A lot of people won’t care about this post – and the ones that do will care a bit too much. So I will keep this relatively short. But just believe me that this post is the first in a series of three that will eventually get to the point 😉
I hope that I didn’t give the impression in my last post that Mankiw actually likes philosophy. If anything, he sounds rather negative. Economists drawing on philosophy when making policy advice is apparently a “dirty little secret”. The point seems to be that making a case for a policy will involve value judgements, often on disputed value judgements about distribution.
Hey, I get it. Just about any substantive policy would help some people but harm others. So how does Mankiw propose to avoid the need to call in some philosophy? His proposed principle is, …. hang on, I had it a minute ago … “[f]irst do no harm”. Eh? Didn’t he just say that government policies pretty much always harm someone?
I guess I must be getting the wrong end of the stick. Perhaps I am failing to distinguish tasty and sweet-smelling type 1 harms from those nasty type 2 harms. Or something. He does give us a couple of hints about what it is all supposed to mean. But I really think we could ask for some more clarity about the normative foundations of his perspective. You know, like doing a bit of philosophy.
A couple of short posts from an anonymous The Hand poster this week – make sure to comment with your views.
Greg Mankiw has an article in the New York Times. It is notable for making explicit reference to literature in normative philosophy. Does this mean that he has been doing some homework? Some of his earlier forays into philosophical territory didn’t show much evidence that he was aware of work in that discipline. Some philosophically literate readers weren’t very charitable about the sophistication of what he came up with. “Low quality freelance philosophy done by people with PhDs in economics” according to Matt Yglegias. A “laughably sophomoric attempt at political philosophy” according to Chris Bertram.
After he finishes his homework, perhaps we can look forward to some better freelance philosophy.
I am trying to gradually clarify my perception of what economics is. Here are some cliff notes from a recent discussion I had:
Economists try to answer questions about “the allocation of resources given scarcity”. Every question is quite specific and different, economics education involves learning a broad set of skills that allow us to tackle questions. To do this economists use models. Models embody a set of assumptions, assumptions that create an “artificial world” that we can deduce conclusions from given these assumptions. We then use data, robustness testing, and rhetorical debate to help us inductively infer conclusions about the real world question we are asking from these artificial worlds.
As a result, economics is a discipline that can discuss a wide range of social questions that range from deterministic statements, to prediction, to description, to exploration – but the answers provided are always conditional on the question asked, and the assumptions we have made for answering that specific question.
Further details can be found in these (in order):
If you know of any literature I should peek at to help inform myself on the status of the accumulation of knowledge and method in the discipline (as there is A LOT of improvement I can do in my understanding here) I would really appreciate it.
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
Economists like to think they’re above politics and deal only with positive questions. Is that really much of a boast?
From the prelude to ‘Fact and Fiction in Economics‘ comes the following gem by Maki:
“Is economics a respectful and useful reality-oriented discipline or just an intellectual game that economists play in their sandbox filled with toy models?”
Variants of these questions fly around all the time. Why are economists making unrealistic assumptions? Why won’t they just assage to “common sense” about the situation? Why are they making the ‘wrong’ choice in some trade-off between looking at the real world and narrative and/or mathmatical beauty?
These questions sound appealing, but in many ways they are often misspecified – not pointless, but without enough content to actually be answerable. As Maki says: