Political disputes are usually terminal value disputes, and pretending otherwise leads to confusion of facts and preferences.
Wow, what? No.
We are nowhere near the point where the only thing left to argue about in politics is terminal values. There are so many strict Pareto improvements available in the world that can't possibly be true.
Modify it and say "instrumental values", then maybe. That leaves a lot of room for the usual mechanisms of human stupidity to produce contradictory results, even with identical terminal values.
I'd say a more accurate characterization of political disputes is people failing at the is-ought distinction: how much of the controversy aroud racism, feminism, authoritarianism, etc is derived from the naturalistic fallacy and disagreeing with the facts because of supposed moral implications? (hint: nearly all of it.)
I want prostitution legalized. Most people don't. This is because I don't think selling sex is immoral. I don't terminally disvalue it. I could make arguments like "Prostitution would be a lot safer if it was legal," which are correct. But it would also probably be more common, and I bet some of my opposition thinks that the extra sex-selling is worse than the STDs legalization would get rid of (especially because they would be inflicted upon people who "deserved" it.). So this is a terminal value disagreement.
I suspect a lot of the oth...
So apparently Richard Feynman once said:
I could be missing something, but this strikes me as a terrible answer.
When was the atomic hypothesis confirmed? If I recall correctly, it was only when chemists started noticing that the outputs of chemical reactions tended to factorize a certain way, which is to say that it took millennia after Democritus to get the point where the atomic hypothesis started making clearly relevant experimental predictions.
How about, "Stop trying to sound wise and come up with theories that make precise predictions about things you can measure in numbers."
I noticed this on Marginal Revolution, so I shall also state my candidate for the one most important sentence about macroeconomics: "You can't eat gold, so figure out how the heck money is relevant to making countries actually produce more or less food." This is a pretty large advance on how kings used to think before economics. I mean, Scott Sumner is usually pretty savvy (so is Richard Feynman btw) but his instruction to try to understand money is likely to fall on deaf ears, if it's just that one sentence. Think about money? Everyone wants more money! Yay, money! Let's build more gold mines! And "In the short run, governments are not households"? Really, Prof. Cowen, that's what you'd pass on to the next generation as they climb up from the radioactive soil?
*Cough.* Okay, I'm done. Does anyone want to take their own shot at doing better than Feynman did for their own discipline?