Abstract
Economics is a multifaceted inquiry into the social relationship among humans in society. This mutifacetedness creates a lack of communication between critics of economics (which includes a large proportion of philosophers and professors with a religious bent) and defenders of what, for lack of a better term, I will call mainstream economics. The problem is that when critics attack economics, their attack generally focuses on the one-dimensional vision of the social relationship of individuals that is conveyed by the principal texts rather than on a much more sophisticated vision of humans and of social relationships held by good economists. The author fully agrees that morals and science are intertwined in a Putnam sense—the questions one asks and the framework one chooses reflects moral choices. But the paper argues that that as a pragmatic way to move forward, that deeper intertwinement can be usefully separated from less deep, entanglements that are more easily understood and recognized.
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Notes
- 1.
I discuss Robbins ’ work in detail in Colander (2009).
- 2.
Whether that sub branch is a science or not depends on the definition of science one is using, and early economists had many different definitions of science. They distinguished pure science from realistic science, and there were many shades of both. Alfred Marshall felt that all economics blended together and chose to call all of economics a science. Others distinguished a science which dealt primarily with logical truisms from broader economic inquiry which they chose to call an art and craft, not a science. I discuss these issues in Colander (1992).
- 3.
Economist’s resolution of these issues goes back to the 1930s when Gunnar Myrdal (1929 Swedish edition; 1932 German edition) pointed out the difficulty of moving from theory to policy. His work was only translated into English in 1952 but it was well known in its German translation. Abram Bergson (1938, 1954) also pointed out that economic analysis needed an externally determined social welfare function to have any possibility of moving from theory to policy implications. Later, Amartya Sen (1970) extended the analysis with social choice theory. It is that work, and the work of their students, to which I refer when I argue that the economics profession has accepted that morals must be integrated into policy analysis. The work of RDG Little (1950) and van Graff (1957) pointed out the difficulties with applying economist’s theoretical model to practice, but that did not affect the belief of economists that they had theoretically solved the problem. The acceptance of the Walrasian general equilibrium model as the basic model for policy pushed all such considerations out of practical economic policy analysis, and the work is hardly discussed in the principles course.
- 4.
An example of what I mean can be found in the debate between Hillary Putnam and Partha DasGupta which I discuss in Su and Colander (2013).
- 5.
Mill (1863) put it this way “The utility standard may be hard to apply, but it is better than having no standard.”
- 6.
This philosophical concept of utility was not something that was designed to be measurable, as some economists later attempted to do with it. It was simply a constructed concept meant to provide moral guidance—to remind policy makers to look at policy from the position of an impartial spectator, not from the point of view of one side or another. That’s why there were two different concepts of utility—one the philosophical concept, utility, utilitarian issues had to be dealt with using a different moral philosophical methodology, not a scientific methodology. (2007)
- 7.
This is a heuristic, not a definitive rule. It accepts that scientific analysis reflects some inseparable moral judgments, but it does the best it can to reduce these as much as it can.
- 8.
- 9.
I am not arguing that most economists have seriously thought about them about them. Welfare economics and methodology is hardly taught in graduate economic programs and thus most economists have little introduction to it. Like most individuals, economist do what they do, and spend little time thinking about broad questions of methodology.
- 10.
One theoretical economist, Ariel Rubinstein, a well known game theorist, and author of a standard text in graduate microeconomics has been very clear about the need to distinguish the moral dimension to economic policy analysis. He writes: “I would like to start with what I believe every academic should do when appearing in public, especially when speaking about political and controversial issues—to clarify the extent to which he is incorporating his professional knowledge in his remarks, when he is expressing views with the authority supported by academic findings, and what part of his comments are nothing more than his personal thoughts and opinions….to the best of my understanding, economic theory has nothing to say about the heart of the issue under discussion here…Because as an economic theorist, I would like to state that economic theory is exploited in discussion about current economic issues, and I don’t like it…, to put it mildly. Everything that I say here, even in an academic context (and I intentionally use the word “academic” since I do not think that the word “scientific” is appropriate for economics) is completely subjective, controversial and therefore perhaps describes me no less than it describes economic theory” (Rubinstein 2012: 13–14).
- 11.
One specific example of economic pedagogy failing is in its failure to deal with the possibility of endogenous tastes. If tastes are endogenous individual’s utility functions are influenced by the operation of the system. In this case, one cannot take preferences as givens. Without some moral input about what tastes are preferable, one cannot say what policy is desirable. With semi-endogenous tastes the entire textbook economic policy foundation is undermined. This would seem to be an important policy issue. Yet, one sees no discussion of that possibility in the economic principles texts.
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Colander, D. (2018). Is Economics a Moral Science?. In: Róna, P., Zsolnai, L. (eds) Economic Objects and the Objects of Economics. Virtues and Economics, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94529-3_6
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