|
K glory
famous economists
History of Economic Thought
Economic issues have occupied people's
minds throughout the ages. Aristotle and Plato in ancient Greece wrote
about problems of wealth, property, and trade. Both were prejudiced against
commerce, feeling that to live by trade was undesirable. The Romans borrowed
their economic ideas from the Greeks and showed the same contempt for trade.
During the Middle Ages the economic ideas of the Roman Catholic church
were expressed in the canon law, which condemned usury (the taking of interest
for money loaned) and regarded commerce as inferior to agriculture.
Economics as a subject of modern study,
distinguishable from moral philosophy and politics, dates from the work,
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), by
the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith. Mercantilism and physiocracy
were precursors of the classical economics of Smith and his 19th-century
successors.
Mercantilism.
The development of modern nationalism
during the 16th century shifted attention to the problem of increasing
the wealth and power of the various nation-states. The economic policy
of the leaders of that time, known as mercantilism, sought to encourage
national self-sufficiency. The heyday of the mercantilist school in England
and western Europe occurred during the 16th through the early 18th centuries.
Mercantilists valued gold and silver
as an index of national power. Without the gold and silver mines in the
New World from which Spain drew its riches, a nation could accumulate these
precious metals only by selling more merchandise to foreigners than it
bought from them. This favorable balance of trade necessarily compelled
foreigners to cover their deficits by shipping gold and silver.
Mercantilists took for granted that
their own country was either at war with its neighbors, recovering from
a recent conflict, or getting ready to plunge into a new war. With gold
and silver, a ruler could hire mercenaries to fight, a practice followed
by King George III of Great Britain when he used Hessian troops during
the American Revolution. As needed, the monarch could also buy weapons,
uniforms, and food to supply the soldiers and sailors.
Mercantilist preoccupation with precious
metals also inspired several domestic policies. It was vital for a nation
to keep wages low and the population large and growing. A large, ill-paid
population produced more goods to be sold at low prices to foreigners.
Ordinary men and women were encouraged to work hard and avoid such extravagances
as tea, gin, ribbons, ruffles, and silks. It also followed that the earlier
that children began to work, the better it was for their country's prosperity.
One mercantilist writer had a plan for children of the poor: "When these
children are four years old, they shall be sent to the county workhouse
and there taught to read two hours a day and be kept fully employed the
rest of the time in any of the manufactures of the house which best suits
their age, strength, and capacity."
Physiocracy.
Physiocracy was briefly in vogue in
France during the second half of the 18th century as a reaction against
the narrow and restrictive policies of mercantilism. The founder of the
school, François Quesnay, was a physician at the royal court of
King Louis XV. His major work, the Tableau économique, an attempt
to trace income flows through the economy, crudely anticipated 20th-century
national income accounting. All wealth, in the doctrine of the physiocrats,
originates in agriculture; through trade, wealth is distributed from farmers
to other groups. The physiocrats were partisans of free trade and laissez-faire
. They maintained that the revenue of the state should be raised by a single
direct tax levied on the land. Adam Smith met the leading physiocrats and
wrote-for the most part, favorably-of their doctrines.
The Classical School.
As a coherent economic theory, classical
economics starts with Smith, continues with the British economists Thomas
Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, and culminates in the synthesis of John
Stuart Mill, who as a young man was a follower of Ricardo. Although differences
of opinion were numerous among the classical economists in the three-quarters
of a century between Smith's Wealth of Nations and Mill's Principles of
Political Economy (1848), members of the group agreed on major principles.
All believed in private property, free markets, and, in Mill's words, that
"only through the principle of competition has political economy any pretension
to the character of a science." They shared Smith's strong suspicion of
government and his ardent confidence in the power of self-interest represented
by his famous "invisible hand," which reconciled public benefit with individual
pursuit of private gain. From Ricardo, classicists derived the notion of
diminishing returns, which held that as more labor and capital were applied
to land, yields after "a certain and not very advanced stage in the progress
of agriculture steadily diminished."
Through Smith's emphasis on consumption,
rather than on production, the scope of economics was considerably broadened.
Smith was optimistic about the chances of improving general standards of
life. He called attention to the importance of permitting individuals to
follow their self-interest as a means of promoting national prosperity.
Malthus, on the other hand, in his
enormously influential book An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798),
imparted a tone of gloom to classical economics, arguing that hopes for
prosperity were fated to founder on the rock of excessive population growth.
Food, he believed, would increase in arithmetic ratio (2-4-6-8-10 and so
on), but population tended to double in each generation (2-4-8-16-32 and
so on) unless that doubling was checked either by nature or human prudence.
According to Malthus, nature's check was "positive": "The power of population
is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man,
that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race."
The shapes it took included war, epidemics, pestilence and plague, human
vices, and famine, all combining to level the world's population with the
world's food supply.
The only escape from population pressure
and the horrors of the positive check was in voluntary limitation of population,
not by contraception, rejected on religious grounds by Malthus, but by
late marriage and, consequently, smaller families. These pessimistic doctrines
of classical economists earned for economics the epithet of the "dismal
science."
