The Economists and Essays on Hayek
Dolan, Edwin G.
he is so very good at what he does, thereby inviting total misunderstanding. To a certain sort of critical mind, it is simply inconceivable that anyone as good a t sketching types as Wolfe is...
...A more generous and sensitive approach would be hard to design...
...stood declared that the Empire ought not exist, that it probably could not exist...
...Nevertheless, Wolfe does what he does better than any novelist or social historian writing today, and one suspects that his work will prove to be a good deal more durable than his critics believe...
...as the best, followed closely by that on Boulding...
...He certainly has earned the right to be taken seriously as a serious literary artist, however...
...Few thought that Trollope's reputation would outlive him, for instance...
...By examining 1880 census figures he determines that between one-fourth and one-third of all black children under six lived in households with missing parents...
...Although Machlup, the volume's editor, contributes a fine review of Hayek's work as a technical economist, The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 31 most of the contributors focus on his broader contributions m social philosophy...
...However much Moynihan attributed problems in black family structure to slavery and the depradations of whites, it could not be ignored that he was saying that black families were weak and not what they might be...
...support programs aimed at reducing black unemployment...
...A less democratic country would blink and ask what of it, but human equality is a serious, if not ideological matter in America, and differences among groups of people must be explained, or better, explained away...
...Gutman / Pantheon / $15.95 Stephen Peter Rosen It has been remarked that the first virtue of the British Empire was the fact that it stood in direct contradiction to the principles of liberalism, and, as such, was a healthy antidote to dogmatism...
...There are certain problems, however...
...Friedman represents everything Silk dislikes about economists, and he lets it show...
...For him, each man's scientific theories are a projection of his normative predispositions...
...The essays in both volumes are concerned with their subjects' technical work as theorists, their views on broader social and philosophical questions, and their individual life experience...
...BOOK REVIEW The Economists Leonard Silk / Basic Books / $10.95 Essays on Hayek Edited by Fritz Machlup / New York University Press / $10.00 Edwin G. Dolan Here we have two efforts to interpret the life work of some of the great economists of the 20th century...
...Wolfe makes no claim to literary greatness...
...In a passage beginning, "the best economists are aware of the importance of trying to observe life directly," Silk praises Samuelson, Leontieff, and Galbraith for the quality of their empirical work, while pointedly omitting mention of the man who is the most doggedly empirical of them all...
...Gutman clearly admits that slavery had catastrophic consequences for the black family...
...That is why slave marriages, however long they lasted, cannot be characterized as stable...
...In his other essays, Silk is balanced, moderate, sometimes overly generous perhaps, but critical when necessary...
...As Silk understands it, the case for a free economy rests on two pillars: an overriding emphasis on efficiency as the criterion for all economic policy decisions, and a belief in the relevance and validity of the model of perfect competition...
...even those who have been judged to be the literary giants of their age...
...At the same time, it was completely undesirable to give comfort to those who argued that blacks were racially inferior...
...Gutman's argument was printed and tacitly endorsed by the New York Times--recognition which indicated, as does the Church's imprimatur, not that the story was factually correct, but that it was free from errors of faith and morals...
...He doesn't galumph...
...But they also believe strongly in a standard of behavior, and I don't know what Wolfe's standard is...
...But today, if you want to know what mid-Victorian England looked like and sounded like and felt like, you don't go to the historians...
...The last thing the modern American liberal wants is to be cautioned, as Hayek cautions him, that the would-be reformer "will have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, as the gardener does for his plants...
...He goes on to state that the constant threat of separation "probably served as a reason to socialize one's children for sale, a damaging and unenviable task for any parent.'" From anecdotal evidence he concludes that slavery encouraged illegitimacy since slave women whose fertility was established were less likely to be sold away from their communities by masters who valued fecundity...
...To Silk, Friedman is only deceiving himself and others by appealing to positive analysis or empirical observation...
