Value judgments and economics expertise

This paper tackles the problem of the demarcation of value judgments in economic expertise. Is it possible to disentangle values from facts, or neutral scientific assertions from value-laden judgments, in the context of economic expertise? If not, why not? And if it is, under what conditions? First, drawing on concepts from analytic philosophy, the paper highlights the interdependencies between descriptive, evaluative, and prescriptive judgments. Second, drawing notably on social studies of science, the paper proposes a definition of ‘expertise’, and translates this into a list of successive stages wherein these different types of judgments are involved. A backward analysis of these stages is provided in order to identify where values stand, and who holds them. Third, reconsidering the positions of neutrality in economics (Mongin 2006), the paper defends the ‘weak non-neutrality’ view in the context of expertise, and concludes with reflections on what could be done to address the problem of democratic legitimacy raised by the difficulty of demarcation. Key-words: methodology, value judgments, prescription, evaluation, recommendation, expertise, neutrality, demarcation . JEL-Code: A13, B41, D63 ∗ Université de Lyon, Lyon, F-69007 France; CNRS, GATE Lyon Saint-Etienne, Ecully, F-69130, France; Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne, F-42000, France. Contact: [email protected], (33) +4 77 42 13 61. † This paper was first presented as a public lecture to the Economics Department of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, on 20 February 2012. I wish to thank all those who attended the lecture, and in particular Richard Ashley, Sheryll Ball, Michael Moller, and Aris Spanos for a constructive discussion. I am also grateful to Maurice Salles, and especially to Valérie Clément and Philippe Mongin, for reviewing a previous version of this paper, and to Ben Young for help in preparing the manuscript. This research was made possible thanks to Nick Tideman’s invitation to Virginia Tech, the donor of the Virginia Tech grant for economic methodology, and the Welfare Economics grant linked to the Chair Université Jean Monnet and CNRS. The usual caveats hold. 1 ha ls hs -0 08 03 55 2, v er si on 1 22 M ar 2 01 3