Latest Blogwatch column

My Blogwatch column from the latest issue (Issue 59, August 2017) of the NZAE magazine Asymmetric Information

Immigration with Art Carden

An interview from the Libertarian Christian Institute with economist Art Carden about immigration.


THE LIBERTARIAN CHRISTIAN PODCASTEp 16: Immigration with Art Carden

The division of labour and the firm: Rauh (forthcoming)

An interesting new paper which develops a theory, incorporating the division of labour and specialisation and a stochastic ('O-ring') production function, to explain the incentive structure and size of the firm is The O-ring theory of the firm by Micheal T. Rauh, which is set to appear in the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy.

A note on the name 'O-ring'. The O-ring production function was introduced by Kremer (1993). The name comes from the fact that it was an O-ring failure that caused the space shuttle Challenger disaster. The basic idea is that the failure of a small component can have large adverse consequences. Here one part of the production process failing causes the whole process to fail.

Rauh assumes a production process that can be divided into a number of distinct tasks. This makes it possible for the tasks to be allocated across workers (the division of labour) and for workers to make investments in task-specific human capital (specialisation). This is the kind of situation just discussed in the Becker and Murphy paper. We saw that an increase in employment gave rise to a greater division of labour, that is, fewer tasks assigned to each worker, and greater specialisation and thus higher productivity. Importantly Rauh postulates an additional feature of the production process: a breakdown at any point in production, which could be due to shirking, poor decision-making or a negative shock, will have serious adverse consequences for the successful manufacturing of the product--this is the 'O-ring' type production function.

This second condition has important implications for the moral hazard problems that arise within a firm. In the first best case, the principal can directly monitor individual worker effort and thus will be able to identify and respond to any shirking by workers with probability one. In the second best case, individual output can be monitored and again shirking can be punished with probability one. Note that in this case a worker who experiences a negative shock will also be punished. In the third best case all workers will be punished, with probability one, if any single worker shirks. In each of the three cases there will be no free rider issues since shirkers cannot hide behind the efforts of their co-workers.

Rauh considers a production process where the set of tasks is the unit interval. The principal chooses the number of workers, and the set of tasks to be performed is divided equally across all workers. Each of the workers is able to choose their production effort and their level of investment in task-specific human capital for each task they are assigned. To produce one unit of output requires one unit of output of each task. This means that you get zero output if any of the workers shirks or suffers an adverse shock in any of their assigned tasks. In line with Becker and Murphy (1992) greater levels of employment implies fewer tasks being assigned to each worker, which in turn means the workers can increase their investments in human capital for each of their reduced set of assigned tasks. This results in greater productivity and thus increasing returns to employment.

The stochastic (O-ring) nature of the production function is thought about in the following way.

"In addition to production effort and investments in human capital, each agent monitors his assigned tasks and makes decisions about whether or not a problem has arisen, whether or not to halt production to fix it, whether he can fix it himself, and which potential solution is appropriate. When there is only one agent, there is a high probability that at least some of these decisions will be faulty because he has limited cognitive resources and performs all the tasks himself. When there are two agents, the probability that either one will make a mistake should be lower because each performs only half the set of tasks and can therefore devote more care and attention to each of them. On the other hand, we now have two probabilities instead of one, so the effect of an increase in employment is ambiguous" (Rauh forthcoming: 2).

More formally, the probability that a worker suffers a negative shock to at least one of the tasks they have been allocated is an increasing function of the proportion of tasks being performed by that worker. Under an assumption of independence, the probability of a product defect is the product of the individual probabilities. If the number of workers is increased this results in two effects. First, it will decrease the probability that each worker will suffer a negative shock. Secondly, it will increase the number of points in the production process at which a negative shock can occur. Rauh then defines a production process as satisfying the O-ring property if the probability of a defect occurring is increasing in the number of workers and converges to one as the number of workers goes to infinity.

Given this background, the main question for the paper is then considered: What limits the size of a firm? For Rauh the answer has to do with the effects (or lack of effects) of moral hazard. Since there is a one-to-one relationship between the division of labour and the level of employment in the paper, the question can be rephrased as, What limits the division of labour? As has been noted above Becker and Murphy (1992) see this limit as be determined not by the extent of the market, as Adam Smith argued, but rather by coordination costs, including agency costs.

