I very much appreciate and thank Sumitra Shah for her last post.  I   
did not intend "bleeding heart" to be understood as a term of abuse.   
The Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1980, 117) has a definition   
closer to what I had in mind: "one who shows extravagant sympathy esp.   
for an object of alleged persecution."  The comments I was responding to   
were about poor workers being paid "slave wages," which they had "no   
choice" but to accept.  
  
When one appreciates that the "poor worker" would be worse off in the   
absence of such an opportunity to work, it gets one to think differently   
about the employer.  Many a life and property have been destroyed,   
especially in the Third World, because too many people have failed to   
think about or interpret carefully such choice situations.  
  
I think it is the way we perceive life's choice situations that leads to   
our taking different sides on the income distributional fence, even with   
the same degree of technical competence in economics.  Note that there   
are Nobel Laureates in economics on either side of the ideological   
divide.  That is why I argued against the inclusion of "normative"   
issues, as Shah had suggested, in the definition of economics.  
  
BTW, macroeconomics entails studying the *consequences* of individual or   
collective choices for the economy as a whole: the price level,   
inflation, unemployment, growth, recessions, etc.  
  
James Ahiakpor