http://www.medhumanities.org/2008/07/on-normative-co.html

Ironically, “economic imperalism” seems to have the odd effect of masking the normativity of the enterprise from its practitioners, such that the need to proffer normative justifications for positions taken is often, in my experience, either absent or simply assumed. Sometimes we have moral obligations to act inefficiently. The mere fact that an arrangement is in and of itself efficient says little, absent context, about whether we ought to pursue policy on that basis.

One wonders whether a deeper understanding of the value-laden nature of economics among practitioners would promote wider comprehension of the dangers of the naturalistic fallacy.

For one thing, he is too kind to Thaler & Sunstein’s “Nudge,” which is devoid of any notion of democracy; I’ve commented in more depth on that book in an Amazon review, so I won’t expand here. For another, Wolfe’s comment that “The social sciences are not just empirical; they are normative, too” is a bit Pollyanna; often they are normative without being empirical at all (e.g. neoclassical economics). Rather than Wolfe being thoroughgoing or getting support from Nielsen, he fails to see one of Nielsen’s points in the excerpt you quote.

A more significant issue is when he says “[P]rice is measured ordinally: $100 is one hundred times greater than $1. But life satisfaction, by contrast, is measured cardinally: the extent to which ‘very satisfied’ is better than ‘satisfied’ has to be established arbitrarily.” First of all, intransitive preferences (e.g., A>B, B>C and C>A) occur in real life, but violate cardinality. But the deeper criticism is, why be chained to a quantitative view of life satisfaction? There is an excellent critique of “arithromorphism” in economics, the fallacy of cardinality of individual utility, and economics’s neglect of qualities and dialectical concepts in the first four chapters of “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process” by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (Harvard U Press 1979).

You seem to allude to the notion of qualities too, if I correctly understand your comment about Elizabeth Anderson. But rather than echoing your lament of Kahneman’s pro-measurement attitude, Wolfe regrets that Frey has abandoned it. Right after the discussion of Helen he says, “Kahneman’s essay was published almost a decade ago. Where are we now? If Frey’s book is any indication, the revolution in economics has taken a giant step backward. Happiness, Frey tells us, need not be established objectively at all.” Wolfe’s concluding skepticism about whether behavioral economics really lives up to the claims of its enthusiasts is nice, but seems to be a kind of a bland, let’s-be-reasonable compromise rather than a forceful position maintained throughout his piece.

If you mean that certain groups of economists ignore costs that you find important (e.g. the cost to our pysche of being unfair or something of that nature), then you should say so. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with using economics to measure welfare.

And even if you think particular economists omit value judgments that you find important, how can you characterize their work as dishonest? If anything, economics is the most honest of social sciences. An economist that decides to make a normative judgment must say: “Option A is better than Option B because Option A’s social welfare exceeds that of Option B. I know this because I calculated social welfare as follows.”