Perhaps my issues is that is provides inappropriate value judgements. After all, since the left and the right both support “rebalancing”, this makes it sound like a thing we should want. However, it is just a different way of packaging an equity-efficiency trade-off that has winners and losers!

In this context, it makes me very uncomfortable

I don’t have a firm view on this but I lean towards Blair’s. What would convince me is some empirical evidence on what public discourse leads to the best policy outcomes. Until then I don’t really see how we can evaluate the terminology unless it is genuinely misleading. At the moment ‘rebalancing’ seems more like an accessible way to wrap up a complex idea that embodies both descriptive and normative elements. As you acknowledge, there’s nothing wrong with that goal.

Indeed – trade-offs without context are very difficult. Economists are not trained to apply value-judgments or motivate trade-offs – and my fear is that no-one is really trained to apply value judgments to the method of description economists use.

Hence, why I think that this is a discipline in of itself – and attempts to do this through calls to ideas like “rebalancing” are merely bad versions of what is attainable in this discipline.

There must be some attainable “hard core” for communicating economic ideas, where if you can get that across the framework can be used to easily communicate the important element of economic ideas.

I almost see it as a form of “controling the frame”, and being able to strip back layers of the narrative to fit in “contrary arguments” and make the other assumptions transparent. However, it is easier to look at this idea than to understand how to do it.