When determining the relationship between moral hazard and the size of the firm, "[ ... ] the optimal employment level balances the following considerations: (i) the increasing returns to employment due to specialization and division of labor, (ii) the O-ring property of the production technology, where the probability of team failure increases with the size of the team, and (iii) the marginal cost of employment (the cost of hiring another agent)" (Rauh forthcoming: 2).

In the first best case of no moral hazard Rauh shows that the standard zero incentive, full insurance contract is employed. Effectively the firm is behaving as if it were a perfectly competitive wage-taker despite it being a monopolist. Since, in this case, each worker's payment is fixed, the firm's labour costs (the number of workers times the expected payment to each worker) are linear in workers and the marginal cost of a worker is constant. Importantly, however, given increasing returns to employment, which arises from specialisation and the division of labour, but only linearly increasing costs to employment, these costs cannot limit the extent of employment. Thus, in this case, the extent of the market for labour or the O-ring property must be limiting employment and thus the size of the firm. If it wasn't for these constraints the first best firm would be of infinite size since there are increasing returns to employment.

Next Rauh considers the second best contract. Here effort cannot be observed but individual output can. Rauh shows that the optimal (second best) contract involves awarding a bonus to a worker when their individual output is high, i.e., when the worker's effort is first best and there is a positive shock, and replacing the worker otherwise. Rauh shows that the worker’s bonus is decreasing in employment. This follows from the fact that as employment increases the proportion of tasks carried out by each worker falls which increases the likelihood of a positive shock. This increases the expected value of the worker’s payment if the worker selects the first best effect level. This means the principal can reduce the bonus paid to the worker. It is also shown that this reduction in the bonus reduces the expected payment to the worker and this implies that the payment is decreasing in employment as well. If this type of effect is large enough then the marginal cost of an extra worker can decline with employment and could even be negative. In this situation the second best cost of employment could be less than the first best (constant) marginal cost of employment. This would mean the second best firm could be larger than the first best firm. Thus, the second best firm would have weak incentives (low bonus), low expected pay (small worker payment) and an excessive division of labour (and an excessive amount of specialisation). Motivation is provided by the fact that shirking workers will be identified and fired, rather than through the use of incentive schemes. As before, as the level of employment increases fewer tasks are carried out by each worker and the probability of a positive shock converges to one. This means that the second best expected payment to a worker converges to the first best payment. In turn, this means that the second best cost function tends towards the (linear) first best cost function. Thus as with the first best case the increasing returns resulting to employment resulting from the division of labour and specialisation cannot be contained by an asymptotically linear cost of employment. Rauh concludes from this that when the principal can monitor individual output, even if not effort, the size of the firm under moral hazard is again limited by either the total number of workers available or the O-ring property .

Lastly, Rauh looks at the third best situation where the where the principal can observe only team output. Here the results are the opposite of the second best case. This is because the third best incentive relies on the probability that all workers experience a positive shock rather than depending on the probabilities that individual workers experience a positive shock. Given the O-ring property, an increase in workers increases the probability that an individual worker experiences a positive shock but reduces the probability that all workers experience a positive shock. In this case increasing the number of workers decreases the team probability of success and this decreases the expected payments made to workers when they put in the first best level of effort. This means that the principal will increase the third best bonus, which increases the third best expected payment to workers and the marginal cost of employment. From this it is clear that all of the third best bonus, expected payments and the marginal cost of a worker are increasing in the number of workers. This is the opposite of the second best case above.

As the number of workers employed continues to increase, the third best bonus, expected payments and the marginal cost of employment all explode. This is contrary to the second best case where all these variables tended to their first best levels. The third best marginal cost of employment is shown to always exceeds the first and second best marginal costs of employment. This means the third best firm is usually smaller than either the first or second best firms.

Thus for Rauh's model moral hazard concerns only limit the division of labour, and the size of the firm, when the principal can monitor just the output of the whole team. When either worker's effort or individual output can be observed either the extent of the labour market or the O-ring property limit the extent of the division of labour or the size of the firm.

Rauh's paper is interesting in part because it combines, in some ways, the older division of labour approach to the firm with the more modern principal agent approach to the firm. The more modern mainstream approaches to the firm don't emphasise the division of labour with their emphasis being more on incomplete contracts and agency problems. The division of labour approach has largely fallen out of favour.

Well worth a read if you are into the theory of the firm.

