- Title
- Reviving the living dead : Economic policy with ethical values
- Creator
- Bankovsky, Miriam; King, John E.
- Date
- 2017
- Type
- Text; Journal article
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/165280
- Identifier
- vital:13200
- Identifier
- ISBN:0156-5826
- Abstract
- Philosophers of science have long been interested in articulating how values serve to condition scientific endeavour. In the 1930s and 1940s, a simple notion of verification had initially been employed by economists to support the idea of appraising theory with reference to facts or observables. However, the idea of theory-laden facts complicated this story in the 1960s, when Thomas Kuhn showed how a theory itself determines the nature of the facts that are to confirm or refute it (1962). The specification of what is to be measured, how it is to be measured or tested, and when a measurement is significant, came to be recognised by traditional economic methodologists (including Mark Blaug 1980) as a necessary condition for making any observations whatsoever. Economic analysis was then seen to presuppose the selection of a set of basic values. In the face of post-modernism and value-pluralism, certain economic methodologists (e.g. McCloskey 1983) chose to bracket the difficult problem of justifying these basic values, by limiting economic methodology to a mere description of what economists happen to do and how they happen to argue (Dow 1997: 78). As Sheila Dow explains, the current state of play is one in which economists agree that a selection of values permits the science to proceed, all the while avoiding the question of the justification of these values, by uncritically accepting what economists already tend to do. Although even the indicative and descriptive judgments of econometric analysis are thus premised on a fairly arbitrary selection of values (Ziliak and McCloskey 2008), little attention has been paid to the effect of value-selection on the discoveries of so-called ‘positivist’ economics. This is one important problem with mainstream economics.
- Publisher
- Australian Political Economy Movement
- Relation
- Journal of Australian Political Economy Vol. , no. 80 (2017), p. 178-200
- Rights
- Copyright © Australian Political Economy Movement
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- 12 Built Environment and Design; 14 Economics; 16 Studies In Human Society; Economic policy; Ethical values; Welfare economics; Methodology; Business; Economics
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