups. The assignment entails to read a book from the book list, reading book reviews of your selected book and to give a presentation informing your fellow students what this book is about. The topic of basic income is used for an integrated analysis of its politics, economics and philosophical aspects. Finally, during the course students will be trained and triggered to find their way in the PPE-blogosphere.

Assessment method
•       Written exam (70% of the final grade);
•       Presentation and discussion of topic project (group/individual assignment, 30% of the final grade), see book list.

Effort requirement
80% attendance at the lectures and tutorials. 

Assumed knowledge
This course builds on Microeconomics, Institutions and Welfare (ECB1MI), Economics of the Public Sector (ECB2EPS) and uses methods from Mathematics (ECB1WIS). 

In case online access is required for this course and you are not in the position to buy the access code, you are advised to contact the course coordinator for an alternative solution. Please note that access codes are not re-usable meaning that codes from second hand books do not work, as well as access codes from books with a different ISBN number. Separate or spare codes are usually not available.