Mill's Principles of Political Economy
was the leading text on the subject until the end of the 19th century.
Although Mill accepted the major theories of his classical predecessors,
he held out more hope than did Ricardo and Malthus that the working class
could be educated into rational limitation of their own numbers. Mill was
also a reformer who was quite willing to tax inheritances heavily and even
to allow government a larger role in protecting children and workers. He
was far more critical than other classical economists of business behavior
and favored worker ownership of factories. Mill thus represents a bridge
between classical laissez-faire economics and an emerging welfare state.
The classical economists also accepted
Say's Law of Markets, the doctrine of the French economist Jean Baptiste
Say (1767-1832). Say's law holds that the danger of general unemployment
or "glut" in a competitive economy is negligible because supply tends to
create its own matching demand up to the limit of human labor and the natural
resources available for production. Each enlargement of output adds to
the wages and other incomes that constitute the funds needed to purchase
added output.
Marxism.
Opposition to the classical school
of economics came first from early socialist writers such as the French
social philosopher the comte de Saint-Simon and the British reformer Robert
Owen. It was Karl Marx, however, who provided the most important social
theories.
To the classical vision of capitalism,
Marxism was in large measure a sharp rebuttal, but to some extent it embodied
variations of classical themes. Marx adopted, for example, a version of
Ricardo's labor theory of value. With a few qualifications, Ricardo had
explained prices as the result of the different quantities of human labor
needed to produce different finished products. Accordingly, if a shirt
is priced at $12 and a pair of socks at $2, it is because six times as
many hours of human labor entered into the making of the shirt as the socks.
For Ricardo, this theory of value was an analytical convenience, a way
of making sense of the multitude of different prices in shops. For Marx,
the labor theory was a clue to the inner workings of capitalism, the master
key to the inequities and exploitation of an unjust system.
An exile from Germany, Marx spent most
of his mature years in London, supported by his friend and collaborator,
the German revolutionist Friedrich Engels, and by the proceeds from occasional
contributions to newspapers. He conducted his extensive research in the
reading room of the British Museum. Marx's historical studies convinced
him that profit and other property income are the proceeds from force and
fraud inflicted by the strong on the weak.
"Primitive accumulation" in English
economic history was epitomized by the record of land enclosure. In the
17th and 18th centuries, landowners used their control of Parliament to
rob their tenants of traditional rights to common lands. Taking these lands
for their own use, they drove their victims reluctantly into cities and
factories.
Deprived both of tools and land, British
men, women, and children had to work for wages. Thus, Marx's central conflict
was between so-called capitalists who owned the means of production-factories
and machines-and workers or proletarians who possessed nothing but their
bare hands. Exploitation, the heart of Marxist doctrine, is measured by
the capacity of capitalists to pay no more than subsistence wages to their
employees and extract for themselves as profit (or surplus value) the difference
between these wages and the selling price of market commodities.
Although in the Communist Manifesto
(1848) Marx and Engels paid grudging tribute to the material achievements
of capitalism, they were convinced that these were transitory and that
the internal contradictions within capitalism would as surely terminate
its existence as earlier in history feudalism had faltered and disappeared.
On this point Marx wrote not in the
tradition of English classical economics but rather out of his training
in the metaphysics of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel interpreted
the movement of human history and thought as a progression of triads: thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis. For example, a thesis might be a set of economic
arrangements such as feudalism or capitalism. Its opposite or antithesis
was, say, socialism as opposed to capitalism. The clash between thesis
and antithesis evolved into the higher stage of synthesis-in this case
communism, which unites capitalist technology with social public ownership
of factories and farms.
In the long run, Marx believed that
capitalism was certain to falter because its tendency to concentrate income
and wealth in ever fewer hands created more and more severe crises of excess
output and rising unemployment. For Marx, capitalism's fatal contradiction
was between improving technological efficiency and the lack of purchasing
power to buy what was produced in ever larger quantities.
According to Marx, the crises of capitalism
were certain to manifest themselves in falling rates of profit, mounting
hostility between workers and employers, and ever more severe depressions.
The outcome of class welfare was fated to be revolution and progress toward,
first, socialism and ultimately communism. In the first stage a strong
state would still be required in order to eliminate the remnants of capitalist
opposition. Each person's work would be rewarded according to the value
of his or her contribution. Once communism was achieved, the state, whose
central purpose was class domination, would wither away, and each individual
would in the utopian future be compensated according to need. See COMMUNISM;
SOCIALISM.
The Neoclassicists.
Classical economics proceeded from
the assumption of scarcity, such as the law of diminishing returns and
Malthusian population doctrine. Dating from the 1870s, neoclassicist economists
such as William Stanley Jevons in Great Britain, Léon Walras (1834-1910)
in France, and Karl Menger (1840-1921) in Austria shifted emphasis from
limitations on supply to interpretations of consumer choice in psychological
terms. Concentrating on the utility or satisfaction rendered by the last
or marginal unit purchased, neoclassicists explained market prices not
by reference to the differing quantities of human labor needed to produce
assorted items, as in the theories of Ricardo and Marx, but rather according
to the intensity of consumer preference for one more unit of any given
commodity.
