Yeah, seriously. I was talking about Hume’s observation that it’s not obvious how a prescription can be inferred solely from a set of descriptive, value-neutral statements. Taking that kind of inference for granted would be fallacious. I’m aware there’s disagreement about whether there’s such a fallacy, but there’s disagreement about everything in philosophy.
My point was just that I doubt that what you called the welfare models have only normative conclusions without implicitly normative assumptions, as you suggested. At least, I doubt the economists justified those inferences by getting around the naturalistic fallacy (which is roughly the same as the is/ought problem).
Partisanship shows up in economics in the different schools of economic thought, such as in the Keynesian versus the Chicago schools and academic departments. The partisanship will emerge not so much in calculations of numbers, but in the initial assumptions about what exactly to calculate. Everyone knows that statistics can be fudged in that way. And see the article below for a study of more hidden ways in which academic writing in economics is a predictor of the authors’ political ideologies.
Your whataboutism won’t help you here because I never said economists are the only dubious academics. I referred to temptations and firewalls and thus to dynamics that may be more or less present in different fields.
You ask, “Are you going to argue against the economists of today ever?” That’s what the second article is for, “How Modern Economics Still Serves the Plutocrats.”
Eclecticism in post-neoclassical economics goes hand in hand with relativism, agnotology, and thus with a more defensive form of propaganda. These days, I argue, economists resort to a welter of models, which effectively hides their partisanship and the extent to which the earlier, more unified economic discourse only accelerated the rise of American plutocracy rather than ushering in any kind of capitalist utopia. The plethora of new models hides the damage done by the bulk of economics.
The models I was talking about were those that assume an optimal capitalist system that’s never realized, not even in a laboratory. I’m aware other scientists posit abstract relations that aren’t directly observed, but the more tenuous theories in real sciences grow out of more grounded ones. For example, theoretical physicists today posit all kinds of strange things, but that’s because their more mundane work has been finished, so most of what’s left is to consider the furthest frontiers.
The question, then, is whether classical and neoclassical models of capitalism grow more out of reality (data or experiment) or ideology (individualism, libertarianism, social Darwinism, etc).
By the way, I’ve written up another article on economics, this one dealing with the role of self-interest in the invisible hand defense of capitalism. It should appear within a couple of weeks.
Anyway, I can see how frustrating these exchanges are for you. Evidently, you take them much more seriously and personally than I do. You should be advised that none of your personal attacks matters to me. I’m just using the opportunity you’re providing to hone my take on economics. So I thank you for that.
https://wp.nyu.edu/zj292/wp-content/uploads/sites/1011/2014/12/political_language_in_economics.pdf
