Tyler Cowan (of Marginal Revolution) is a smart dude, and, doubtless, he's an excellent economist. I would be remiss, however, if I didn't point out one of the many flaws in this post:
I am commonly excoriated by people (not Matt) for not supporting government-subsidized universal health insurance, yet few if any of these people grapple seriously with the best evidence.
I live in a country where the extension of health insurance is a major issue, and a major budgetary issue, yet much of the discussion is in an evidence-free zone.
As for his first point, that's just a cheap shot. It might be fair to say that many people don't "grapple seriously" with the best evidence, but it's hyperbole to claim that "few if any" proponents of "subsidized universal health insurance" know the "best evidence." (All of this is, of course, granting that we can agree on Cowan's definition of "the best evidence.")
But the real problem with all of this is the obsession in policy-making with consequentialist answers to normative questions. I'm not trying to claim that we shouldn't have consequentialist analysis of policies, but that it should be tempered with deontological analysis as well.
Why does this matter? Consequentialism would say a policy is right or wrong depending on how much good it does for people--regardless of the percieved morality of the policy itself. That is, a consiquentialist might say that torture is wrong because it doesn't produce good intelligence, and, even when it does, the negative fallout of torture isn't worth the potential bad press. This is very different than a deotological view of torture, which might be that torture is wrong because torture is wrong.
Granted that I'm doing a gross disservice to these views, which are basically umbrella terms and are far more complex than the above paragraph...
The problem with economics is that it devalues non-consiquentialist readings of the rightness or wrongness of a given policy. I think there's a plausible deontolgical case that health care reform is the right thing to do, but these sorts of arguments are not taken seriously by economists (or social scientists in general).
It's worth noting that non-consiquentialist policies have a proud history in the U.S. Think about the Blackstone ratio: "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
Just sayin'.
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