Bob Butler Wrote:Exercising my personal value of respecting both sides of a dispute, I would say both paradigms have value
Of course they do, that’s my point.
Quote:Such folk will look at the numbers and history to determine the weight of merit of the two paradigms.
And people have done that. That’s how these two concepts emerged.
Quote:Throwing in another example, could Darwin's principle of evolution be considered a paradigm?
Of course it is. It’s one of the fundamental paradigms for biology. When evolutionary theory matured and developed a fruitful mathematical theory of evolution, biology matured. And look at the progress since then! Mature sciences have valid paradigms. Science in which opposing plausible paradigms are still battling it out, like economics, are still immature. This isn’t necessarily because of clashing values. Science is difficult.
Quote:According to his understanding that holy works are unquestionably, absolutely and literally true, it follows that evolution is incorrect.No it follows that a fundamentalist cannot become a competent biologist because his values conflict with the operating manual of biology. He can still do chemistry, however. I know some conservative Christian chemists who could be fundamentalists for all I know. I don’t look to them for religious guidance, just chemistry guidance.
Quote:...the world views and values of red and blue folk in the United States does effect their perception of the worth of your two economic paradigms.
I suspect self-interest has a stronger influence than values—we are a commercial republic as Vigil used to say.
Quote:I would happily agree with you that the above economic examples ought to be resolved using something similar to the scientific method.
The fact is they are. The best way to resolve this is by experimentation. We had the opportunity to try to experiment with this in 1920-21, 1929-33, 1970, 1980-82, 1987, 2000 and more recently in 2008-9. The supply side paradigm yielded a good outcome in 1920-21, and with the Friedman modifications in 1980 and 1987. It utterly failed in 1929-33. Demand-side policy was employed successfully after 1933 and unsuccessfully in 1970. In 2008 we sort of did both policies half-heartedly. I will leave the interpretation of the results as successful or not to you.
Quote:It's just that political partisans often include these economic paradigms within the realm of their world views, and thus are apt to be no more objective and rational.
Since the answer is unclear, this is a fair approach.