More tariffs paid by US consumers

[Dill]

(06-13-2019, 08:31 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Economics is a social science for a reason. The economy is the management of resources within society. Therefore, the economy is a product of society and they cannot be separated.

Any good economist will agree that the separation of "economy" from "society" is an analytical distinction which enables clearer isolation of measurable inputs and outputs. We are not talking about some natural, self-evident distinction here.

Some economists will also agree that data in whatever form are an abstraction, and in the case of economies only a partial measure of health or efficiency or whatever is deemed to make an economy good.  The latter judgment will always rely on values as much as data. And which metrics one uses to judge the "health" of an economy cannot be unrelated to values. E.g. whether one decides to include metrics such as the wealth gap, or to exclude them, is a value judgment. 

So you are correct that economy and society are inseparable.  There is no measurement/assessment of the former which does not already imply some assumption about what is good for society, or what the good society is. 

I have a strong suspicion that business students may be taught to apply some economic instruments/measures with little attention to their status as or derivation from social science. One consequence of this is they don't see how their choice of metrics always already involves value judgments.  They are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) taught a worldview which naturalizes the free market and assumes the neutrality of their measurements.  That is why they are so often hard to reason with. Regarding their own claims as self-evident, they cannot argue for them, only repeat them. And they cannot process counter arguments well enough to address them rationally, term for term.