Economics often is regarded as the most successful of the social sciences in developing a scientific theory of social behavior. Therefore, economics is a science with manifest ethical implications.

General Equilibrium Theory

Contemporary economic theory is based on the general equilibrium model first outlined by the nineteenth-century Swiss economist Léon Walras (1834–1910) and perfected in the post–World War II era by Kenneth Arrow (b. 1921; winner of a Nobel Prize in economics in 1972) and others. The Walrasian general equilibrium model includes firms, which transform production inputs (land, labor, natural resources, capital goods such as buildings and machines, and intermediate goods produced by other firms) into outputs (including consumer goods and services) by using a technologically determined production function that summarizes the most technically efficient way to transform a specific array of inputs into a particular output or array of outputs. The only other actors...