Jeff is a distinguished economist. He decides to run for political office as a conservative. Doug is also a distinguished economist, and he's running for the same office as a liberal. Assuming they both accept economics consensus, how might their economic policy views differ?
Yes, I know "conservative" and "liberal" are squishy, political weasel words that don't have concrete definitions. But I do still see people in this subreddit using those terms to refer to specific economists. I can easily see two economists accepting a "positive" claim, but using it to make different "normative" claims based on their political philosophies. That's what I'm interested in learning about.
What would a "conservative" economist and a "liberal" economist disagree on in economic policy?
byu/fantasiavhs inAskEconomics
Posted by fantasiavhs
3 Comments
Anything involving interpersonal comparisons. Both my mentor and I studied income redistribution. We agreed on the facts, including the high cost of redistribution. But we disagreed on whether redistribution should be scaled up or down, because we effectively used different social welfare functions to compare utilities. He was more of a straight utilitarian (society’s welfare is the sum of utilities) so fairly conservative, while I was more of a Rawlsian (society’s welfare is the min of all utilities) and so I endorsed a bleeding-heart liberal platform. Both positions are consistent with the same facts and analysis.
Assuming they’re both genuinely talented technical economists, they’d likely agree on things that “are” true. Ie what the impacts of a minimum wage are. They’d likely disagree on whether those impacts are desirable or not.
Economics doesn’t give you answers as such, it gives you a framework to think about questions.
The purpose of this sub is to answer questions about economic theory and research. Discussing the differences in political ideologies, even if it’s the political ideologies of theoretical economists, is outside of that purpose.