Economists typically assume that preferences are fixed - that people know what they like and how much they like it relative to all other things, and that this rank-ordering is stable over time. But this assumption has never been accepted by any other discipline. Economists are increasingly having difficulty arguing that the assumption is true enough to generate useful predictions and explanations. Indeed, law and economics scholars increasingly acknowledge that preferences are constructed, and that the law itself can help construct preferences. Still, fixed preferences are often treated as a normative ideal: Even if people don't have fixed preferences, they should. Behavioral law and economics scholars offer approaches to deal with this normative shortcoming. My article argues that preference construction, properly understood, is not normatively undesirable. Having fixed preferences means having a complete and stable rank ordering of what we want that dictates our choices. But we often do not have such an ordering, and rationally so. My article argues instead for an alternative process-based, account of preference construction. Rather than having a complete rank ordering, we have ways of making choices. We construct narratives, using evaluative criteria against a backdrop of wants, desires and inclinations, some of which we rank order and some of which we do not. The evaluative criteria embed a consideration of transaction costs: critically, where a decision is not very consequential, a formulaic decision rule that permits a ready choice among roughly comparable alternatives may serve our purposes better than a more considered alternative-by-alternative assessment. Our wants, desires and inclinations are for both traditional objects of choice and higher order values and desires; they are both previously constructed and constructed and elicited in the choice-making process. My article makes the case for such an account's potential explanatory power, as well as its tractability.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1311506_code702020.pdf?abstractid=1288652

The Rationality of Preference Construction (and the Irrationality of Rational Choice)

The chapter is based on new empirical data collected through primary surveys and in-depth interviews with Indian skilled migrants in Europe and with returnees in India. The study found that Indian skilled professionals, scientists and students are contributing to their home country while they are abroad and after they return. These contributions are manifested in various channels of engagement including financial remittances and investments, social capital, knowledge transfer through diaspora interventions and physical return. The chapter highlights the development aspirations of skilled Indians in Europe and illustrates the transnational actions they engage in to transfer knowledge and promote positive linkages. While Indian skilled professionals, students and researchers in Europe link their development aspirations to their return plans, and believe that Indian society can benefit from the knowledge and expertise they accumulate overseas, the reality is that they are faced with several obstacles within the local system in India. They also encounter difficulties when transferring the specialized knowledge and technical skills gained abroad after they return.

/pdf/knowledge-transfers-through-diaspora-transnationalism-and-1nstnfhuh6.pdf

Knowledge Transfers Through Diaspora Transnationalism and Return Migration: A Case Study of Indian Skilled Migrants

To reverse “brain drain”, the Chinese governments have deployed various mechanisms, including preferential policies, to recruit ethnic Chinese individuals from abroad who are considered top talent urgently needed in China. This study looks at how Chinese overseas recruitment policies contribute to the construction of overseas talent as a distinguished social group, thereby entrenching stratification in the Chinese society. Theoretically, the thesis is informed by Bourdieu’s theory of social class and by Levinson et al.’s perspectives on policy function. The main focus is the Thousand Talent Plan (TTP), which is the China’s most influential policy for recruiting top-notch talent from abroad. My study starts with a historical overview of talent policies in China, giving special attention to the social and economic context of the changes. Critical discourse analysis is then employed as a methodological approach to examine how such policies ideologically differentiate the “best from the rest.” I argue that Chinese overseas recruitment policies have the formative power to construct and impose a legitimate vision of “top” overseas talent as a distinguished social group: a minority privileged with cultural capital, advantageous economic capital, privileged social capital, and honourable symbolic capital. Study limitations and implications for policy and practice are discussed.

“Top” overseas talent as a distinguished social group : a policy study using critical discourse analysis

Migrants from the Promised Land.

Amidst the constant emphasis on identifying the variables for development, increasing importance is now being attached to highly skilled migration, resulting formations of diasporas, and their role in negotiations at a national and international level Diasporas are of special interest, and they have become a vital concern at a global level, in part because of their potential developmental impact in the home countries This is specifically pertinent for the Indian diaspora, which comprises 25 million people spread over 130 countries, making it the third largest in the world after the British and the Chinese This chapter looks at the different programmes and policies that the Indian government has implemented to convert overseas Indians into partners of national development In seeking to explore the extent to which these efforts have been successful or not, we examine the diverse ways that skilled Indians in Europe contribute to the development process of India We discuss the views and suggestions of both the Indian diaspora and returnees as to what needs to be done to provide an enabling setting for diaspora engagement The conclusions indicate that the Indian government needs to be more sensitive to diaspora needs and to build a trustful relationship with the diaspora Furthermore, there is a need for an environment in India that is conducive to diaspora engagement if the contributions are to materialise substantially

