Much of what government does is about signaling and allocating status, not about doing any actual good. But to get the process started, we have to signal the professionalism and the integrity of the government — its objectivity; its science....
Second, we have to signal that certain groups are valued and loved by the government — farmers, auto companies, large foreign financial institutions, Pakistan — and here we hit a problem. How do we do it?...
Enter the macroeconomists. Anthropologically, they act as soothsayers, interpreting the random walk of experienced history (and experienced favoritism) as part of an eternal cycle, only dimly seen, of transcendent justice — understood, à la Rawls, as fairness, or à l’Hayek, as conforming with abstract, impersonal rules. The latter being harder, but only by a little.And usually understood, I'll add myself, as a mixture of Rawls and Hayek, or as conforming with "fair rules".
(Note that, in substituting witch doctors for soothsayers in this post's title, I mean no disrespect to the former. Just thought that it made the point even clearer.)
Enter the macroeconomists. Anthropologically, they act as soothsayers, interpreting the random walk of experienced history (and experienced favoritism) as part of an eternal cycle, only dimly seen, of transcendent justice — understood, à la Rawls, as fairness, or à l’Hayek, as conforming with abstract, impersonal rules.
ReplyDeleteA bit hyperbolic. Keynes for one did not do "ethics". He described certain situations, and offers explanations--there might be a desire to put forth economic policies--such as interventionism of various types-- that lead to equilibrium, or full employment etc. but it's not really normative, or "Rawlsian" per se.
Probability and reliability of models are issues however: what good are high-powered academic economists with all sorts of stats and demographics who can't really model the future with any degree of accuracy? In a sense they're better off doing historical sorts of analysis (it's the same with stockbrokers. you hire brokers with winning records. Those that lose more often than not generally don't last, but go back to office jobs, or the farm, street, etc).
For that matter Rawls was not arguing for transcendental justice in some platonic or theological sense. Rawls may have wanted to achieve that end (ie Kant's kingdom of ends) via rational contracting but it's not really a metaphysical theory, but more akin to Hobbes' covenants, such as they are (were). One famine, war, revolution and all that proceduralism is worth...nada.
I respect Rawls (certainly more than I do austrian crypto-royalists such as Hayek or Von Mises) but he had... a faith in rationality that some of us don't share.