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Los autores quieren agradecer los comentarios de A. Faik Kurtulmus, P.-Ch. Pradier y dos evaluadores anónimos., Exploramos aquí la conexión entre los conceptos de riesgo e igualdad en el argumento del observador imparcial. La concepción de la justicia que elegiría un observador imparcial se justifica por la pureza del procedimiento de elección. Sin embargo, si modelizamos esta decisión utilizando medidas del riesgo habituales en matemática financiera, veremos cómo el criterio de elección del observador bajo el velo de la ignorancia contiene una preferencia implícita por el grado de desigualdad resultante. Esto nos obliga a reconsiderar la pureza procedimental de la elección., We study the link between the concepts of risk and equality in the argument of the impartial observer. The conception of justice that this latter would choose is grounded on the purity of the choice procedure. However, if we model this choice using the standard risk measurements in mathematical finance, there is an implicit preference for the degree of inequality that the chosen outcome will yield. This should make us reconsider the neutrality of the impartial observer's proceduralism., Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN), Depto. de Economía Financiera y Actuarial y Estadística, Fac. de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, TRUE, pub

In this review of A Structuralist Theory of Economics by Adolfo García de la Sienra, the contributions of this book to economic methodology are discussed., En esta reseña de A Structuralist Theory of Economics de Adolfo García de la Sienra se discuten las aportaciones de este libro de metodología de la economía.

This article analyses how the French Academy of Sciences assessed Jaime Ferrán’s cholera vaccine submitted for the Prix Bréant in the 1880s. Ferrán, a Spanish independent physician, discovered the treatment in 1884 and tried it on thousands of patients during the cholera outbreak in Valencia the following year. His evaluation sparked a controversy in Spain and abroad on the vaccine’s efficacy. The Bréant jury did not see any evidence for it in Ferrán’s submission, a decision usually interpreted in terms of French scientific nationalism (or simple chauvinism): an outsider from the scientific periphery could not be awarded the Bréant. Drawing on the archival records of the award, we suggest that Ferrán failed instead to provide data that the Academy could consider unbiased, according to the contemporary standards for data presentation. We will illustrate these standards at work in the assessment of another submission from Spain, by Philipp Hauser, who received the Bréant for the thoroughness of his statistical endeavour.

Randomized controlled trials test new drugs using various debiasing devices to prevent participants from manipulating the trials. But participants often dislike controls, arguing that they impose a paternalist constraint on their legitimate preferences. The 21st Century Cures Act, passed by US Congress in 2016, encourages the Food and Drug Administration to use alternative testing methods, incorporating participants’ preferences, for regulatory purposes. We discuss, from a historical perspective, the trade-off between trial impartiality and participants’ freedom. We argue that the only way out is considering which methods improve upon the performance of conventional trials in keeping dangerous or inefficacious compounds out of pharmaceutical markets.

Experimental balance is usually understood as the control for the value of thecconditions, other than the one under study, which are liable to affect the result of a test. We will discuss three different approaches to balance. ‘Millean balance’ requires to identify and equalize ex ante the value of these conditions in order to conduct solid causal inferences. ‘Fisherian balance’ measures ex post the influence of uncontrolled conditions through the analysis of variance. In ‘efficiency balance’ the value of the antecedent conditions is decided ex ante according to the efficiency they yield in the estimation of the treatment outcome. Against some old arguments by John Worrall, we will show that in both Fisherian and efficiency balance there are good reasons to randomize the allocation of treatments, in particular when there is no agreement among experimenters as to the antecedent conditions to be controlled for.

I analyse cultural relativism as a methodological strategy to correct for ethnocentric biases in anthropological fieldwork. I discuss the format debiasing norms may adopt (rules or standards) depending on whether a discipline has a causal or interpretative outlook. Boas and his school advocated for an interpretative approach to ethnographic fieldwork, in which cultural relativism was implemented as a standard (“Only culturally unbiased reports are admissible”) to be interpreted by expert third parties. Legitimate as it may be as a debiasing method, it does not allow anthropologists to adjudicate their debates on biases in their ethnographic record.