The British economist Alfred Marshall,
particularly in his masterly neoclassicist work Principles of Economics
(1890), explained demand by the principle of marginal utility, and supply
by the rule of marginal productivity (the cost of producing the last item
of a given quantity). In competitive markets, consumer preferences for
low prices of goods and seller preferences for high prices were adjusted
to some mutually agreeable level. At any actual price, then, buyers were
willing to purchase precisely the quantity of goods that sellers were prepared
to offer.
As in markets for consumer goods, this
same reconciliation between supply and demand occurred in markets for money
and human labor. In money markets, the interest rate matched borrowers
with lenders. The borrowers expected to use their loans to earn profits
larger than the interest they had to pay. Savers, for their part, demanded
a price for postponing the enjoyment of their own money. A similar accommodation
had to be made in wages paid for human labor. In competitive labor markets,
wages actually paid represented at least the value to the employer of the
output attributed to hours worked and at least acceptable compensation
to the employee for the tedium and fatigue of the work.
By implication, if not direct statement,
the tendency of neoclassical doctrine has been politically conservative.
Its advocates distinctly prefer competitive markets to government intervention
and, at least until the Great Depression of the 1930s, insisted that the
best public policies were echoes of Adam Smith: low taxes, thrift in public
spending, and annually balanced budgets. Neoclassicists do not inquire
into the origins of wealth. They explain disparities in income as well
as wealth for the most part by parallel differences among human beings
in talent, intelligence, energy, and ambition. Hence, men and women succeed
or fail because of their individual attributes, not because they are either
beneficiaries of special advantage or victims of special handicaps. In
capitalist societies, neoclassical economics is the generally accepted
textbook explanation of price and income determination.
Keynesian Economics.
John Maynard Keynes was a student
of Alfred Marshall and an exponent of neoclassical economics until the
1930s. The Great Depression bewildered economists and politicians alike.
The economists continued to hold, against mounting evidence to the contrary,
that time and nature would restore prosperity if government refrained from
manipulating the economy. Unfortunately, approved remedies simply did not
work. In the U.S., Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 landslide presidential
victory over Herbert Hoover attested to the political bankruptcy of laissez-faire
policies.
New explanations and fresh policies
were urgently required; this was precisely what Keynes supplied. In his
enduring work The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the
central message translates into two powerful propositions. (1) Existing
explanations of unemployment he declared to be nonsense: Neither high prices
nor high wages could explain persistent depression and mass unemployment.
(2) Instead, he proposed an alternative explanation of these phenomena
focused on what he termed aggregate demand-that is, the total spending
of consumers, business investors, and governmental bodies. When aggregate
demand is low, he theorized, sales and jobs suffer; when it is high, all
is well and prosperous.
From these generalities flowed a powerful
and comprehensive view of economic behavior-the basis of contemporary macroeconomics.
Because consumers were limited in the amounts that they could spend by
the size of their incomes, they could not be the source of the ups and
downs of the business cycle . It followed that the dynamic forces were
business investors and governments. In a recession or depression, the proper
thing to do was either to enlarge private investment or create public substitutes
for the shortfalls in private investment. In mild economic contractions,
easy credit and low interest rates (monetary policy) might stimulate business
investments and restore aggregate demand to a figure consistent with full
employment. More severe contractions required the sterner remedy of deliberate
budget deficits either in the form of spending on public works or subsidies
to afflicted groups.
Mathematical Economics.
Both neoclassical price theory and
Keynesian income theory have been illustrated by the mathematics of calculus,
linear algebra, and other sophisticated techniques. The most powerful and
popular-if not necessarily the most successful-alliance of economics with
mathematics and statistics occurs in the specialty called econometrics.
Econometricians are model builders who link together hundreds or even thousands
of equations that purport to explain the behavior of an entire economy.
As forecasting tools, econometric models generally are used by both corporations
and government departments, although their record of accuracy is neither
better nor worse than that of alternative ways of looking into the future.
Operations research and input-output
analysis are two additional specialties in which economic analysis and
higher mathematics operate in tandem. Operations research stresses a systems
approach to problems. Typical puzzles involve coordinating the functions
of a multiple-plant corporation, fabricating many products, and using equipment
so as to minimize costs and maximize efficiency. Researchers make use of
the expertise of engineers, economists, industrial psychologists, statisticians,
and mathematicians.
In the words of its inventor, the Russian-American
economist Wassily Leontief, input-output analysis tables "describe the
flow of goods and services between all the individual sectors of a national
economy over a stated period of time." Although constructing such a table
is a challenge, this method has had a major impact on economic thinking.
It is now widely used in socialist as well as capitalist countries.
|