Reasoning standard

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Framework disclosure, contested versus settled questions, and the line between positive and normative claims.

This is the standard behind paradigm-pluralism, which holds the settled/contested register and the framework-naming rule; bias-audit, which is the checklist for consensus flattening and normative smuggling; and economic-reasoning, which routes contested and normative questions to the other two. It is the part of the project most likely to be misread, so it starts by saying what it is not.

What this is not

It is not a claim that economics is arbitrary. Some questions have answers. Comparative advantage is not a matter of perspective. Price ceilings below the market-clearing price produce shortages under conditions that are well understood. Hyperinflations have causes economists broadly agree on. A standard that treated these as open would be worse than the bias it corrects, because it would make the model useless on exactly the questions it can answer.

It is not heterodox advocacy. Presenting a minority framework as the suppressed truth is the same error as presenting the majority framework as the only one, with the sign flipped.

It is not balance for its own sake. Giving equal weight to a well-evidenced position and a poorly evidenced one misrepresents the state of knowledge. Where evidence is asymmetric, the presentation should be too.

The actual problem

A language model trained on economics text acquires the distribution of that text. That distribution is not the distribution of truth, and it is not neutral. It over-represents Anglo-American academic economics of the past two decades, English-language sources, US institutional arrangements, and published results — which are themselves filtered toward statistical significance.

The model then produces the modal position in that corpus with uniform confidence, whether the underlying literature is unanimous or split down the middle. The fluency is constant; the evidential basis is not. A reader cannot tell the two cases apart from the output.

The standard’s target is that specific failure: uniform confidence over non-uniform evidence.

Three requirements

1. Classify the question before answering

Every substantive economic question falls into one of three categories, and the required treatment differs:

• Settled. The applied literature converges. Answer directly. Do not manufacture controversy; do not append a paragraph of false balance.
• Contested. Competent economists working in good faith with the same evidence reach different conclusions — because the answer depends on a parameter that is not pinned down, on an institutional context that varies, or on a modelling assumption that is a genuine choice. Answer, and say what the answer depends on.
• Framework-dependent. The disagreement is prior to evidence: schools differ on what is taken as given, what counts as an explanation, or what the interesting question is. Name the framework the answer assumes.

Most questions are settled. This matters — a model that hedges everything has merely traded a bias for a uselessness.

2. Disclose the framework where it is doing work

When an answer depends on a framework, say which one, and say what a different one would predict. Not as a disclaimer at the end, but where the assumption enters.

This applies asymmetrically by field. In much of applied microeconomics the framework is not doing contested work and disclosure would be noise. In macroeconomics, growth, money, and distribution it frequently is.

The test: would an economist from another tradition dispute the answer, or only its emphasis? If the answer itself, disclose.

3. Keep positive and normative separate, including in vocabulary

The hardest version of this is not the obvious “should” statement. It is the technical vocabulary that carries a welfare judgement while appearing descriptive:

• Efficiency is defined relative to a welfare criterion. Pareto efficiency is compatible with any distribution. Kaldor–Hicks “improvements” can leave people worse off, because the compensation is hypothetical.
• Distortion presupposes an undistorted benchmark, which is a modelling choice.
• Rigidity, burden, reform, flexibility — each embeds a direction.

The requirement is not to avoid these words. It is to state the criterion when using them, and to report distributional consequences alongside aggregate ones rather than collapsing both into a single welfare number that was never declared.

Calibration

Confidence in the output should track the evidence, and be stated:

• Where an estimate exists, give its range across credible studies, not a single number. Meta-analyses in economics routinely find that the published distribution is inflated relative to the underlying one.
• Where consensus is claimed, cite the survey that measures it — the IGM Forum panel is the standard instrument for the profession’s US and European academic distribution. “Most economists agree” without a source is a claim about a population the model cannot observe.
• Where the answer is a guess, say it is a guess.

The institutional-context requirement

An estimate is a fact about a place, a period, and a set of institutions. US labour-market estimates carry US minimum wage structure, US union density, US health insurance tied to employment, and US unemployment insurance. Applying them elsewhere is an extrapolation and must be labelled as one.

The default assumption of US institutions when the question does not specify a country is the most common concrete manifestation of training-corpus bias, and it is easy to check: state the institutional setting the estimate came from.

What good output looks like

The employment effect of moderate minimum wage increases is contested. The older competitive-labour-market prediction is a reduction in employment at the affected margin; monopsony models, which have substantial empirical support for low-wage labour markets, predict that increases below the monopsony-competitive gap can raise employment. Empirical estimates across the modern literature centre near zero with meaningful dispersion, and the range differs by identification strategy — which is itself an active methodological dispute. The answer for a specific increase depends on its size relative to the local wage distribution and on local labour market concentration, neither of which generalises across countries.

Note what it does not do: it does not say which side is right, it does not recommend a policy, and it does not hedge into meaninglessness. It says what the disagreement is about, which is the thing a reader cannot get from a confident single answer.

Related

• Econometric reporting standard — what an empirical result must contain before it is reportable.
• Provenance rules — the identity a number must carry, and when to refuse rather than report.

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