February 10
Comments migrated from WordPress:
Specialist290 <specialist290@hughes.net> on 2016-09-23 16:38:06 wrote:
On the one hand, from the purely definitional standpoint, this makes a certain amount of sense.
On the other hand, getting at a deeper issue: Does the fact that economics itself is an objective science mean that a good economists ought to suspend their own sense of moral judgement when making prescriptive recommendations rather than descriptive analyses? Or should the ideal economist (and, by extension, the ideal scientist) be required to refrain from making prescriptions at all, and just “shut up and Science”?
Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-09-24 01:50:38 wrote:
You can have whatever ethical (or other opinions) you like, and make choices based on that when choosing which Initiatives to contract with and how to guide (persuasively) projects you’re involved in. You just can’t pass them off as economics when you’re doing it, because that’s improperly using the imprimatur of your professional reputation and your profession’s reputation to validate statements made outside of it - and that manages to violate professional ethics, the social conventions of well-managed valëssef , and the Technarch’s Code all at the same time.
So you can be as prescriptive as you want inside your field (say, in terms of the economically optimal way to achieve end X within constraints Y; or the purely economic reaction to action Z), but if you want to venture outside of it in the field of prescriptions, you have to be clear that you aren’t talking as an economist .
(Or whatever other field you happen to be in, obviously.)
Specialist290 <specialist290@hughes.net> on 2016-09-26 20:44:09 wrote:
As a semi-related sidenote, I’d imagine a lot of conversations involving Imperial economists must sound something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg
February 10
avatar:
what people want, what people want to want, what people ought to want, and what people ought to want
Is this a typo? The last element is duplicated.
1 reply
February 10
▶ JAPH
My guess at the intended emendation would be “what people ought to want to want”, but I’m not very confident. It certainly looks currently duplicated to me.
[EDIT: remade the post because my attempt at a quote was automatically removed and I had to make it a reply instead. If possible, please delete my previous post; if not possible, I would very much appreciate if JAPH would redo the original post so that we can do the chain properly.]
[EDIT 2: now that the previous post had been deleted, this one no longer shows up as a reply. Ugh.]
1 reply
