This book examines the role of normative economics in the writings of Karl Marx, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and Karl Popper.
The book shows that while distinguishing positive from normative economics can be helpful, this distinction should not minimize the importance of normative economics or reject the possibility of offering objective evaluations of social phenomena and policies in normative economics. The book offers a critical assessment of the attempts by Marx, Mises and Friedman to reduce scientific economics to the positive analysis of social phenomena alone. Through a meticulous analysis of their work, the book shows that their positive theories fail to justify their evaluations of economic phenomena and policies. The book then draws on the writings of Popper to maintain that we should place normative economics at the center of economics. The book argues that normative economics can choose the norms underlying its evaluations of social situations and policies objectively and relies on some of Popper’s ideas to offer some criteria that can facilitate the selection of these norms.
The book will be of interest to economists, historians of economic thought, philosophers of economics and political theorists and philosophers.
This book examines the role of normative economics in the writings of Karl Marx, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and Karl Popper.
1. Introduction PART I. MARXS NONNORMATIVE CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM
2.
Marxs Concept of Value: The Value of Work or the Value of Working Time?
3.
Marxs Distinction between Productive and Unproductive Labor
4. The
Transformation of Values into Production Prices
5. The Law of the Tendential
Fall in the Rate of Profit
6. The Epistemological Foundations of Marxs
Theory PART II. MISESS NONNORMATIVE DEFENCE OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE
7. The
Apriorist Science of Human Action
8. Economics as a Branch of Praxeology
9. A
Critical Evaluation of Misess Economic Theory and Apriorist Epistemology
PART III. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POSITIVE AND NORMATIVE ECONOMICS IN
FRIEDMAN
10. The Methodology of Positive Economics
11. Predictions and
Freedom in Friedmans Normative Thought PART IV. POSITIVE ECONOMICS AND
NORMATIVE ECONOMICS IN POPPER
12. What Epistemology for Positive Social
Science?
13. Toward a Popperian Normative Economics
14. Conclusion
Sina Badiei is Junior Lecturer and Senior SNSF Researcher at the Walras-Pareto Center of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and Program Director in the Philosophy and Human Science Department at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, France.
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