...Problems like poverty, pollution, ignorance, and militarism rouse indignation and passion, yet, as Hartwell points out, they are treated too lightly or too rationally by men like Hayek and Friedman...
...Alone among his peers, he has illuminated the sixties and seventies and set their absurdities in amber...
...Most strikingly, the same census figures showed that among young (20-29) black women in two rural Southern counties, father-absent households were, respectively, two and four times as common as they were among identically aged white women in a poor Southern county chosen by Gutman as a benchmark...
...Should I, in my dotage, desire to relive this wretched period, I won't go to the historians...
...At one point, discussing the manners approach to art--he calls it "fashion"--Wolfe says: "novelists who have dwelled on fashion...have usually been regarded in their own time as lightWeights--' trivial' has been the going word --scarcely even literary artists~ in fact...
...Instead, they evoked ferocious attacks for having contradicted the American ideology of equality...
...This is something which seems never to have fully registered with the Chicago school...
...There is no better description of what Wolfe has done...
...Having got this far in understanding Silk, I was well primed for reading the essays on Hayek...
...In other respects, however, the two books differ substantially...
...Wolfe will have to write thousands of pages before he plays in the same league with Trollope...
...Moynihan, drawing upon the conventional academic wisdom, wrote a report which argued that slavery had so weakened the black family that it was less able to support or morally educate blacks...
...Inequalities of condition clearly existed between races, they had to be understood, and it was desirable that something be done about them...
...For one thing, Silk forcibly rejects the idea of a value+free economics...
...This brings us to what was, for me, the puzzle of Silk's book--his treatment of Friedman...
...In describing the University of Chicago to which Friedman went at the end of the war, Silk uses the device of a lengthy, extremely negative quotation from Paul Douglas...
...As for Galbraith--perhaps we can skip ahead a bit and quote Hayek: "Every scholar can probably name several instances from his field of men who have undeservedly achieved a popular reputation as great scientists solely because they hold what the intellectuals regard as 'progressive' views...
...It's extremely difficult to judge mannerists in their own day, and most contemporary judgments tend to be wrong...
...When he comes to Friedman, however, he is frankly polemical...
...As Hayek wrote, "the argument in favor of competition does not rest on the conditions that would exist if it were perfect...
...The two sets of essays have certain points in common...
...One cheap shot follows another...
...His conclusion, drawn from his evidence, is that between one-seventh and one-sixth of all black families in slavery experienced forcible separations...
...Moynihan's facts and arguments did not encourage Americans to realize that equality was a much more problematic goal than they had believed...
...Utility, free trade, and self-interest rightly under...
...All of the economists under discussion have-how shall we say it--not precisely completed their life work, but have certainly gotten through enough of it to give us a fair basis for guessing what the completed edifice will look like...
...The general impression created by the Times and other favorable reviewers is that the Moynihan report, and the scholarship on which it was based, have been substantially discredited...
...In a discussion of the first manners novelists, Wolfe says, "Early in the game they seemed to sense that fashion is a code, a symbolic vocabulary that offers a subrational but instant and very brilliant illumination of the characters of individuals and even entire periods, especially periods of great turmoil...
...All sense of balance disappears...
...Herbert Gutman's book is the latest of these attacks...
...But there is no doubt that he has captured the manners and morals of the past decade-and-a-half in a way that none of his contemporaries can match...
...Leontieff comes through somewhat less successfully, despite--or perhaps because of--Silk's heroic effort to explain the nature of his input-output matrices without the aid of a single table or equation...
...Friedman is unfairly portrayed as soft on Watergate and Chilean dictatorship, and possessed of a cynical disregard for the lot of the poor, the racial minorities, and the undereducated...
...Silk rejects monetarism because its policy implications seem to him morally unacceptable, and he rejects Friedman because the latter argues that the moral implications of the doctrine are not relevant to the questions of whether it is true or false...
