Mark D. White

Mark D. White

Ed Glaeser's Economix/New York Times blog post from yesterday, "The Moral Heart of Economics," argues that a belief in the value of freedom is "at the core of our discipline." While I appreciate that someone of Glaeser's stature and influence is highlighting the role of ethics in economics, I find his claim regarding the universal economic belief in freedom to be weak, simply because he opens the door for so many interpretations of it:

Economists’ fondness for freedom rarely implies any particular policy program. A fondness for freedom is perfectly compatible with favoring redistribution, which can be seen as increasing one person’s choices at the expense of the choices of another, or with Keynesianism and its emphasis on anticyclical public spending.

But that is certainly not the meaning of freedom that many classical liberals (or any libertarians, for that matter) would endorse–which is not an argument against it, of course, but merely points out that proposing freedom as a uniting value among economists does not carry much water if the definition of freedom is allowed to vary so widely.

(HT: Chris Coyne via Peter Boettke at Coordination Problem.)