the public gets what the public wants

Professor Paul Dolan’s inaugural is being held at 5pm on 13 February 2008 at Imperial College.

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.