“The dismal science”

It never ceases to amaze me how people who generally have no interest in economics repeatedly put forth serious economic assertions with absolutely no empirical or theoretical support to back them up. I am genuinely fascinated by such people.

Most such people have never picked up an economics text. They don’t read Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, or any other business publication on a regular basis. They have never taken a college course in economics, and they don’t generally hang out with economists.

Yet, for some strange reason, they feel totally qualified to form economic opinions and advance public policies. Indeed, many of these people are themselves public policy makers–leaders in the legislature or in the administration.

I can assure you: many of these public policy-makers couldn’t tell the difference between Milton Friedman and Milton Berle. Go ahead: just ask one of them.

Then again, economics is “the dismal science”–a science that includes everyone from Milton Freidman to John Kenneth Gailbraith, or John Maynard Keynes to Ludvig Von Mises (all of whom most of our politicians know next to nothing about).

Granted, economics is not a hard science–certainly nothing like applied physics or mathematics. In economics, we encounter two types of questions: the normative and the positive. This is merely the difference between facts and values–between what is and what actually ought to be. In economics, too much normative stuff always seems to get in the way.

Ordinarily, one might think that the normative and the positive shouldn’t clash so wildly. After all, what is good and what is bad should all be rather obvious. As Norman Podhoretz points out in his autobiography (“Making It”), it is better to be rich than poor, tall than short, handsome than ugly, and so on, and so forth.

Not so for the liberals who cherish false egalitarianism and sponsor big government programs for various protected special interest groups. Such policies and programs attempt to defy reality by forcing values to fit the facts–by imposing what ought to be against what is. This is where Marxism, communism and socialism have always failed. Reality simply cannot be defied–at least not indefinitely.

The good economist–the free market Libertarian–is careful not to make this sort of egregious mistake. To him, values (the normative) must be derived from the facts of reality (the positive), not the impossible–and ridiculous–reverse.

“Is the concept of value, of ‘good and evil,’” asked Alice Rosenbaum, “an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from and unsupported by any facts of reality–or is it based on metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man’s existence?”

A worthy question indeed–but one that dwells clearly in the realm of epistemological philosophy. Economics, you see, is as much about philosophy (and psychology) as it is about pure math and science. No wonder it is called “the dismal science.”

Strictly a personal view. Charles Reyes Jr. is a regular columnist of Saipan Tribune. Mr. Reyes may be reached at charlesraves@hotmail.com