No such thing as a free-market economist?
What is free-market economics? Is it different from regular economics?
Seems like a silly question. After all, the term is ubiquitous in media and politics. But on closer inspection, it’s a surprisingly nebulous concept.
A reasonable start might be a definition. But good luck finding one. Google returns more than 22,000 search results, none of which offers a clear and defensible definition.
A search on onelook.com, which scans 970 dictionaries, turns up 96 common modifiers to “economics.” Unfortunately, free-market isn’t one of them. Not even Liberty Fund’s Concise Encyclopedia of Economics—with entries from a range of self-described free-market economists—has an entry for free-market economics.
How about the Dictionary of Free-Market Economics? Nope. How about A Primer on Modern Themes in Free Market Economics and Policy? Though it includes lots of policy prescriptions for moving toward a free market, there’s no actual definition.
Wikipedia—though it has no entry for free-market economics—defines free market as follows:
A free market (or free-trade) economy is an idealized form of a market economy in which buyers and sellers are permitted to carry out transactions based on mutual agreement on price without government intervention in the form of taxes, subsidies, regulation, or government ownership of goods or services.
Now, one might conclude that free-market economics is the study of the free market. And from that, it might seem reasonable to say that free-market economics is therefore another branch of economics—one that studies markets without state intervention.
But you’d be wrong. That’s really not what people mean when they use the term free-market economics.
Much like suppy-side economics, in practice the term is used to describe a political viewpoint about economic policy, not an academic field within economics. Free-market economics isn’t so much economics as it is an ideological predisposition for a particular set of social arrangements favoring markets over government.
Now, being sympathetic with laissez-faire is one thing. But calling it a branch of social science is another. It seems clear that explicit ideological predispositions like those embodied in the term free-market economics have no place in the social sciences.
The goal of economics is to provide a true account of social phenomena. As with other social sciences, that requires economists to accept a scholarly responsibility to pursue truth in as unbiased a fashion as possible. Labeling one’s self a free-market economist, ruling out particular social arrangements as illegitimate from the start, seems to be an explicit rejection of that scholarly responsibility.
If free-market economics means anything, it means some questions and answers about social phenomena—especially those involving government action—are simply off the table, for ideological reasons. I think most reasonable people would agree that’s an unscientific approach. Regardless of whether it’s a correct description of reality or not, free-market economics is essentially a political program, and is not technically economic science at all.
Of course, one might object to that extreme view. Since no science is completely free of ideology, denouncing free-market economics for having explicit ideological biases perhaps misses the mark. And on some level that’s true—ideological predispositions do guide the types of questions all scientists find interesting, and they undoubtedly temper everyone’s research instincts.
But whatever the subconscious influence of ideology, economists, and academics more generally, have a professional responsibility to actively steer clear of their own ideological biases, insofar as they interfere with the truth-seeking enterprise of science.
As people who study markets and possess rich understanding of the failings of government intervention in the economy, it seems natural that most economists will aesthetically favor freer markets, compared with those subject to more intervention. I, for one, am usually one of them. And in our capacities as citizens in a representative democracy, or as policymakers formulating economic policy, those political views are appropriate and necessary.
But the question I’m addressing here is one of science. As social scientists, there is an ethical responsibility to at least keep our political predispositions in the closet when analyzing social phenomena. Importing our ideological predispositions into our work, and then attempting to cloak them in a veneer of scientific validity, is just bad methodology.
Economics already has a bad rap. Critics of economics have long questioned the status of economics as a science—accusing it of being mere “politics in disguise” in the words of iconic author Hazel Henderson.
The day economics devolves into ideological advocacy of a political program of political libertarianism, even if that program is the best among alternatives, those critics will be right. And that will be a shame.
Posted by Andrew on Thursday May 27, 2004 | Feedback?
