normativity
The concept space of norms and things to do with norms. "Normativity" can refer to
- descriptions of norms that are active in your object of study
- normative claims you are making about your object of study
- what a norm even is
In economics, normativity(2) is a mode of inquiry alongside descriptive and prescriptive modes. It's the class of questions of any of the following forms:
- "what ought to be?"
- "what events, were they to transpire, would universally be agreed to be somehow aberrant, and why? what ought to happen in those events?"
- "what rules or values benefit everybody to implement?"
- "what rules or values are enforced by everyone?"
- "what is held to be true by all players in this system, even though the world itself does not seem to offer evidence?"
Q: You may notice that those are all very different types of question, that should return different types of answer. Why do they all fall get called "normative"? Why, actually, am I calling them all normativity(2)?
A: Norms are social truths. Whether by enforcement, equilibrium, or common traits among actors in a system, some things that could in theory happen just don't.
When asked, the answers any embedded explainer will reach for will insult, dismiss, or make an enemy of even a hypothetical violator of a norm.
Normativity is an understudied concept relative to the use economists put it to. From my favorite perspective it's a broad class of examples of mutually enforced reality pruning.
The normative bait-and-switch
An operation I've sometimes seen performed in economics metatheory, where a descriptive hypothesis that gets disproven in an unsatisfying edge-case-y way, or isn't falsifiable in the first place, will sometimes be silently recast as a norm so that it can be kept in the model. Axioms of revealed preference were where I first saw this happen. Properties of the given setting's homo rationalis are also likely suspects.
todo Further reading
- (Gibbard, Allan 1990) – norm-expressivism, a normativity(3) claim: norms are what everybody feels they ought to be.
- – the above structure generalized; foundational work on how a "way everybody does a thing" theoretically and causally comes to be.
- (Bicchieri, Cristina 2005) – formalization of rules. Disagrees with Pettit about whether stag-hare and builder-assistant are the same.
- (Horty, John F. 2001) – norms as properties p of outcomes that you help enforce because helping to enforce p is a dominant strategy for you. Mutually enforced reality pruning from a deontic logic perspective.
- (Infante, Gerardo and Lecouteux, Guilhem and Sugden, Robert 2014) – "there's a secret rational agent inside you!" welfare economics edition
- Pettit , On Three Dogmas of Normativity – current work, discussing foibles of the norms project.