Speaking of conflating normative and positive issues, I read a post referencing a bit of old popular folklore about women being “too emotional” to handle certain tasks and it got me thinking about bad economics in the conservative style. Let’s do that this week.
The post I read drew attention to the highly emotional discourse common among male, conservative, right wing pundits and politicians in the USA to challenge the notion women vary systematically from men in terms of emotionality. Seemed a valid point. That in turn got me thinking of a comical image from the world of economics broadly conceived involving male conservative economists and pundits “mansplaining” bad economics in the conservative style to skeptical women, then complaining women are just too emotional to get it. I’m not presenting documentary evidence such a thing ever occurred. I’m speaking from general experience, impressions, now perhaps dated to some degree. If you suppose it doesn’t happen, it’s not a real issue, maybe consider the issue in terms of a rare but possible occurrence?
In the context of bad economics in the conservative style, the fundamental conceit is the dubious, controversial normative, ethical content slipped into neoclassical welfare economics is just a matter of science, math, logic, etc., so if one disagrees, one is being “emotional.” The reality, of course, is one who disagrees is simply evaluating the surreptitiously added normative, ethical material according to one’s subjective moral sense or sensibility, like anyone else, and finding it lacking. Relatively emotionality is not an issue. Of course, the insincere, misleading, opaque, tricksy nature of how normative, ethical issues are handled in bad economics in the conservative style may generate an angry or frustrated emotional response, which may be selectively apparent in those who disagree with the rhetoric. But in that case the implied task one objecting to bad economics in the conservative style would be too emotional to handle would be the task of listening to an insincere or confused charlatan “mansplaining” bad philosophy. Not a task one should be expected to accept, is it? Also, in that area, one might expect a similarly emotional response in those who promote bad economics in the conservative style when they're called out on the fakery, insincerity, falseness of their handling of the relevant normative or ethical content.
To link normative evaluation to the proposed gender issue, I suppose one would have to hypothesize an underlying gender difference in the evaluation of the implicit normative or ethical content in bad economics in the conservative style or in the need for sincerity or honesty. Is it plausible to suggest such a difference? Well, I don’t know. I think maybe yes? Based on systematically different life experience of males and females, including but not only in the context of family, child rearing, etc.? At the risk of being excessively blunt, I suppose it may appear systematically more ethically plausible to males one should accept amorality or a morality based in egoism, ignoring the needs of others and society, than to females. If that were the case, the distinctive normative or ethical content slipped into neoclassical welfare economics in anti-democracy bad economics in the conservative style may lead to normative or ethical conclusions that seem systematically more attractive to males than females. This would then lead to females tending to reject bad economics in the conservative style even without pinpointing the little rhetorical tricks involved, which males who support that normative theory might then falsely cast as an instance of “emotion” overruling reason.
Because of the scientific pretensions of many economists, gender issues in the field of economics are often discussed in the context of positive economics in terms of differential interest in, or facility with, math, logic, science, etc. I wonder if they may be more usefully discussed, or anyway also usefully discussed, in the context of the evaluation of specifically normative economics, real (normative) neoclassical welfare economics, bad economics in the conservative style.
