I find economics a bizarre way to try to understand the world. Most of it seems to be wrong on common sense grounds, and the rest of it makes no sense.
So I think Drew is wrong. Economic theory is inherently political, because it's the wrong answer to the wrong problem.
Here are the real problems:
1. How can I both maximise my personal profits and pay less in taxes?
Snark aside, it cannot be true that economics is value free. Economics is literally the business of defining a culture's values. If issues like non-sustainability, personal stress and unhappiness and the destruction of indigenous cultures and ecosystems don't appear on the books, they're not considered real enough to exist.
Eliminating them from fiscal policy is equivalent to eliminating them from consciousness, and almost from public debate. The fact that economists have chosen to do this and (mostly) continue to do it demonstrates what the implicit value system is really about.
Can you think of any examples of economics making no sense on common-sense grounds? This is very much wrong. Evaluating incentives, habits preferences to attempt to predict behavior is absolutely common-sensical. I think much of this thread has turned into an attempt to politicize a field that, at base, simply tries to explain why we make the decisions we make -- usually with our money (though economic methods are used outside the more-narrow range of economic issues).
Economics isn't concerned with wealth distribution. Again, that's a matter for politics and philosophy. It can be used to explain why the distribution evolves as it does, though I honestly don't know the exact answer. But the question of whether the distribution of wealth is a "problem" is a moral question, not an economic one, even though it is, obviously, directly related to economic issues.
As far as support for innovation is concerned, economics deals greatly with this, but economists can't tell you what, exactly, causes innovation. Research and education play large roles, andmost economists believe the government has a role to play in producing more of both. But it's nearly impossible to predict which innovations will radically change the economy. We can't say, "For every four research labs, or six PhDs in engineering, we should expect x number of innovations that will have an impact, y, on growth."
In other words, "How can I maximize revenue and minimize costs?" This is exactly what I'm saying. Tax rates are related to politics, but this is not an inherently political question.
No. I'm sorry, but this is plainly false. The market's "values" are society's values. People define their own values. Economics tries to discover them and explain why people hold these values. If people value (say) the environment properly, they'll elect politicians who will stand for environmental improvement, and the market will adjust to changes in the rules of the game. You're getting stuck on the concepts of "consumers and producers," "business and labor," and so on, when markets go well beyond these simply monetary arrangements.
The issues you've listed are only as real as we, as a society, make them. If they're ignored, it's not the fault of economics. It's our fault, because it's our decisions that determine the outcome.
The market is the aggregate of our activities within society, monetary and otherwise. Economics simply attempts to explain that market and, thus, the society. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
