to make all normative decisions. Thus some normative decisions reached would be based on misinformation.When one makes the claim, without any clarification, that unemployment increases wages, this is a positive statement. It is true for some framework, but not necessarily for the conditions that exist in reality at the time which we would like to make a normative decision based on this “fact”. It is at this point which the positive statement, because not clearly articulated, becomes value-loaded. We cannot tell what assumptions the economist made. This creates a statement most likely in support of his or her view of what ought to be, trying to pass it off as less than such. If he or she left out wage stickiness, it may be completely useless in our application to reality, despite the truth of the statement in the right conditions. Accepting the statement as the only means of making a policy decision would be allowing normative biases to pass as positive facts. Thus the reason for clear positive statements is that others may evaluate their completeness. When an economist claims “If one wants to decrease this type of unemployment under this situation with these assumptions, and so on,” one can analyze whether this is an effective positive statement which reflects the conditions of the world, and is therefore useful to normative science. It is the action of taking the economist’s statement as a fact of universality which is the problem, not with “normative influences” on the statements.One may construct this whole process in the context of a simple physics problem. Say a physicist, for whatever reason, values the possibility of a feather and a brick hitting the ground simultaneously when dropped simultaneously from the same height. This may lead him to the true theory that a feather and a brick fall at the same speed in a vacuum. However, if everyone fails to understand that the earth...