...Silk concerns himself with Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, Wassily Leontieff, and Kenneth Boulding, while the Machlup volume contains essays on Friedrich Hayek by William F. Buckley, Jr., Gotffried Dietze, Ronald Hartwell, Shirley Letwin, George Roche, Arthur Shenfield, and Machlup himself...
...Hartwell's worry is that the champions of economic freedom have too little respect for such "powerful and valuable springs of feeling" as moral indignation, aesthetic revulsion, envy, and hatred...
...All men are created equal, and would be if given the chance, yet in 1974, fewer black births in Washington, D.C...
...The best satirists always possess biting wits, as does Wolfe...
...And "what really spurred Friedman...to attack the Keynesians was not the technical aspects of monetary theory but the Chicago tradition of conservatism and the ideology of laissez-faire...
...On what grounds, then, does Gutman base his claim that the black family was not weakened by slaver), ? The most impressive evidence is the documented zeal with which blacks legalized their informal slave marriages after the CMI War...
...He just doesn't look substantial, doesn't sound serious...
...Silk and other modern liberals see capitalism as ugly and obscene, and therefore calling for forceful and immediate action...
...Now i t may well be, of course, that Friedman does not attach m either of these tenets the importance that Silk would have it that he does...
...Rather the reverse...
...As near as can be told, all slave marriages were legalized by ex-slaves acting on their own initiative as soon as it became possible to do so...
...Thus "the underlying motivation for Friedman's discovery of monetarism appears to have been his general dislike of Keynesianism and his aversion to any economics which...might undercut the intellectual preeminence of individualism and freedom of enterprise...
...Nonetheless, I think it is in fact the case that an overemphasis on efficiency and perfect competition has weakened the economist's case for the free market...
...Although one might guess that Moynihan would recommend, on the basis of this analysis, policies specifically designed to affect black family structure, he chose to Stephen Peter Rosen is a graduate student in the Harvard government departmerlt...
...First Silk...
...It claims that black families were not weakened by slavery and that they are not now weak...
...Wolfe seems to understand that he is frequently taken less than seriously by the poo-bahs, and one suspects it bothers him just a bit...
...Such a position, unlike Moynihan's, is compatible with American liberalism and egalitarianism...
...But I don't know what he regards as sane...
...You go to Trollope...
...BOOK REVIEW The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750-1925 HerbertG...
...But it was not enough to keep him out of trouble...
...Early in the 1960s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan had the misfortune to become involved in a problem of this sort...
...Less significant is the fact advanced 32 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977...
...At least two points emerge which shed additional light on Silk's treatment of Friedman...
...I know what he views as zany...
...So it is in America, only we have egalitarianism and obvious cultural differences...
...Why does Silk have it in for Friedman...
...The problem is that Gutman simply does not show that the black family was not weakened by slavery...
...Initially his book appears innocuous enough, an effort by a distinguished journalist to discuss in layman's terms the work of five eminent academic economists...
...To a certain sort of critical mind, it is simply inconceivable that anyone as good a t sketching types as Wolfe is could also be a substantial artist and serious thinker...
...were legitimate than not...
...But there it was in all its splendor...
...According to an observer whom Gutman quotes without contradiction, " I t was held no shame for a girl to bear a child under any circumstances...
...One of the things that Hayek has worried about a great deal is why the case for the free society, as advanced by people like Milton Friedman, holds so little appeal for modern-day intellectuals like Leonard Silk...
...Elsewhere Friedman is damned by omission...
...I'll go to Wolfe...
...It is explicitly motivated bv the controversy surrounding the Moynihan report...
...From this he sensibly infers "that all slave marriages were insecure [italics original...
...As such, much of the book succeeds quite well...
...The essay on Samuelson, whom Silk admires greatly, strikes me Edwin G. Dolan is assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth, and author of TANSTAAFL, a market approach to environmental problems...
...On a closely related point, even Hayek comes in for gentle criticism, this time from Ronald Hartwell...
Vol. 10 • March 1977 • No. 6
