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