David,

Are the following actions by economists science or art? They are
economic science in that they concern statements about how the world
is, yet they have obvious implications for policy.

The government has decided that it wishes to reduce inflation by a
specific amount, and that it wants to achieve this through policies
that do not interfere with certain other objectives. The economist
writes a report in which he or she shows that adopting a certain list
of policies will achieve that objective. Does it make any difference
whether the list of "other objectives" is comprehensive and clearly
specified or vague and even non-existent?

The government institutes a program of spending cuts stating that its
goal is to reduce the deficit, reduce future inflation, and that it
will benefit all groups in society. The economist publishes an article
in the FT arguing that the cuts will fail to reduce the deficit, that
they will have no effect on inflation and that they will make the poor
worse off. Or an article in the AER or Econometrica arguing the same
thing (and using techniques that would be out of place in the FT)? In
this case/these cases, does it make any difference whether the
economist explicitly draws the conclusion, " ... therefore this policy
is flawed"?

Is the difference that if the economist judges policy according to the
government's stated objectives, the economist is engaging in science;
but if the economist judges policy according to objectives that are
not explicitly stated, the economist is combining scientific knowledge
with judgements about the criteria that should be used to evaluate
policy, and is therefore engaging in art? But if that is the
distinction, how do we handle objectives that are not explicitly
stated or are stated imprecisely?

Either all these examples count as economic science, or else the
distinction between science and art seems problematic.

Roger Backhouse