Jim Devine wrote,
> In a passage which seems to summarize his message, Tom Walker wrote:
> >The NAIRU story and the Phillips curve story make sense if one assumes
> >that capital's brief is efficiency and labour's is waste.
>
> Tom, that sure seems like you're mixing normative concepts (efficiency) and
> positive concepts (NAIRU, Phillips curve) in a strange way.
No, I'm saying that the supposedly positive concepts are covertly grounded
in normative judgments and they simply don't wash if you make those
judgments explicit and challenge them. BTW, this is not something I
dreamed up by myself. There is a rich literature on it ranging from
critical theory to hermeneutics to deconstruction.
> Are you saying that if we reject the normative view that "capital's brief
> is efficiency and labour's is waste," we should reject both the Phillips
> Curve and the NAIRU, _even if_ they fit the empirical data?
1. The Phillips Curve and the NAIRU do not unambiguously "fit the
empirical data". 2. Fitting the empirical data is not prima facie evidence
of a causal relationship. 3. We should reject the Phillips curve and the
NAIRU if a. they don't fit the empirical data or b. we can find a better
explanation for why they do (if and when they do). 4. The SOP in economics
has been to assume that the geocentric theory is right and to search for
subsidiary explanations for the "perturbations" in the orbits of the
planets. One can explain away quite a bit that way.
> (Mind you, I am
> quite conscious that the empirical data reflect the power of capital and
> institutional framework of the country being studied. But we live under
> that power and that framework.) Are you saying that one should reject a
> positive theory based on the fact that you don't like its moral
> implications?
This last question simply restates your initial normative judgment that
_I_ am mixing normative and positive concepts as a positive statement that
I _am_ mixing the normative and the positive. Thanks for illustrating how
it's done.
> But the positive/normative mix could be very different: it seems to me that
> the NAIRU theory could easily be interpreted as an argument for
> overthrowing capital. "Capitalism requires a reserve army THAT BIG to keep
> it from punishing us with accelerating inflation??"
That faint hope relies on your substituting the normative "capitalism" for
the positive "the economy". Nice finesse if you can pull it off. I'll
stick to going for the juglar.
> I am no positivist, but I think that _trying_ to separate positive and
> normative concerns is a useful step in many cases (as is being aware of the
> way in which one's moral commitments shapes the questions one asks, the
> data one looks at, the research methods one uses, etc.)
That's what I was talking about, looking at the hidden moral judgments
underlying the allegedly positive claims about unemployment and
inflation. And frankly, if you go back just a bit in the history of
American teaching of political economy -- good old late 19th century
laissez faire social darwinism -- the moral judgments are not
hidden in the slightest. Unemployment is unambigously a sign of the
unemployed's sinful habits.
Have a look at the 1909 book by J. Laurence Laughlin, _Latter
Day Problems_, in which he talks about the Christ-like
"sacrifice" (abstinence) of the capitalist as the creative
source of wealth. I'm not exaggerating. Or see the 1938 labour economics
textbook by Royal Montgomery in which he scrupulously presents the
unions' *stated* position on the hours of work followed by what he
coyly advises the reader is their *real* motivation.
My point -- and I've made it over and over again -- is that if you do a
historical read through of a lot of these "positive concepts" you find out
that they started as explicit and quite extreme moral judgments that over
time got "moderated" by expunging some of the more defamatory or
laudatory premises. But to do such a historical read would lead us
into the temptation of quoting from old books.
Tom Walker
