President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court raises the question of whether a person’s life experience should influence how she or he analyzes particular issues.
An economist has no particular standing to comment on qualifications for service on our nation’s highest court. But the debate about Obama’s and Sotomayor’s views on the issue makes it opportune to point out an analogous debate within economics. To what extent should an economist’s life experience or personal philosophical and religious beliefs affect how she works as an economist?
As is often the case, the late Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman had something to say on the subject. Friedman, who wrote extensively on methodology in economics, argued that knowledge, and hence scholarship, could be divided into two categories: “positive” and “normative.”
Positive topics dealt with facts, things that can be measured objectively. Normative topics were those of values and beliefs. Economics was a science, Friedman argued, and hence it should deal only with positive questions of measurable facts. Economists must shun normative value judgments. Those were best left to jurists, philosophers and theologians.
Some 55 years later, his argument is widely accepted among economists and appears in Chapter 1 of virtually every introductory economics textbook, including some written by professors who disagree sharply with Friedman on other issues.
His position is analogous to those who argue that whether a justice is white, African-American or Hispanic, male or female, old or young should have no bearing on how they interpret the Constitution. They should use sound legal reasoning untainted by any personal views that stem from their background or life experience.
The counterargument is that both economists and justices are human beings and that in the real world it is impossible to make neat distinctions between fact and value. It is impossible for any thinker to completely isolate how they approach legal or economic questions from their values and identities.
Some point to Friedman’s own life and work. He opposed military conscription, arguing that a volunteer military was economically more efficient. He said his views were based on purely “positive” criteria.
But others noted that his arguments ignored factors like imperfect information and external costs and benefits. They pointed to Friedman’s own experience of being cruelly hazed as a scrawny Jewish kid in mandatory ROTC training, an experience he still described with bitterness decades later. Did the Nobelist’s own painful early experience influence his analysis?
There is an analogy with the way Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ traumatic experiences in the Civil War cropped up decades later in his legal, as well as personal, writings and with how virulently anti-Semitic Justice James McReynolds frequently dissented from Louis Brandeis, the first Jew to sit on the Supreme Court.
McReynolds also reportedly said, “I’ll never resign (from the court) as long as that crippled son-of-a-bitch is in the White House.” Did such bitter dislike of President Franklin D. Roosevelt color McReynolds’ legal opinions on Roosevelt’s New Deal programs? Or did his opinions stem only from objective legal reasoning?
One can point to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of similar situations in economics where it certainly seems that personal beliefs and backgrounds may indeed have some bearing on the particular issues particular economists choose to study and the conclusions they reach. But economists who acknowledge such influence remain a minority.
© 2009 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.