My last post, about whether economists should be the ethical arbiters of society, reminded me of a different but related issue, the distinctive form of fake distributional indifference in bad economics that uses the difficulties and controversies associated with ethical issues to support the status quo. I must have mentioned it before, but I suppose there’s no real harm in a certain amount of repetition. I’m referring to the argument that until economists or others can scientifically, objectively, empirically, logically resolve the controversial issues posed by ethics, especially distributional ethics, they logically must support the status quo. You know the sort of thing I mean. “We economists would love to help make the world a better, nicer, more ethical place, we just don’t know how.” As though they were addressing some great mystery of the world.
A few comments? If I may? Because of the ultimately subjective nature of ethics, neither economists nor anyone else will ever be able to scientifically, objectively resolve the issues of ethics including distributional ethics. Also, as a general point of ethical philosophy, one cannot avoid ethical issues by ignoring them or choosing to do nothing. In ethics, doing nothing is doing something, namely nothing. It has ethical significance. More particularly, economists cannot avoid the ethical controversy associated with revising our system for distributing economic power by not revising it and supporting the current one. The same level of controversy applies.
As I noted last week, it’s not the role of economists to be the arbiters of social ethics. That’s inconsistent with the ethical half-theory structure of neoclassical welfare economics. They’re meant to be indifferent to exogenous ethical issues. Rather than having the hubris (or perhaps ignorance) to suppose they might one day “solve” ethics like a math problem or perhaps with an experiment, economists should concentrate on what economics can offer society in terms of helping society implement its ethical decisions in reasonable, dare one say optimal, ways.
Word to the wise. It’s perfectly fine to say one can’t actually perform miracles of philosophy. One needn’t pretend, be the Wizard Behind The Curtain. One should clarify that which is exogenous, social, subjective, so the people can consider change. One should provide the people factual information or theoretical predictions that may be relevant to their ethical or normative decisions about what the economy should be doing. One should discuss real tradeoffs. Empirically, when X goes up, Y goes down. Theoretically, we expect this or that. Yes, one can use math and logic to do optimization problems contingent on arbitrary inputs, but social ethics requires a solid normative analysis of inputs and conditions including factual premises (“assumptions” in the context of positive models), as well as assiduous attention to the limitations of the conclusions. Many economists are clearly just not up to it. One can use optimization techniques appropriately, of course, but one shouldn’t use it to do clueless, uninformed, irrelevant, baby level ethical philosophy. One should know one’s strengths, accept one’s weaknesses. Stop playing and get real. Do something useful for society.