Refs.:

• Becker, Gary S. and Kevin M. Murphy (1992). 'The Division of Labor, Coordination Costs, and Knowledge', Quarterly Journal of Economics, 107 (4) November: 1137-60.
• Kremer, M. (1993). 'The O-ring theory of economic development', Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108(3) August: 551-75.
• Rauh, Michael T. (forthcoming). 'The O-ring theory of the firm', Journal of Economics & Management Strategy.

Speaking truth to "power"

Bob McManus writes at the City Journal:

Stephen Colbert, with arguably the sharpest tongue among America’s late-night TV ankle-biters, made his bones at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, laying a vile spiel on President George W. Bush and finding himself the man of the moment. How brave, to speak such truth to power, gushed the usual suspects, and Colbert has been riding that wave ever since.

But he had done no such thing. In the absence of personal risk, haranguing the powerful can be soul-satisfying, and sometimes it forges careers, but it isn’t brave by a long shot. Thomas More spoke truth to Henry VIII, and it cost him his head. Dietrich Bonheoffer spoke truth to Adolf Hitler and was hanged in a concentration camp. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke truth to the Soviet Union and suffered grievously for it. Stephen Colbert piddled on the president’s rug, and he’s been cashing big-bucks checks ever since. See the difference?

Statements have to be costly to be credible. Cheap talk is .... well .... cheap talk. Signals need to be costly if people are to believe them. And there is nothing costly or brave about just sounding off against "power" when that "power" will not respond.

Palgrave studies in ancient economies

An interesting looking new book series from Palgrave.

Call for Proposals - Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies

Announcing a new series

This series provides a unique dedicated forum for ancient economic historians to publish studies that make use of current theories, models, concepts, and approaches drawn from the social sciences and the discipline of economics, as well as studies that use an explicitly comparative methodology. Such theoretical and comparative approaches to the ancient economy promotes the incorporation of the ancient world into studies of economic history more broadly, ending the tradition of viewing antiquity as something separate or ‘other’.

The series not only focuses on the ancient Mediterranean world, but also includes studies of ancient China, India, and the Americas pre-1500. This encourages scholars working in different regions and cultures to explore connections and comparisons between economic systems and processes, opening up dialogue and encouraging new approaches to ancient economies.

Series Editors:
Paul Erdkamp, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Ken Hirth, Penn State University, USA
Claire Holleran, University of Exeter, UK
Chunyan Huang, Yunnan University, China
Michael Jursa, University of Vienna, Austria
J. G. Manning, Yale University, USA

Contact for Proposals
Submissions are ideally between 60,000 and 110,000 words, although shorter submissions (25,000-50,000 words) will be considered for our Palgrave Pivot publication format.

Authors interested in submitting a proposal should contact the series editors directly or Laura Pacey (laura.pacey@palgrave.com)

Civil asset forfeiture, crime, and police incentives

Yes the police, like criminals, respond to incentives.

A new NBER working paper makes this point.

Civil Asset Forfeiture, Crime, and Police Incentives: Evidence from the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984

Shawn Kantor, Carl Kitchens, Steven Pawlowski

The 1984 federal Comprehensive Crime Control Act (CCCA) included a provision that permitted local law enforcement agencies to share up to 80 percent of the proceeds derived from civil asset forfeitures obtained in joint operations with federal authorities. This procedure became known as “equitable sharing.” In this paper we investigate how this rule governing forfeited assets influenced crime and police incentives by taking advantage of pre-existing differences in state level civil asset forfeiture law and the timing of the CCCA. We find that after the CCCA was enacted crime fell about 17 percent in places where the federal law allowed police to retain more of their seized assets than state law previously allowed. Equitable sharing also led police agencies to reallocate their effort toward the policing of drug crimes. We estimate that drug arrests increased by about 37 percent in the years after the enactment of the CCCA, indicating that it was profitable for police agencies to reallocate their efforts. Such a reallocation of effort, however, brought an unintended cost in the form of increased roadway fatalities, seemingly from reduced enforcement of traffic laws.

Enforcement goes where the money is, not where the need is.

Intellectual property rights: yay or nay?

From the IEA comes this podcast in which Kate Andrews and Steve Davies talk about the good and bad aspects of intellectual property rights.

The Institute of Economic Affairs's Dr Steve Davies joins Kate Andrews to discuss the arguments for and against intellectual property rights - a topic that which particularly divides the libertarian movement.

In the podcast, Steve explains the philosophical arguments both for and against, ultimately arguing that copyright law forms illogical conclusions when taken to the extreme.

