mercredi, mars 29, 2006

Gary Becker, la peine de mort et un critique britannique

Il y a quelques années, j'ai publié un article dans le journa Le Monde un article (article que l'on pourrait rapidement retrouver en fouillant dans les archives du journal, mais il est un peu tard pour que je me lance dans cette recherche) critiquant Gary Becker. Depuis, je lis avec un mélange d'intérêt (ce qu'il est écrit est, naturellement, intelligent), d'agacement et d'envie d'en découvre tout ce que publie ce très distingué professeur de Chicago, lauréat du Prix Nobel d'économie (y compris sur le blog qu'il partage avec Richard Posner, autre auteur "agaçant"). Il est vrai qu'il "n'en rate pas une". Dernière de ces inventions : une défense de la peine de mort qui fait douter du sérieux de tout son programme (qui consiste, pour dire les choses simplement, à mettre les outils de l'économie au service de l'analyse des comportements sociaux : mariage, discriminations…).
Je ne suis bien sûr pas le seul dans cet état d'esprit. Geraint Johnes, qui enseigne l'économie à l'université de Lancaster, est dans les mêmes dispositions. Et puisqu'il le fait parfaitement bien, je me contenterai ce soir de citer sa critique de l'argument de Becker sur la peine de mort :
"Thursday, March 16, 2006 Gary Becker provides an interesting defence of capital punishment. His argument hinges on the deterrence effect. While the strength of this effect is a matter of some debate, he argues that even where less than one innocent life is saved as a result of killing a guilty murderer, society may benefit from capital punishment, since the positive value to society of the murderer is likely to be less than that of the innocent victim. "A comparison of the qualities of individual lives has to be part of any reasonable social policy."

This statement is, of course, far from innocuous - especially so if we remove it from the emotive context of capital punishment. It is particularly controversial because it begs the question of who should make the decision about the qualities of individual lives. If different people are to carry different weights in society's welfare function, how should democracy work? Do currently installed governments have a mandate to make decisions on this? Should the governments now in place therefore allocate variable numbers of votes to members of their populations in time for the next elections? Should these be based on criminal records, access to welfare payments, education, gross income, or contributions to party funds? Under such conditions, democratic government would amount to little other than a one party state. So should it be a dictator that decides on the weights? That would be convenient, to be sure, but one dictator's tea is another dictator's coffee.

Unless Becker can tell us how and by whom the comparison of the qualities of individual lives should be made, his argument is no more than subjective opinion - in his view, we should count some people's lives as worth more than others. In the context of capital punishment, his opinion may have a lot of public support. More generally in the construction of social policy his would be one voice amongst many, and each of those voices would like to be able to dictate.

All this is not to suggest that economists can, or should, refrain from making comparisons of the qualities of individual lives. Indeed we cannot avoid doing so, for assigning an equal weight to each individual involves making comparisons just as does the assignment of unequal weights. But reaching a judgement that at the margin one life is worth more or less than another is something that we should do only in the most exceptional of circumstances, and in full cognisance of the implications. For amongst those implications is the undermining of much of our discipline as we know it. Utilitarianism would be out, and with it much of welfare economics would go. Even the invisible hand, which provides the intellectual foundation stone of free market economies, and which assumes that one agent’s welfare is worth the same as another’s, would be seriously compromised.

Now that's a funny thing to come out of Chicago!"

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