Robert Sugden, professor of economics at the University of East Anglia, is the winner of the American Philosophical Association’s 2019 Joseph B. Gittler Award.

The Gittler award, established in 2007, is given annually in recognition of “an outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences. The range of the social sciences is construed broadly so as to include anthropology, economics, education, government, history, psychology, sociology, and any other field that is normally located within the social science division in contemporary colleges and universities.”

Professor Sugden won the the $4,000 prize for his book, The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist’s Defence of the Market (Oxford University Press).

The award selection committee said, “Robert Sugden’s book is a significant and powerful defense of a theory of the foundations of economics, which attempts to derive fundamental axioms and theorems of welfare economics from a contractarian approach in which the criterion of individual interest is not the satisfaction of preferences but rather opportunity.  The result is a defense of a regulated and psychologically/socially stable market economy (as opposed to a planned economy). Sugden offers an argument for what is mistaken about neoclassical economics and its problematic reliance on a preference-satisfaction criterion of individual interest.”

More information about the award, including a list of previous winners, can be found here.