DougNorton.com

The new semester has kicked-off to a terrific start.  And, I’m looking forward to running some experiments this semester and improving on the lecture notes for the Economics of Compassion.  Possibly the lecture notes could eventually produce a text book for a class that currently borrows from several other books that are wonderful but do not encompass all covered topics.

Also, something that has been cropping up over the past week that is really beginning to fascinate me is the tension between normative and positive analysis (how an economy ought to work and how it does work).  The divorce between the two occurred quite some time ago for a number of reasons, chief among them the economist’s desire to sever their ties with ethics for the sake of gaining some sense that economics is a "real science."  But, it seems normative economics is important since the "ought to" questions are the one’s people are most interested about.  Edward Zajac wrote in The Political Economy of Fairness, "Although their strong views on how to right societal wrongs may be fair game at cocktail parties, economists are careful to keep them out of their professional lives.  This is reasonable; however, this mind-set also keeps economists from treating fairness and justice as a topic to be analyzed, objectively and dispassionately, with a view toward improving conventional economic analysis."