Got ethics?
from David Ruccio
Economists have no ethics.
Certainly not like sociologists [pdf], psychologists, or statisticians, all of whom have well-defined ethical guidelines or codes of conduct. The American Economic Association has no such guidelines or code nor do most economics programs offer courses—at either the undergraduate or graduate level—on ethics.
That situation may now be changing. In general terms, the current crises have raised the issue of the role of mainstream economists in promoting policies that led to the Second Great Depression. Charles Ferguson’s film Inside Job exposed the failure of prominent economists who wrote about and spoke on matters of economic policy to disclose their conflicts of interest. And, now, Reuters has published a special report on the lack of a clear standard of disclosure for economists and other academics who testified before the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee between late 2008 and early 2010, as lawmakers debated the biggest overhaul of financial regulation since the 1930s.
roughly a third did not reveal their financial affiliations in their testimonies, based on a comparison of the text of their testimonies available on the Congressional committees’ websites with their resumes available online.
George DeMartino has set out to solve this problem. His new book, The Economist’s Oath: On the Need for and Content of Professional Economic Ethics, is now available from Oxford University Press. And he has organized a session on ethics for the upcoming meetings of the American Economic Association in Denver:
9 Jan 2011 10:15 am, Hyatt Regency, Capitol 5
Association for Social Economics/American Economic Association
The Ethics of Professional Economic Practice (A1)(Panel Discussion)
Panel Moderator: MARTHA STARR (American University)
DEAN BAKER (Center for Economic and Policy Research) Applying Economics to Economists: Good Governance at the International Financial Institutions
DAVID COLANDER (Middlebury College) A Three-Word Ethical Code for Economists
GEORGE DEMARTINO (University of Denver) The Economist’s Oath: On the Need for and Content of Professional Economic Ethics
DEIRDRE MCCLOSKEY (University of Illinois-Chicago) Humanomics: Taking All the Virtues (and Vices) Seriously
According to DeMartino,
The economics profession has built up a greater confidence among the public than it deserves, and the result of that is an outsized influence on public policy. These economists have never gotten five minutes of training in their profession in conflicts of interest because it’s not something that economics has taken any interest in the last 100 years.
The rest of the world can only hope that, from now on, the gargantuan economists who are responsible for the current crises will be fed a steady diet of ethics.
There are very few economists who really understand economics. Majoring in economics is just the admission ticket into the profession’s corral. Once you get your “validation by society”, it’s time to “unlearn” virtually everything you’ve been taught of as “economics”. For starters, one must learn what modern money actually is and how the economics profession has been shaped (deformed might be more appropriate, IMHO) all along the way according to the banksters’ agenda(s). Then we’ll start talking about Ethics.
Why spoil the fun?
Professional engineers use an iron ring on their little finger as reminder of the need for ethics in the profession: The iron in these rings comes from a bridge that collapsed because of faulty design.
Perhaps economists should use some similar symbolic reminder, like a ring made from some thin metal string, going around and around the finger.
This could represent “the graph that went nowhere”?
Or how about the pretty graphs and models that lie?
Asking the typical, market-worshiping economist to take an ‘ethics oath’ (“What’s that??”) will make about as much sense to them as asking them to take an oath in God (“What’s that??”) Their ethic and their god is the free market. All else is merely human opinion.
Must be a conspiracy of “the mind’, a zeitgeist motif. Barely 20 minutes before Mr. Ruccio’s post (as time stamped in my email), I had emailed the editors there at the blog this brief note re the NY Times article on the subject, quoting Mr. Lucas, which I found to be hysterical:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/business/economy/31economists.html?ref=todayspaper
“It’s good to get this stuff out in the open, but I don’t like the idea of the A.E.A. watching over this,” said Mr. Lucas, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago.
Mr. Lucas added: “What disciplines economics, like any science, is whether your work can be replicated. It either stands up or it doesn’t. Your motivations and whatnot are secondary.”
Ethics in economics – oh no, couldnt possibly manage that when we know ethics is subjective and only those stripped of normacy and enlightened by positivism can proceed..
David, you’re wrong. Economists do have ethics! Just read these plutonomy reports:
‘We, Ajay Kapur, Niall MacLeod and Narendra Singh … authors of this report … herby certify that all of the views expressed in this research report accurately reflect our personal views about any and all of the subject issuer(s) or securities. We also certify that no part of our compensation was, is or will be directly or indirectly related to the specific recommendation(s) or view(s) in this report’ (second report, Appendix A1)’. I guess they are wearing golden rings on their little finger.
On Kapur and MacLeod: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ab2nYXJA_8QQ&refer=us
Mind the date of this news: on March 1, 2007, Citigroups chief global equity strategists starts his own hedge fund…
I’m currently studying a module in Public Policy Economics, and a huge amount of its focus seems misguided. The ethics of decision making of course come up, but we are not taught to scrutinize this itself, but rather to understand concepts, models, graphs and conventions. Rigourous philosophical/ethical arguments should underpin the study of Economics, especially when it is not merely a reflective discipline, but often a prescriptive one…
The argument has, of course, been made that Economics, properly understood, is itself a sub-discipline of Ethics. Indeed, Adam Smith, though his name has been ‘used and abused’ to many a political end, never saw himself as an economist, but as a moral philosopher (for those interested, see Amartya Sen’s lecture online called ‘Uses and Abuses of Adam Smith’..)