Economist and theologian Paul Heyne once asked the question, “Are economists basically immoral?” He asked this because economists have a frustrating tendency to interrupt the high moral aspirations of others with complications about how, in the real world, life is not so simple. When other people are concerned with social justice and love, they have a knack for focusing on things like costs and logistics, seemingly putting a price on doing the right thing. Is this just an annoying habit of a small subset of social scientists, or might it be a moral calling? It is common today, especially among economists, to conceive of economic science as “value-free” in a fairly radical sense. Often this conception is credited to Milton Friedman, who wrote in a 1953 article, “Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments.” To be fair to Friedman, in the same article he admits there is a place for normative or morally-informed economics. But his characterization of positive economics has become a standard way of understanding economics as a whole. Economists just run the numbers. What people do with them is up to them and their own value systems.

Read the article “The Higher Calling of ‘The Dismal Science’” on acton.org.