The capacity to choose: reformulating the concept of choice in economic theory
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite being conceived as a 'theory of rational choice', orthodox economics fails to ascribe to human beings the ability to choose in a meaningful sense, something philosophical approaches to economics have long noted and tried to remedy. Tony Lawson's critical realism is one attempt at a remedy. If, following Lawson, one conceives of choice as a 'capacity' of human beings, critical realist analysis suggests a distinction between humans' possession and their exercise of this capacity. If one can sustain this distinction, one should be able to distinguish cases in which agents actually exercise their capacity to choose from those in which they do not. Investigation of this distinction does not, however, lead to the desired distinction between such cases. Consequently, a reformulation of the notion of choice is required. An implication for economic theory - namely, the possibility of conceptualizing 'exploitation' - is discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it