Public economic policy debates frequently look, to a casual observer, like genuine disagreement over basic facts — but economists on opposing sides of a policy debate are very often looking at the same underlying data and reaching different conclusions for two more specific, more structural reasons: different underlying economic models, and different value judgments about acceptable trade-offs, neither of which is really a disagreement about the raw data itself.
Different schools of economic thought build in genuinely different assumptions
Different economic frameworks — broadly, schools of thought that place different relative weight on the role of government intervention, the speed at which markets self-correct, and how much weight to give short-term versus long-term effects — start from genuinely different foundational assumptions about how the economy actually functions, and applying different models to identical raw data can produce meaningfully different predictions and policy recommendations, without either economist being wrong about the data itself; they’re working from different underlying theoretical frameworks about how that data translates into real-world outcomes.
Value judgments about trade-offs are frequently mistaken for factual disagreement
A substantial share of apparent economic disagreement is really a disagreement about values rather than facts — for instance, a policy question about accepting somewhat higher inflation in exchange for lower unemployment (or the reverse) involves a genuine value judgment about which economic pain is more socially acceptable to prioritize avoiding, a values question that economic data alone cannot resolve, even though it frequently gets debated using technical economic language that makes it sound like a purely factual, resolvable dispute rather than a genuine values trade-off.
A lot of economic disagreement that sounds like ‘these experts can’t agree on the facts’ is more accurately described as ‘these experts agree on the facts and disagree about which trade-off is more acceptable’ — a genuinely different, and less resolvable, kind of disagreement.
Why this distinction is useful for evaluating economic debates
Understanding this distinction is genuinely useful for evaluating economic policy debates more critically: when two economists disagree, it’s worth asking whether the disagreement traces to a genuine factual dispute about the data (comparatively rare and usually resolvable), a difference in underlying theoretical model (common, and worth understanding which model each economist is implicitly using), or a values-based disagreement about acceptable trade-offs (also common, and not something more data alone will ever resolve, regardless of how technical the surrounding language sounds).