Ultimately I understand that the reward structure in academia may not get the optimal set of ‘economic knowledge’ out, but I don’t really know much about that so I wouldn’t want to guess either way. Your argument for it sounds convincing though, so I’d be apt to agree with you in the light of no more information.

Also I was stating that I didn’t send you the article in any sign of attack (in fact I enjoyed your discussion in the post about hotels and the disabled), I just thought you might enjoy it 😉

As I am repeatedly told, there are three types of articles: there are theoretical articles which advance our theoretical understanding of a topic; there are practical articles which are directly useful to the political economist; and, there are theoretically practical articles, which apply known theory to problems which are of no practical use to anyone. The last category is useless, but very popular among economists because it is by far the easiest sort of paper to write.

Huh, I just sent you the paper because I thought it was interesting 😉

“but I feel that the normative judgments should inform our science, not just the other way around”

None of this rules out that economists choose what to study based on what issues are important on the day. The purpose of the positive – normative split is to define what part of our analysis is descriptive, and what part is value-laden.

Robin believed that ‘economic science’ should be solely positivist, as he was one of the positivists around during the positivist revolution in the sciences. However, he realised that we have to include value judgments before we can provide policy advise in most cases.

The distinction is useful insofar as its allows economists to agree on a set of fundamental ‘facts’ before applying value judgments to make policy – in other words it is useful because the value judgments we make are transparent.

No-one thinks it is possible to analyse a problem without value judgments – hell even physics has given this up. However, the distinction is useful insofar as it guides our method and provides transparency.

But I don’t see this as a huge problem. I think plenty of policy is so poor, and deviates so substantially from economic principles, that there is plenty of scope to recommend policies that are likely to improve welfare in all but the most bizarre sets of utility schedules. I also think that a lot of policy stems from beliefs that are either demonstratably wrong, or demonstratably founded on false principles. Economics can go some way to correcting these things.

“For an economist to study the science of economics without considering the constraints of what is politically possible is to render his science irrelevant”.

I’m unconvinced that this is much of a constraint. NZ has gone from strongly socialist to a paragon of free-market economics (and some of the way back again) in under 30 years. Marx and Friedman both espoused radical economic philosophies long before either was put into place. Throw out the assumption that we’ll remain in a democracy, and the constraints seem even less binding.

But anyway, public choice economics seems to deal quite substantially with what kind of results the political process is apt to produce.

I do like economics that seeks to test theoretical results empirically (although there are plenty of important results to come out of pure theory). But economics is hardly lacking in unresolved problems, so I think there is plenty of room for economists to derive results outside of a normative framework. Just thinking of macroeconomics, most of the policy framework seems to be consensus these days, but there is plenty of scope for research that improves our forecasts or our knowledge of macroeconomic interactions.

None of this abstracts from the fact that our normative views color our research agendas (and thus potentially our research results). Economics always faces the challenge of proving that results were derived in an objective framework rather than a normative one. Unfortunately that kind of criticism normally comes from sources poorly placed to assess the objectivity of the assumptions that underly economic modeling.

To call you on your belief in the importance of normative judgments, what specific steps could economics/economists take to improve the situation?