Economic analyses and conclusions are intimately bound up with judgements regarding the human condition. They are concerned with the study of what Marshall (1947, p. 1) referred to as “[hu]mankind in the ordinary business of life,” and dedicated to examine “that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing,” (Ibid.). In that respect, economics is, from first principles, a normative enterprise.
