This gets at exactly what bugs me about public Econ. The hand wringing over tax incidence and counterintuitive “unintended consequences” is so disproportionate to the concern over the common sense but much more important issue that rich people have way too much money and power. https://twitter.com/arindube/status/1264328268049678336

I think there are two main issues: 1) to some extent we fetishize contrarian thinking. So if you can show that the public perception of a policy is misguided and well-intentioned policies go wrong that ups the “novelty” of a paper

2) we have tried (unsuccessfully) to eliminate moral judgements from Econ. And so we don’t think seriously about issues of fairness which are what actually motivate most people. We leave the burden of making memorial judgements to other people (politicians, voters, etc.)

But how you frame things inevitably affects what you research and what you care about. So if you don’t allow yourself to make moral judgements about “fairness” you naturally bias yourself against issues of exploitation and powerlessness. Which... is a moral judgement

You can’t separate the positive and the normative. That’s a fantasy. Choosing not to address morality is, predictably, immoral