|Peter Boettke|
I recently stumbled upon a very clear presentation on the damaging impact of inequality by Alan Krueger from 2013 entitled "Fair and Efficient Rules for Capitalism."
Watching this sparked a question that I honestly don't have an answer to, which is how much of economic analysis is done against the background of philosophical speculation based on tacit presuppositions that are in fact contested propositions in the philosophical literature? Critics of philosophers who touch on economic topics -- such as Jason Brennan, or Loren Lomasky and Fernando Teson, or David Schmidtz, or Jerry Gaus -- often are careful to point out economic fallacies that are snuck into philosophical analysis and must be corrected. Shouldn't a similar group of economists who become informed in philosophical discussion be willing to make a similar critique? Would economists be as open in the top journals in economics to such a dialogue?
I'd like to believe that economists would be open to such a dialogue, but I also wonder whether the tacit presuppositions are so tacit that the economists wouldn't even understand what you were talking about ... there work they would claim is based on economic analysis and not philosophical speculation.
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