Pat Gunning wrote:
>In reply to John Medaille about economics
>necessarily being value laden, my guess is that
>he would regard physics as value laden also.
I have already responded to the question about physics in a previous post.
> The question is: If economics is all value
> laden, then how can we economists ever reach an
> agreement about anything unless we share the same values?
Excellent question. It seems to me that
economists from different schools don't agree on
very much, and the problem is that they assign a
different function to economics and hence start
with different values. But since they don't
always recognize their starting positions as
value-laden, they talk past each other. Values
can be discussed and compared, if one recognizes
that as the question. Otherwise, the conversation
gets lost because the participants don't realize the real subject.
>In fact, agreements have been reached by very
>good economists who have very different values.
>
>No Nobel Prize winner of physics of whom I am
>aware believes that all physics is value laden.
>And no Nobel Prize winner of economics of whom I
>am aware believes that economics is all value laden.
I am not sure that Amartya Sen would agree with
you. Nor would all physicists, for reasons I laid
out in my previous post.The arguments in physics
between "realists" and idealists are legendary.
Einstein could never reconcile himself to quantum
mechanics because they violated his sense of
order in the universe. "God does not play dice,"
he responded to Niels Bohr. Whatever side one
takes in that debate, it is not "value-free."
>Now if these bright people don't believe this, I
>say (appealing to authority, if I must) that I
>need pay no attention to those like John who
>have these strange beliefs about values.
But you assert that your own view is value free.
This is simply impossible. The values we bring to
economics will depend on whatever function we
assign to economics (or vice-versa). If we view
the role of economics as the mere accumulation of
goods, we will have one set of values. If we view
it as the means to the end of the proper and just
material provisioning of society, we bring
another set of values. Recently, someone said to
me that the "The goal of economics is to evaluate
arguments for and against market intervention."
That may or may not be true, but it is certainly
not value-free. Milton Friedman agrees with you,
yet he claims that the only "social
responsibility" of the firm is to enhance
shareholder value. A value-free statement? I don't think so.
Historically--and from the time of
Aristotle--economics has been a colony of ethics,
and no philosopher or theologian worth his salt
would refrain from writing on economics. Only in
the 19th century does the idea of an ethics free
economics become a dream. As Jevons put it, the
lack of a �perfect system of statistics � is the
only � obstacle in the way of making economics an
exact science�; once the statistics have been
gathered, the generalization of laws from them
�will render economics a science as exact as many
of the physical sciences.�[1] We have had more
than a century of statistics since Jevons, yet
economics has come no closer to physics--either
real physics or what economists imagine physics
to be--then we were in Jevons' day.
>Of course, I need not appeal to authority. The
>epistemological basis for economics has been
>described quite well by Mises in his ULTIMATE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE.
That sounds like an appeal to the authority of
Mises. But epistemology is not a field in which
Mises, as an economist, had an expertise; if he
is advancing his claims as a philosopher, that is
one thing, but it is a field about which
economists must defer to others. Samuel Bostaph
traces the differences in economic schools to
different epistemologies, which is certainly part
of the question (although not, I think, the whole
of it). But to the degree that it is true,
economics roots itself in something outside
itself. Empiricists will have one view,
platonists another, critical realists a third,
metaphysical realists a fourth, and so on. A book
by Mises would hardly be dispositive of the question.
[1] James E. Alvey, "A Short History of Economics
as a Moral Science," Journal of Markets and
Morality 2, no. 1 (Spring, 1999): 62.
John Medaille
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