Were there any classes in uni that taught you idea of distributive justice or similar ideas that questions the fairness of allocation of resources? Economis always felt to me like a strong deserve all kinda field, cause its its indifferent to origin of resources that rich currently possess. Are Economists just HR department of economy, whose only loyalty lies to keep the economic system up and running?
Does economists study or care about ethics?
byu/mercy_4_u inAskEconomics
Posted by mercy_4_u
2 Comments
It seems like you misunderstand what an economist does.
Economics is a descriptive science about how people allocate scarce resources. It focuses on studying the relationships between variables (ie x results in y). It’s not a bunch of people trying to convince others to follow their preferred ideology or an “HR department of the economy”.
But nearly every college student will have to take an ethics or ethics adjacent course as a part of general education requirements.
Many economists care about ethics. You’ll see plenty of conversations here speaking to that, for instance.
However, economists by in large do not study ethics. While the two areas are related conceptually, there are enormous methodological differences between the two that make it incredibly difficult for one to contribute to each other. Actually it is worse than that; as someone who dabbles in philosophy, I’d argue there are deep *epistemic* differences between the two disciplines. It’s not even that we do not speak the same language – there are fundamental disagreements about what constitutes knowledge in the first place.
Which is not to say that no one is bridging the gap – Amartya Sen is frequently cited in both circles, for instance. But the gap is huge, and there isn’t a large academic audience for that kind of cross-domain work, so at least for now it remains relatively unexplored.