Ethics in Economics

real-world economics review, issue no. 58

Ethics in Economics - Where Is It?

Peter Radford

[USA]

Copyright: Peter Radford, 2011

You may post comments on this paper at http://rwer.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/rwer-issue-58-peter-radford/ WEA online conference: Economics in Society: The Ethical Dimension

It is time to address the question of professional ethics in economics head-on. As we pick our way through the debris of the lingering economic crisis, the economics profession continues to present a poor, incoherent, and frankly inadequate face to the wider society, one of whose key facets it purports to understand. Either it does. Or it doesn’t. It is time to confront the possibility of failure and withdraw to sort the mess out. What it shouldn’t be doing is to press on as if nothing has happened. The risk of doing even more damage is just too great. Medicine has its famous injunction - first: do no harm. Economics ought to abide by that rule too. It is a massive evasion of responsibility for the profession to continue to plod along as if a few hundred more earnest papers will do the trick. They won't. The error is profound. It is deep. It is decisive. Economists everywhere: stop what you are doing. Stop advising. Stop writing. And above all stop pontificating. Start thinking about the ethics of economics. There are no clothes on this particular emperor, and it is high time we admitted as much. So, instead of all those old normal activities, consider this: what are you doing to rehabilitate economics? Now. Not tomorrow. I found this comment buried deep in a Paul Krugman blog post about the effect of wage cuts. A correspondent of his, a non-economist, wrote: "I wish that you economists had the equivalent of a bar exam so that the incompetent among you could be prevented from practicing. As far as professional credentials are concerned, you seem to be operating like medicine in the eighteenth century, PhD’s notwithstanding." Precisely. But it isn’t that easy...