Morten Luchtmann’s thesis defense

Event details :

Thesis title: The Creation of Rational Addiction as a Descriptive Concept and a Political Fiction

The jury is composed of:

• Mr Samuel Ferey (University of Lorraine – Thesis supervisor)
• Mr Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay (University of Lorraine)
• Ms Agnès Gramain (University of Lorraine)
• Ms Catherine Herfeld (Leibniz Universität Hannover)
• Mr Jean-Sébastien Lenfant (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University)
• Mr Pedro Teixeira (University of Porto)

Astract: This PhD thesis investigates the history of recent microeconomics, taking the rational addiction model of Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy (1988) as a case study. Our main objective is to describe how the model provided was innovative in two ways. First, we argue, the model provided an economic description of addiction; second, as a “political fiction,” the model provided a neoliberal view of addiction that was compatible with economically-liberal government principles, such as consumer sovereignty. Historiographically, we look at the rational addiction model as a “host of practices.” We describe the practices that are contained in the model and we compare how they were perceived in different research communities. Although Becker’s work on addiction provides the central threat of this thesis, we use different methods to contextualize his and his co-authors contributions on addiction.

The thesis is structured into three Parts. In Part 1 we provide a social-institutional prehistory of the rational addiction model by focusing on the household production framework, a theoretic framework in which the rational addiction model was first formulated. We document how the household production framework has been developed within an intellectual community at the NBER in the 1960s and 1970s. Using historiographical concepts like thought collectives and thought styles, we stress the social-institutional relations in which Becker became the intellectual leader that he was when he became involved in modeling addiction.

In Part 2 we focus in depth on the practices that were contained in the rational addiction model and we compare how they fitted in the existing literature on habit formation in formal demand models. First, we trace how habits entered into formal demand models in the post-WWII decades as a means to make static estimations more dynamic. While habits were at first modeled as a mechanism that limited present choices through the path dependency of past consumption, they became a more complex mechanism in intertemporal utility models as agents were also assumed to take in account the future effects of their habit-guided present consumption. We describe how the rational addiction model fitted in this literature and in which ways it was as a case of practice innovation.

In Part 3 we focus on the reception of the rational addiction model. We compare how the model was discussed and taken up among three different intellectual communities: among behavioral psychologists, among applied health economists, and among behavioral economists. By showing how in each of the three communities the model was perceived differently, we document associations that have been ascribed to the rational addiction model going beyond the purely descriptive aspect. We argue that our presentation of the creation and dissemination of the model illustrates well how microeconomic concepts often have meaning and significance going beyond the purely descriptive.