Should Economists be sued for malpractice?
It is relatively easy for economists to debate efficiency issues e.g. when we discuss privatisation.
But when we are discussing a host of particular economic issues – such as the distribution effects of labour market deregulation, or the role of health care, or the role of investment in education, or why a government stimulus is needed (when interest rates are up against the zero bound) – one problem keeps coming up. Has economics now become so “mathematized and divorced from moral philosophy” that it is no longer concerned with trade-offs between equality and efficiency? (Something Greg Mankiw recently reminded of this).
Does it now mean that, within the Paretian framework, there is no reason why a person B does not need to care about the effect of government public policy on the welfare of another person B – so long as person B can theoretically be made materially better off?
This leaves us with an economics literature that “few people …can truly understand, either in its content or its relevance the important moral and economic arguments that confront us today”?
Read the comments by Maxine Udall in http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/02/should-economis...
