Brian Davey — Putting moral philosophy back into economics

In conclusion – if we are going to try to reclaim economics as a branch of moral philosophy and if we are really going to describe the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be, then we have to acknowledge what happened in the historical process that paralleled the “development” of the economy and the development of economics as a subject. Put bluntly the people who were fraudsters, thieves, gangsters, thugs and murderers have had a predominant influence across much of that history and have ruled in what are now “developed” societies for centuries. They have conquered most of the rest of the world, stole resources and terrorised it – and economists helped them by supplying a narrative that justified what was happening as a source of improvement and technological progress.

Actually it has been a history of violence, duress and crime and it still is. There is an estimated $ 21 trillion to $ 32 trillion in wealth hidden in financial secrecy jurisdictions which are places that facilitate fraud, tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance. These places facilitate escape from financial regulations, embezzlement, insider dealing, bribery and money laundering. In Britain the continued prominence of the City of London and its network of tax havens was originally based on an Empire imposed by violence and then continued by providing a place to evade tax, regulations and the law. If economics is supposed to describe the world as it really is, how come that the analysis of these kind of facts are not what economic textbooks are about?

The first step to putting ethics back into economics is to take centuries of PR spin out of it and describe the world as it is, not the comfortable ideas that we would prefer to believe.

Feasta
Putting moral philosophy back into economics

Brian Davey