Economics is essentially about valuation and worth. In the past, judgments about these questions were left to bishops and kings. The authority of economists developed in the context of enlightenment values, the secularisation of society, and, in social relations, the displacement of custom and authority by the market.
Economists like to claim a rational or scientific basis for their theories.
As Joseph Schumpeter argued in his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1949, all economists have a world view, but most orthodox economists keep it well hidden. The values that economists hold are inextricably bound up with the way they interpret economic events. Economics is a moral science which attempts to explain why people are motivated to behave in particular ways in response to particular conditions. Economists are not scientists in the sense that scientists' social values are irrelevant to their professional task, which is to discover the universal and unchanging laws of nature. The essence of science is the development of testable theories.