Diasporic Paths to Development: An Indian Perspective

The long held exogenous view of preferences constitutes the underlying core of educational decision making in neoclassical economics. This paper is organized in three sections. The first section presents the conceptual and empirical difficulties with the notion of preference adopted in neoclassical economics and its implications to higher education. Section two offers a critical appraisal of psychologists’ efforts, grounded in empirical studies, to revise the concept of preference. The third section critically examines the issues and argues that neither standard economics, mainstream psychology, nor their ‘convenient’ fusion is able to adequately portray the educational preferences. Hence, it becomes imperative to ask how education preferences are formed; and how do the social-psychological processes shape the formation of higher education preferences.

Making of Higher Education Preferences: A Critical Appraisal

Research into different aspects of migration has expanded significantly over the last few decades paving the way for dialogue of a more interdisciplinary nature. This has not only resulted in a diversity of migration-related topics but it has also seen migration scholars adhering to a diverse range of methods. Today, we can see how issues related to the return of highly skilled migrants to their countries of origin and the ways in which they can contribute to the development process have become the subject of many studies. Likewise, scholars have been attracted to the study of diasporas and their potential contributions to development. In the case of Indian skilled migration, it has become important to deliberate upon the strategies and the specific methods that are used to assess the role played both by the diaspora and by returnees in home country development. This chapter provides an overview of the methods that were used for carrying out a recent research study on Indian skilled migration. Given the technical nature of this chapter on Method, we have restricted our discussion to the sampling procedure, the tools employed in the study, the operational definition of the target group and the data collection procedure used. Information is also provided on the key sample characteristics in order to supplement the discussion. Three questionnaires were developed for the study which allowed us to observe three sets of highly skilled Indians at the same time, diaspora, returnees and non-migrants, and to compare their perceptions about returning to India after international exposure. In terms of practical application, our hope is that the study will inform policy-making bodies in both the host and the source countries concerned.

The Role of Highly Skilled Diaspora and Returnees in India’s Development: Data Collection Strategies and Survey Methods

Our particular concern here is with how decolonising psychology is interpreted (or misinterpreted) as well as its implications for making our discipline a truly liberating enterprise. We make three related arguments here: first, colonialism was a joint project between the colonisers and the colonised instead of being a one-way imposition of the worldviews of just the colonisers. Second, the constellation of the values of the colonised societies (before their colonisation) that facilitated the fruition of colonialism continues to be a part of the culture of these societies even after their freedom from colonial rule. Third, a version of indigenous psychology that is based on simplistic binaries such as Indigenous vs Western, Local vs Global, or Self vs Other is bound to fail in achieving the goal of substantive decolonisation. Moreover, there is a politics of indigeneity too as Edward Said in his classic Orientalism (1978) has argued that the concept of the orient itself was a construction of the West for an ideological purpose. Therefore, it is ultimately argued that the project of true or substantive decolonisation can be accomplished only by attaining a proper understanding of self and culture and this goal can be achieved by collaborating with others. Further, the culture of a society may be viewed as a set of disparate, often contradictory values which help to keep a check on the excesses of certain cultural tendencies by offering an internal critique of it. This way of looking at culture calls for viewing it as a dynamic process and necessitates a dialectical approach to examine the nature of the relationship between contradictory values of a culture. In this effort, the methodology of critical cultural psychoanalysis helps us to recognise the dialectical relation between the conscious and the unconscious/repressed aspect of the culture of the societies of the coloniser and the colonised and work through them to expand their consciousness by recovering/owning the repressed/disavowed aspect of their self. Finally, it is argued that like colonisation, substantive decolonisation will also involve a collaborative process between the colonisers and the colonised whereby they can recognise and own their selves in entirety.

Umesh L. Bharte

Papers

Diasporic Paths to Development: An Indian Perspective

Making of Higher Education Preferences: A Critical Appraisal

The Role of Highly Skilled Diaspora and Returnees in India’s Development: Data Collection Strategies and Survey Methods

Working Through the Politics of Indigeneity: Decolonising Psychology by Way of a Dialectical Approach