Samuelson's social welfare function and Buchanan's critique: the struggle with normative science.
A history of the transformation of public finance into public economics necessarily involves an understanding of the tension between positive and normative statements, that is a history of how public economists dealt with Robbins's requirements that economists should not make normative statements. I...
| Publicado en: | European Journal of the History of Economic Thought Vol. 30; no. 5; pp. 812 - 832 |
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| Autores principales: | , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Oct2023
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=173009567&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 173009567 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 09672567 5B6 jtl: European Journal of the History of Economic Thought issn: 09672567 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Oct2023 vid: 30 iid: 5 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 173009567 10.1080/09672567.2023.2248322 ppf: 812 ppct: 20 formats: tig: atl: Samuelson's social welfare function and Buchanan's critique: the struggle with normative science. aug: au: Coker, David C. Marciano, Alain su: Samuelson, Paul A. (Paul Anthony), 1915-2009 Buchanan, James M., 1919-2013 Social services Social skills Public finance Public history Twentieth century sug: subj: Samuelson, Paul A. (Paul Anthony), 1915-2009 Buchanan, James M., 1919-2013 Social services Social skills Public finance Public history Twentieth century keyword: Arrow Buchanan idealism normative positive public economics Robbins Samuelson scale issues science utilitarianism ab: A history of the transformation of public finance into public economics necessarily involves an understanding of the tension between positive and normative statements, that is a history of how public economists dealt with Robbins's requirements that economists should not make normative statements. In this paper, we propose to contribute to this history by discussing and comparing the works of two major economists of the 20th century, Paul Samuelson and James Buchanan. We show that they both use the same strategy to deal with the positive/normative tension: they adopt a reduced scale of analysis to escape normative judgements – the family for Samuelson and small groups (clubs) for Buchanan. What they do manage at this level is to create examples or models which remove that normative response from the theorist, and ascribe it to the participants. The normative views of the theorist are not involved. Yet, when one shifts back to a larger scale, the positive element of the analysis is less clear, at least in Samuelson's work. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y dt: @attributes: year: 2023 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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