Gloriously Pooterish
If we are to make choices between competing accounts, then we necessarily need to have an economics that is ethical. In a very real sense, there is no other choice.
That, as Deaton himself noted, requires that economics rethink its use of empirical methods that necessarily impose an artificial worldview on economic analysis so that economists might undertake their existing form of mathematical interpretation of the incomplete and flawed data that they collect, which they do, however, presume to be value free in almost all the exercises that they undertake.
As I have always argued, the stories that we tell each other about the economy in which we live are more important than the data we collect about it because they provide the framework within which any information is interpreted. It would seem that Deaton now agrees.
I call that progress, except for the fact that about 92% of the world’s living economists are probably now in disagreement with him now. We will just have to make progress, one step at a time.
The Nobel Laureate is now coing around to the way I’ve been telling everyone they should think therefore the world is becoming a better place.
Not that Spud has understood, in the slightest, what the Nobel Lareate is saying (umm, chaps, maybe we should think a little more about distrobution, not just efficiency?) but Charles Pooter lives on.