I was struck by a blog post from The Economist a couple of weeks ago that discussed the necessary politicization of academic arguments in macroeconomics. The post argues that macroeconomics (and I would argue all of economics) needs to be a politicized field in order to settle academic disputes:
“[A]s scientists, they have an obligation to state their hypotheses as clearly as possible, to make testable predictions whenever possible, and to be rigorous and transparent in gathering evidence to support or falsify those predictions. But macroeconomics is also inherently political, and the practitioners who seek to ‘politicise’ their ideas and make them a political reality play as vital a role in the advancement of the field as the scrupulously apolitical academics who never write a public word outside a peer-reviewed journal.” Fundamentally, economics involves considering how society organizes itself to enhance well-being in the population. This is, at its heart, a political activity; people will have disagreements about the best ways to organize, and, in the modern era at least, they will largely use political means to settle those differences. As the beginning of the fall semester draws near, however, my mind has been focused on preparing my courses and, after the summer of Brexit, on the appropriate role and responsibility of economists as teachers, at least at the introductory level. That is, if one accepts that academic arguments will be necessarily politicized, how should one treat such ideas in the classroom while still respecting and encouraging independent thinking by students? Wrestling with these ideas is a work in progress, but I have thought through a few principles that seem to work well when discussing methodology and epistemology with students. First, I strongly reject the notion that economics should be seen as a “value-free science” as many economists would like. Portraying the discipline in this way is, I believe, both intellectually lazy and misleading. If economists are prescribing what is “best” for society, then it necessarily implies some sort of conception about how to rank alternatives, and that criteria for ranking requires value judgments. Using Pareto-optimality as a criteria, for example, is generally considered to have a status quo bias. More famously, making GDP growth a primary macroeconomic goal prioritizes the market transactions that are included in the measure while ignoring things like home production or environmental degradation that may have an impact on economic well-being, too. Most academic work, even if the author claims to be apolitical, will be at least an implicit endorsement of some value-based concept. As the post cited above notes, however, having values does not mean abandoning social scientific principles. If one advocates for a policy because they believe it will have certain impacts, one should be willing to change that recommendation if methodologically sound work does not show those impacts. The best example of this is, perhaps, the minimum wage, which most economists long argued against on the grounds that it would reduce employment because people are working for a higher wage than the market would otherwise assign them. However, many empirical studies have shown that this is not the case for “moderate” minimum wages. Most economists have therefore changed their opinions on the matter. Focusing on this approach to teaching, where values are transparent and there is an openness to change as further evidence is gathered, leads to good intellectual habits in students. They can learn to be clear about stating assumptions and constructing a rigorous and logical argument to support what they are saying. This can also help them to more critically think about their own views, which are often vague and inconsistent economic models largely taken from their parents – things like: deficits are always bad or government spending is always bad. Of course, it should go without saying that teachers should do their utmost to respect differences of opinions between themselves and students. But this does not prevent us from challenging students to make intellectually rigorous arguments, no matter their place on the political spectrum. It may be helpful to think of this as an investigation of ideology, which I do not think is a “bad” word. An ideology is a lens through which we view the world; it is the theory that fills in the gaps between pieces of empirical evidence and assigns relative importance to that evidence. Without ideology, empirical findings about the world have no connection, and we cannot have a coherent view of society and the economy. The goal of economics education at the introductory level should be, through the teaching of various concepts and skills (which can have lots of side benefits for things like professional development), to enable students to have a clearer and more consistent ideology. Learning about economic concepts may almost inevitably lead to some near-consensus on policy questions (like the notion that something should be done to reduce CO2 emissions to avoid widespread economic damage from climate change), but it is not faculty responsibility to tell students what that ideology should be. None the less, through leading by example, it is likely that, for many students, their professor’s ideology will rub off a little. This means that all the more care should be taken in how material is presented and discussed in class, not so that the professor gives equal weight to all political sides in an argument – that’s nonsensical for something like climate change or the gold standard – but so that students understand why a certain group of economists holds a given position. In so doing, my hope would be that economists can help produce a more thoughtful citizenry ready to express preferences for better policy than we have been seeing in many places.
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AuthorEconomist. Professor. Environmentalist. Archives
July 2017
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