No news is good news...

[paulhope]

Life's been fine! Successful potluck dinner last night. Alternity rulebook delivered today. I've been having deep thoughts: economists are right after all! Sorry, naive ultraleftists. It's ok though--they have only descriptive, not normative claims.

I...will get back to this later. I have some defending of an ideological stance to get to.

Comments

[polishcyclist]

told you so.

In which I totally overreact to you taunt....

[paulhope]

Hey, hey, hey...just one minute. I didn't concede anything! I just said that economics has descriptive power--which is relatively uncontroversial. I'm doing economics this summer, remember?

There's a difference between being skeptical about anti-market solutions to social problems on factual grounds (will policy X produce result Y, which economics can help to answer) and believing that results Y or Y' are good results (which economics has no business answering, because this is a moral philosophy question)--this is what I mean when I say it does not give normative answers.

Everywhere in the Critical Review readings and especially in the discussion questions written by Friedman, I see this line being blurred. There have been a couple points where a question as really and truly misrepresented a mild-mannered economist explaining things descriptively as a ballsy libertarian claiming that such-and-such reform was "for the common good

Re: In which I totally overreact to you taunt....

[polishcyclist]

Ah ha! The over-reaction to tongue-in-cheek quip tables have been turned! I wasn't actually refering to anything in particular (not CR for sure), just making a light-hearted comment (at most, in regards to me generally being more into economics/economic viewpoints than you).

I accept your sheepish grin.

Re: In which I totally overreact to you taunt....

[polishcyclist]

oh oh, and I'm so going to respond to those rent control posts - give me a day cause I'm running out of internet-cafe-points here.

[anonymous]

I knew this was inevitable as soon as you announced yourself an instrumentalist. This involves a modicum of rationality, you see.

-yal

[paulhope]

Knew what was inevitable? And what involves rationality?

I think I'll need to clarify my position later. You and Piotr seem to be taking this as some sort of win for libertarianism, but I think that's a different battle altogether.