The Economists Oath

Preface :-
I began thinking about the idea of professional economic ethics in 2004 when I was invited to give a plenary talk on the future of economics at the first meeting of the International Confederation f Associations for Pluralism in Economics (ICAPE). At the time, I was teaching a graduate seminar on the normative foundations of economics, and a discussion with my students on the maxi max decision rule that appears in Robert Nozick's Anarchy, state and Utopia provoked me to think about the practice of economic policy making. It struck me immediately that the maxi max principle that Nozick identifies and derides in this text was in fact the guiding decision rule in the market liberalization project in the global south from the 1980s on word and in the transition economizes during the 1990s, I then began to wonder about whether the use of this rules in not just unwise (as Nozick rightly claim) but also unethical when applied by a profession that enjoys influence over the lives of others.