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In the philosophy of economics, economics is often divided into positive (or descriptive) and normative (or prescriptive) economics.Positive economics focuses on the description, quantification and explanation of economic phenomena, [1] while normative economics discusses prescriptions for what actions individuals or societies should or should not take.
For example, "children should eat vegetables", and "those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither" are philosophically normative claims. On the other hand, "vegetables contain a relatively high proportion of vitamins", and "a common consequence of sacrificing liberty for security is a loss of both" are positive claims.
Philosophy and economics studies topics such as public economics, behavioural economics, rationality, justice, history of economic thought, rational choice, the appraisal of economic outcomes, institutions and processes, the status of highly idealized economic models, the ontology of economic phenomena and the possibilities of acquiring knowledge of them.
Statements of value (normative or prescriptive statements), which encompass ethics and aesthetics, and are studied via axiology. This barrier between fact and value, as construed in epistemology, implies it is impossible to derive ethical claims from factual arguments, or to defend the former using the latter.
Normative economics seeks to identify what economies ought to be like. Welfare economics is a normative branch of economics that uses microeconomic techniques to simultaneously determine the allocative efficiency within an economy and the income distribution associated with it.
An economic ideology is a set of views forming the basis of an ideology on how the economy should run. It differentiates itself from economic theory in being normative rather than just explanatory in its approach, whereas the aim of economic theories is to create accurate explanatory models to describe how an economy currently functions.
There is an important difference between norms and normative propositions, although they are often expressed by identical sentences. "You may go out" usually expresses a norm if it is uttered by the teacher to one of the students, but it usually expresses a normative proposition if it is uttered to one of the students by one of his or her ...
Behavioral economics investigates human behaviour which violates the above axioms. Believing in axioms in a normative way does not imply that everyone must behave according to them. [8] Consumers whose preference structures violate transitivity would get exposed to being exploited by some unscrupulous person.