Fahd

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This statement- which is a common attack to economics as a discipline - is correct in a literal sense. But I think it's important to unpack it to show that - while the statement is correct - the message that the statement implies fundamentally is not! Here's the unpacking: 1) Trivially, every discipline has a political dimension: the study of subatomic particles requires billions dollar investments that could be used to feed kids. But, this is rather silly. Economics is "more" political than physics: statements about monetary policy have direct political implications that statements about protons do not have. 2) Economics (as a discipline) has recognized this since its early steps in England and has developed imposing constraints on itself to limit its political dimensions. Two examples: i) Mathematical formalism makes it much much harder to hide the economist's ideology behind his/her arguments. ii) The adoption of Pareto efficiency as a definition of efficiency and the whole working with ordinal preferences limit the possibility of inter-personal comparisons in the evaluation of policies (so that the economist's ideology cannot be hidden behind the social welfare ordering he/she uses). 3) Ideology is heterogeneously distributed across individual economists' - so that ideological statements supported by one economist are not by another. Does this mean that ideology does not affect economics and policy - of course not - you can hide stuff with math and statistics too - and the distribution of ideology between economists is not the same as the one in the population. But the discipline has strong anti-bodies against ideological statements. And I would like to add that this is - in my biased and limited understanding - much less the case for other disciplines which have fundamental political dimensions - like sociology or anthropology, or even psychology. This is the sense in which the message the Tweet implicitly sends is severely misleading in my view.