Mark D. White

Mark D. White

At this blog, we stress the ethical issues that underlie economic reasoning in theory, practice, and policy. In yesterday's post at The New York Times' Economix blog, Catherine Rampell made the same point in response to Peter Orszag's call for improving policymaknig by vesting more power in technocratic committees rather than elected, representative bodies (the emphasis below is mine):

On narrowly defined (and often technical) policy issues, expert panels can be useful. But as I wrote in an article last year about politicians’ poor incentives, delegating policy authority to technocratic panels is more problematic when dealing with larger economic matters that involve social value judgments, like austerity measures and tax reform.

These policy areas may sound like dry academic subjects. But they are thoroughly infused with, and ultimately shaped by, moral beliefs.

There are, after all, infinite combinations of spending cuts and tax increases that can add up to the same bottom line. Deciding what should get trimmed and what taxes should be increased or decreased involves questions of favoritism, welfare, compassion, fairness and all sorts of other subjective judgments not answerable by the “laws” of economics.

It’s not clear that a doctorate in economics (or, for that matter, in theology) gives a person any more moral authority than anyone else. That’s why such decisions are decided through a republican democracy — both lower case — and not by genius academics, however messy and dysfunctional the resulting process may be.

It's nice to see we're not the only ones ringing this bell! (I wonder if another popular NYT blogger read Ms. Rampell's post–I hope he did, but I'm not holding my breath.)