However, Steve thinks certain forms of intellectual property are justifiable and helpful, like trademarks, often because they spring up organically, and recognised by courts rather than determined by state policy.

He also points out, that as it becomes increasingly more difficult to monitor copyright infringement, changes to law may be needed for the 21st century.

The Latest bad idea in town: economic nationalism

From the IEA comes this podcast in which Kate Andrews and Steve Davies talk about the rise of economic nationalism.

From the left-ward shift of the Conservative Party in Britain, to the rise of Donald Trump in America, there seems to be a growing appetite for protectionism and central planning in contemporary politics. Steve and Kate examine some of the reasons behind this trend - and whether advocates of free trade are losing the "Battle of Ideas" in the 21st century.

They also look at what protectionist governments hope to achieve from adopting these policies - and how likely they will be to succeed in "bringing back jobs" for declining domestic industries.

Pigs don't fly: the economic way of thinking about politics

This essay, Pigs Don't Fly: The Economic Way of Thinking about Politics by Russ Roberts is well worth rereading, especially as we are only weeks away from the election.

Politicians are just like the rest of us. They find it hard to do the right thing. They claim to have principles, but when their principles clash with what is expedient, they often find a way to justify their self-interest. If they sacrifice what is noble or ideal for personal gain, they are sure to explain that it was all for the children, or the environment or at least for the good of society.

Pigs don't fly. Politicians, being mere mortals like the rest of us, respond to incentives. They're a mixture of selfless and selfish and when the incentives push them to do the wrong thing, albeit the self-interested one, why should we ever be surprised? Why should be fooled by their professions of principle, their claims of devotion to the public interest?

And yet voters are stupid enough to be fooled.

Roberts makes a nice point about bootleggers and Baptists,

The Baptists give the politicians cover for doing what the bootleggers want. No politician says we should ban liquor sales on Sunday in order to enrich the bootleggers who support his campaign. The politician holds up one hand to heaven and talk about his devotion to morality. With the other hand, he collects campaign contributions (or bribes) from the bootleggers.

"Democracy in Chains" versus public choice

From the Cato Institute comes this Cato Daily Podcast audio in which Michael Munger is interviewed by Caleb O. Brown about Nancy Maclean's book Democracy in Chains. The book paints Nobel Laureate and Cato Distinguished Senior Fellow James Buchanan as the scholar who would help bring down democracy using the methods of public choice. Michael Munger of Duke University comments.

Is price gouging bad?

No.

4.42 minutes stating the obvious.

Why you want to keep politicians away from business

The ever disintegrating Venezuela gives us a great illustration of why politicians should be kept out of businesses. Trying to gain political support by interfering in the running of a business doesn't improve the business.

To survive months of street protests and an economy in tailspin, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is trying to turn state oil company PDVSA into a bastion of support, further degrading an already vulnerable enterprise.

Political appointees are gaining clout at the expense of veteran oil executives, while employees are under mounting pressure to attend government rallies and vote for the ruling Socialists. The increasing focus on politics over performance is contributing to a rapid deterioration of Venezuela's oil industry, home to the world's largest crude reserves, and to a brain drain at the once world-class company.

Interviews with two dozen current and former employees, foreign oil executives, and contractors point to a PDVSA coming apart at the seams.

"Everything is a disaster and yet we have to clap," said a PDVSA employee, who asked to remain anonymous because she feared retaliation.

and

Now Venezuela's oil production is on track to end 2017 at a 25-year low, but the leftist government still relies heavily on PDVSA to be its financial motor.

That leaves management in a precarious balancing act and sources say political factions are increasingly locked in power struggles within the company.

A senior management team named in January that draws heavily on political and military appointees has left PDVSA's president, the Stanford-educated engineer Eulogio Del Pino, largely powerless, according to two high-level sources in PDVSA and the government who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure of the company is crumbling, rig counts are at historic lows and refineries are working at a fraction of capacity.

Staff at PDVSA's once gleaming headquarters complain that many elevators are out of service, the bathrooms lack toilet paper, and their cars are broken into in the parking lot. Scarce paper and ink are diverted to make political posters.

and

Prominent new executives include trading division boss Ysmel Serrano, who used to work for current Vice President Tareck El Aissami, and finance vice president Simon Zerpa, a young ally of Maduro's.

The influx of inexperienced executives and middle managers is keenly felt by foreign oil executives, who say they sometimes spend hours waiting for PDVSA representatives and complain that simple decisions are inexplicably delayed.

