Peart Organizes Symposium on Ethics and Economics 

Winter 2008

A three-article symposium on ethics and economics compiled by Dean Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy, a professor of economics at George Mason University, was published in the Winter 2008 edition of the Eastern Economic Journal.

The symposium explores the nature of ethics and ethical constraints within economics and challenges the notion that those who study human choice are somehow different from those whose choices they study.

“If we are equally competent, or must treat people as if they are, then it follows that policy makers, economists and other experts on social matters, are equally able to be ethical and to be unethical,” Peart and Levy write. “We are all tempted to the unethical, by whatever tempts any among us. The trick is to recognize this basic fact and then, having done so, to put into place constraints that serve to attenuate the temptations that experts, those whose advice is sought, face.”

In addition to Peart and Levy’s article, “Inducing Greater Transparency: Towards the Establishment of Ethical Rules for Econometrics,” the symposium includes articles by professors of economics Martin Zelder and Daniel Houser titled, “Why the Con Hasn’t Been Taken Out of Econometrics” and “A Note on Norms in Experimental Economics,” respectively. Zelder teaches at Northwestern University. Houser is a professor of economics who specializes in experimental economics at George Mason University.

The articles were originally presented in 2003 at the Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economics at George Mason University, which Peart directs with Levy.