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