"Most of the time executives don't answer phone calls or emails. It's surprising how young and unprepared some managers are," said a representative of a foreign firm holding a supply contract with PDVSA.

He said that managerial and operational chaos was worsening, with waiting time to load a tanker stretching to 30-40 days compared to 2-3 days a few years ago.

In short the business of politicians is politics, not business.

George Selgin on "A Monetary Policy Primer, Part 11: Last-Resort Lending"

One of the few interesting bits of monetary policy is the central banks role as the lender of last resort.

For many, the "lender of last resort" role of central banks is an indispensable complement to their task of regulating the overall course of spending. Unless central banks play that distinct role, it is said, financial panics will occasionally play havoc with nations' monetary systems.

George Selgin's aim is to challenge this way of thinking. Its an interesting antidote to much of what you hear said about the importance of the lender of last resort role of central banks.

Worth a few minutes to read.

You know your country is in trouble when

you get these kind of things happening,

In a hastily organized plebiscite on July 16, held under the auspices of the opposition-controlled National Assembly to reject President Nicolás Maduro’s call for a National Constituent Assembly, more than 720,000 Venezuelans voted abroad. In the 2013 presidential election, only 62,311 did. Four days before the referendum, 2,117 aspirants took Chile’s medical licensing exam, of which almost 800 were Venezuelans. And on July 22, when the border with Colombia was reopened, 35,000 Venezuelans crossed the narrow bridge between the two countries to buy food and medicines.

Voting with your feet is a real thing.

And

The most frequently used indicator to compare recessions is GDP. According to the International Monetary Fund, Venezuela’s GDP in 2017 is 35% below 2013 levels, or 40% in per capita terms. That is a significantly sharper contraction than during the 1929-1933 Great Depression in the United States, when US GDP is estimated to have fallen 28%.

Mike Munger interview

Dr. Mike Munger (Professor, Political Science & Economics at Duke University) is interviewed by Dave Rubin to discuss political science, the importance of state’s rights, the Republican’s problem with social issues, fact checking in mainstream media, and more.

Towards a political theory of the firm

Towards a Political Theory of the Firm is a new NBER working paper by Luigi Zingales.

Abstract:

Neoclassical theory assumes that firms have no power of fiat any different from ordinary market contracting, thus a fortiori no power to influence the rules of the game. In the real world, firms have such power. I argue that the more firms have market power, the more they have both the ability and the need to gain political power. Thus, market concentration can easily lead to a "Medici vicious circle," where money is used to get political power and political power is used to make money.

I hope when I get the chance to read the paper that there is more to it than this abstract suggests. Many, most, organisations, be they firms, trade unions, churches, not-for-profits, universities, welfare groups, environmental groups etc, will try to get governments to do their bidding. It's just the nature of things and a really good reason for keeping firms etc as far away from government as possible. It is one reason why you want a limited role for government in the economy, the smaller the role, the less government can do to help firms and thus the less firms will try to influence governments. 'Positive non-interventionism' has a lot going for it.

In the neoclassical model its not that firms have no power to influence the rules of the game, its more that there are no firms, or government for that matter, to do the influencing or to be influenced. In a world of zero transaction costs there is no need for firms since consumers can carry out production themselves. "With perfect and costless contracting, it is hard to see room for anything resembling firms (even one-person firms), since consumers could contract directly with owners of factor services and wouldn't need the services of the intermediaries known as firms" (Foss 2000: xxiv).

If you want to see what letting governments and business get together results in check out the history of guilds, they provided money to governments and governments provided protection for them for 800 years! What suffered for this time was economic efficiency, the consumer (as usual) and the economy and society in general.

Ref.:

• Foss, Nicolai J. (2000). 'The Theory of the Firm: An Introduction to Themes and Contributions'. In Nicolai Foss (ed.), The Theory of the Firm: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management (xv-lxi), London: Routledge.

Ronald Coase a socialist!

I have just come across an article by Per Bylund at the Mises Institute website on the question Was Ronald Coase an Austrian? At one point Bylund answers the question by saying,

He was hardly an Austrian economist. On the contrary, he was a self-declared socialist - at least in his youth.

