Reflections on Evelyn Brister’s and Ken Stikkers’s Responses

it is a pleasant task to reflect on these thoughtful comments on my Coss lecture. Their gracious reception of an economist into the world of philosophy is an added bonus.

Let me leave to one side—for the moment—the main title of my paper, and focus on the subtitle: “the collective construction of rules to live by.” Here, we find my core interest in both economics and philosophy. Beginning around the middle of the twentieth century, economists claimed to have the necessary tools for deriving the optimal rules to live by. Once that claim was taken seriously by the profession, it became accepted practice for economists to become advocates for those decision rules. More correctly, economists became advocates for a specific theoretical apparatus that then justified the adoption of public policies that would instantiate the theoretical structure from which those specific policies had been derived. The idealized policies were less motivated by the need to solve a particular “public problem” (in the Deweyan sense) than they were motivated by the desire to bring about a new allegedly optimal economic configuration in which there would be few if any social problems in need of melioration. This is what the Supreme Court does when it issues a decision. It adopts a rule that, had that rule been in place, then a particular dispute would not have come before the court. Evelyn Brister registers her primary concern over this advocacy. She asks: Is it appropriate that economists are policy advocates?

In addressing her question, I wish to point out that there are two kinds of advice that might be propounded by economists—one kind of advice is from “inside the model,” while the other is from “outside the model.” When Paul Krugman writes in The New York Times that the austerity policies now in vogue in Europe and the United States are based on flawed analysis, he is writing from inside the model. He buttresses his criticism by drawing on economic theory and appropriate empirical phenomena. For instance, he calls our attention to the very low interest rates on US debt instruments—bonds and Treasury Bills. This evidence suggests that investors are not worried about US budget deficits so why should politicians fret about them? He shows us that fears over the deficit are simply part of a political strategy to avoid stimulus spending that might ease unemployment. After all, most large American corporations are flush with cash, and the current economic climate helps to keep payroll costs low. There are few things more important to corporate America than driving down labor cost (including fringe benefits) to the lowest possible level. Corporations like a nervous labor force unsure of finding work—the better to keep unionization at bay. Of course, other economists will draw on different data, and perhaps different parts of economic theory, to make the opposite case. It seems that there is not a single “warranted belief” in economics. But there is a theoretical apparatus that allows structured contestation.

Public policy is, without intention, an exercise in Deweyan experimentation. I say “without intention” because it is quite impossible to admit that we are experimenting with people’s lives. But an economy is always in the process of becoming, and so public policy is, unavoidably, an exercise that resembles that famous Chinese proverb—crossing the river by touching the stones. We feel our way forward, seeing what works, and what does not seem to work as well.

In my Coss lecture, and in my book Sufficient Reason, I am critical of policy advocacy from outside the model. We see this when environmental economists become advocates for particular pollution policies in the name of “efficiency.” Advocacy outside the model also happens when economists denounce fisheries policy because it does not pursue “efficiency.” A third example is when economists suggest that it is not socially efficient to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. Such advocacy has no coherent theoretical ground beneath it.

I understand why Brister asks where I stand on the “question of the appropriate role for economists in the policy-making process.” I stand with Rorty and...