Economics and Ethics: A Rant

Mac asked us to keep the blog alive, so I guess I'll share. This is one of those topics that's been bothering me for a while, but that I really can't talk to people in Wilson about with any depth. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

In the mid-1700s, Francis Hutchenson, one of Adam Smith's instructors at Glasgow, wrote A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy. In the section entitled "The Principles of Oeconomics and Politics," we get a few chapters on marriage and divorce, roles within a household (parent/child, master/servant) and the duties and responsibilities of household members. Otherwise, the section is pretty much devoted to politics. It's only when you get to the section entitled "Elements of the Law of Nature" that you get anything about property, money, and prices. These, apparently, were not a part of "oeconomics."

Hutchenson wasn't being dense. "Oeconomics," as it was understood until about the 1750, mostly had to do with household management, politics, or even management in a more general sense. Xenophon's Oikonomikos was fundimentally a work of ethics, and it is worth noting that Adam Smith himself was primarily a moralist. Economics was not a science, it was a field concerned with obtaining "the good life," starting at the home and later branching out into a larger, national sense on the level of the state.

What's struck me as I read more about modern economics is the almost total reversal that's taken place when we talk about the role of ethics in economic analysis. Economists have an almost painfully self-conscious desire to be scientists, and part of this desire to avoid nonscientific analysis is an attempt to aviod the kind of moral baggage that their forerunners attached to their analyses. Aside from the pure silliness that comes with a man studying social constructs trying to present himself on the same level of material objectivity as, say, a chemist (really, guys? really?), it has some implications that really disturb me.

Economics is all about choice. And in a context where (1) alternatives are pretty loaded, morally (for example, the choice between feeding the poor through social programs or letting them starve until the market corrects itself) and (2) alternatives are laid out with at least the hypothetical expectation of implimentation ("There is no such thing as a free abstraction"), even the apparent lack of preference on the part of the economist represents a moral choice in and of itself. In other words, by presenting "aid the needy" and "let them eat cake" as equally valid alternatives, their respective consequences described without comment, the economist has made an ethical statement, and a fairly disturbing one at that.

Economists try to run from this problem with a weird kind of number fetishism (under the assumption, I suppose, that numbers speak for themselves and therefore do not require an analysis that isn't completely factual), but all that it has really accomplished is to have made the field one of incomplete analysis. So, for example, we talk about GDP because it is easily measured, but we are less comfortable talking about the actual standard of living of the citizenry. We talk about production levels in a capitalist system, but we are less comfortable talking about waste (in contexts other than efficiency within production). These are important issues, but recieve little attention.

As much as I loathe his ideology and his propagandistic techniques, in this sense I really do have a deep respect for Milton Friedman. Friedman did not simply say, "the market is self-correcting, unless its normal fluctuations are impeded by state intervention," but actually went further, interpreted that conclusion as one that implies a certain ideology, and defended the logical ethical conclusions of that ideology. (A less repugnant example of an economist who is also willing to moralize might be someone like Galbraith or Stiglitz, but TASP nostalgia made Friedman hard to resist.)

Economics needs ideologues. Writing that almost makes me cringe, and you can bet that you will never hear me say that about another field as long as I live. But I think it's incredibly important. Fuck "political economy," fuck "social science." We need a "moral economy." Economists are and have always been closely linked to questions of social organization and policy-making. Scientists and mathematicians can tell us how to get where we are going, but they cannot tell us where we must go. For that, we need moralists, we need a vision. In a field so closely linked to politics, it is unspeakably irresponsible to shirk this responsibility.

I know more TASPers than myself are going into Econ, or planning to, at least. For fuck's sake, don't become one of those assholes who creates elaborate models to determine the impact of a 0.1% change in the interest rate. Don't sit around in a pressed suit and ask a table full of identically-dressed balding men whether we're bulls or bears. You, of all people, need to be the ones to shape our world, or to at least have the spine to try.