Let me quote Coase himself on this,

One may ask how I reconciled my socialist sympathies with acceptance of [Arnold] Plant's [free market] approach. The short answer is that I never felt the need to reconcile them. I would only recall that a fellow student, Abba Lerner, who, in the preface to his Economics of Control, acknowledges Plant's influence in the development of his views, went to Mexico to see Trotsky to persuade him that all would be well in a communist state if only it reproduced the results of a competitive system and prices were set equal to marginal cost. In my case my socialist views fell away fairly rapidly without any obvious stage of rejection (Emphasis added).

So the description should be 'he was a self-declared socialist - ONLY in his youth'.  I'm sure that anyone who has read the older Coase will be surprised to see him call a socialist. If fact in an interview Coase tells a story about his wife going to a party while he was at the University of Virginia,

They thought the work we were doing was disreputable. They thought of us as right-wing extremists. My wife was at a cocktail party and heard me described as someone to the right of the John Birch Society. There was a great antagonism in the '50s and '60s to anyone who saw any advantage in a market system or in a nonregulated or relatively economically free system.

Perhaps being both a socialist and to the right of the John Birch Society is an accomplishment worthy of a Nobel Prize!

Minimum wage increases, wages, and low-wage employment: evidence from Seattle

A new NBER working paper looks at the effects of the first and second phase-in of the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance, which raised the minimum wage from $9.47 to $11 per hour in 2015 and to $13 per hour in 2016. The paper is

Minimum Wage Increases, Wages, and Low-Wage Employment: Evidence from Seattle
by
Ekaterina Jardim, Mark C. Long, Robert Plotnick, Emma van Inwegen, Jacob Vigdor and Hilary Wething
NBER Working Paper No. 23532. The absract reads,

This paper evaluates the wage, employment, and hours effects of the first and second phase-in of the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance, which raised the minimum wage from $9.47 to $11 per hour in 2015 and to $13 per hour in 2016. Using a variety of methods to analyze employment in all sectors paying below a specified real hourly rate, we conclude that the second wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent. Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees’ earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016. Evidence attributes more modest effects to the first wage increase. We estimate an effect of zero when analyzing employment in the restaurant industry at all wage levels, comparable to many prior studies.

What is an incomplete contract?

A two minute answer to the question from Oliver Hart.

Positive v's normative economics

This is a distinction every economics student knows. But where did it originate?

A clear distinction between positive and normative economics goes back at least as far as John Neville Keynes (father of Maynard). Keynes wrote,

"[a]s the terms are here used, a positive science may be defined as a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is ; a normative or regulative science as a body of systematized knowledge relating to criteria of what ought to be, and concerned therefore with the ideal as distinguished from the actual ; an art as a system of rules for the attainment of a given end. The object of a positive science is the establishment of uniformities, of a normative science the determination of ideals, of an art the formulation of precepts" (Keynes 1917: 34-5).

Carl Menger also saw a difference, with regard to ethical considerations, between theoretical economics (positive economics) and economic policy (normative economics). In Menger (1883: 235) Menger criticises what he calls the "ethical orientation" of the German historical school. He writes with regard to theoretical economics that

"[w]hat we should like to stress here particularly is the fact that we cannot rationally speak of an ethical orientation of theoretical economics either in respect to the exact orientation of theoretical research or to the empirical-realistic orientation". But normative consideration do enter into economic policy: ``Economic policy, the science of the basic principles for suitable advancement (appropriate to conditions) of ``national economy" on the part of the public authorities" (Menger 1883: 211).

The important word here is suitable. You can not determine what is suitable without value judgements.

John Stuart Mill makes a similar distinction when he differentiates between science and art.

"These two ideas [science and art] differ from one another as the understanding differs from the will, or as the indicative mood in grammar differs from the imperative. The one deals in facts, the other in precepts. Science is a collection of truths ; art, a body of rules, or directions for conduct. The language of science is, This is, or, This is not ; This does, or does not, happen. The language of art is, Do this ; Avoid that. Science takes cognizance of a phenomenon, and endeavours to discover its law ; art proposes to itself an end, and looks out for means to effect it" (Mill 1844: 124).

So 1844 is as far back as I've found the distinction going, so far.

Refs.:

• Keynes, John Neville (1917). The Scope and Method of Political Economy 4th edition, New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1986.
• Menger, Carl (1883). Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics, formerly published under the title: Problems of Economics and Sociology (Untersuchungen uber die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der Politischen Oekonomie insbesondere), with a new introduction by Lawrence H. White, edited by Louis Schneider, translated by Francis J. Nock, New York: New York University Press, 1985.
• Mill, John Stuart (1844). Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, London: John W. Parker.