One person’s “overarching narrative” is another person’s set of Bayesian priors.
Take, for example, your pollution discussion. An economics textbook will tell you that there is an ideal level of taxation, yes. However, it won’t tell you about regulatory capture, mission creep, the Hayekian knowledge problem, etc. There is always a correct set of contextual data to be used to interpret and resolve problems in isolation, yes—but determining what this set is and how we should interpret the probabilities of various events occurring is pretty much always going to invoke an overarching narrative unless you really, really think that this screws everything up.
But as an economist—a Masonomics student, no less—I’m inclined to see a greater harm in “markets fail, so assume a benevolent social planner and imagine what policies she could implement” approach to solving economic questions than the harms of dirtying one’s self in the morass of historical context. This is why social science is hard—and why it should be hard. It’s not that we should be indifferent to the injection of ideology into these debates, but that it’s liable to create greater harm if we try to avoid all questions which cannot yield precise analytical answers which are self-apparent to reasonable minds.
Hopefully I’m not strawmanning your point here—maybe you’re primarily trying to explain how ideology mucks things up, but I also get the impression that you think it’s reasonably feasible to avoid questions that lend themselves to ideological answers… I definitely would disagree with such an assertion.
One person’s “overarching narrative” is another person’s set of Bayesian priors.
Take, for example, your pollution discussion. An economics textbook will tell you that there is an ideal level of taxation, yes. However, it won’t tell you about regulatory capture, mission creep, the Hayekian knowledge problem, etc. There is always a correct set of contextual data to be used to interpret and resolve problems in isolation, yes—but determining what this set is and how we should interpret the probabilities of various events occurring is pretty much always going to invoke an overarching narrative unless you really, really think that this screws everything up.
But as an economist—a Masonomics student, no less—I’m inclined to see a greater harm in “markets fail, so assume a benevolent social planner and imagine what policies she could implement” approach to solving economic questions than the harms of dirtying one’s self in the morass of historical context. This is why social science is hard—and why it should be hard. It’s not that we should be indifferent to the injection of ideology into these debates, but that it’s liable to create greater harm if we try to avoid all questions which cannot yield precise analytical answers which are self-apparent to reasonable minds.
Hopefully I’m not strawmanning your point here—maybe you’re primarily trying to explain how ideology mucks things up, but I also get the impression that you think it’s reasonably feasible to avoid questions that lend themselves to ideological answers… I definitely would disagree with such an assertion.