Morning Must-Read: Joseph Heath: Why People Hate Economics, in One Lesson
We see this strikingly in the many, many right-wing economists who assign moral fault to liberals who don’t free ride, don’t pollute, don’t work hard to externalize as many costs as they can and make others bear them. A doctrine that gleefully assigns positive moral value to being a schmuck is a very odd doctrine to advocate indeed…
…Tabarrok and Cowen are trying to communicate… ‘incentives matter’… a methodological point… [that] should be presented in… as platitudinous [a way] as possible…. There are many ways of doing that, since the problem with the public… is not that they think incentives don’t matter… it’s just that they underestimate the[ir] power of incentives, or they don’t see some of the unexpected ways…. The right way… is to say ‘here’s something that we can all agree upon–but have you thought through the consequences of it? Perhaps not. That’s what economists do.’ But Tabarrok and Cowen are unable to restrain themselves….
[They] present it in a way that makes it seem both morally suspect and politically conservative… set up a contrast between ‘economy’ and morality, with the latter being dismissed somewhat contemptuously as mere ‘sentiment’ (as though people were being tender-minded fools for thinking that there should be moral rules that prohibit killing people…. By buying into Chadwick’s contrast between ‘economy’ and ‘benevolence,’ Tabarrok and Cowen are accepting the narrowest reading of the ‘incentive’ concept, that which identifies it, not just with people’s self-interest, but with their pecuniary interests.
Second, there is the (again somewhat contemptuous) reference to the British parliament passing ineffective ‘regulations.’ The fact that Tabarrok and Cowen use this term, which is anachronistic in the context, shows that they can’t resist getting a little dig in against the left, with its tender-hearted conviction that government can be an effective force for good in the world. But this is not the right place to be doing it… present the foundational ideas of economics in a way that makes them neutral with respect to political ideology…”