Vision and Ideology: How they Affect Economic Thought

...some economists lie, as does everyone from time to time, but that is not the problem the term conjures up...

...What we have here is a logical lapse that is not recognized as such...

...We can say very little as to the sources of these constellations that we project into the social universe...

...We mainly discover this application of science in the open and inquiring stance with which most economists approach the "workings" of the system...

...Visions are not logical constructs...

...My central placement of ideology and vision is therefore not intended as a retreat to a hopelessly personal or pointlessly reductionist view of economic inquiry...

...I have dealt elsewhere with some of the empirical difficulties that attend the use of "rational" and "maximizing," but let us now consider a more fundamental difficulty that reveals the unexamined nature of the premise on which the concept is reared...

...I emphasize this statement because I sometimes fear that economists more than scientists yield to the temptation of asserting their belief systems as true belief systems...

...The interests that this structure serves are too broad and deep to be dispelled by mere disproof...

...The point at issue is not whether the pharaohs were, in fact, the perpetrators of most of the injustice in ancient Egypt, but why "government" conjures up pharaonic Egypt for Lucas, not Lincolnian America...

...Thus, no single reading can be adjudged the Truth...

...That is why economics manages, with real resemblance to natural sciences, to take up and discard one "theory" after another—monetarism, supply-side economics, rational expectations, and whatever will come next—and that is why it elevates this willingness to try on and discard theories like clothing, as testifying to the scientific status of the discipline...

...There are many examples of the staying power of belief systems despite their internal weaknesses...

...Yet there is little doubt as to the immense constructive power of our visions...

...There will be no "world," no "problems," no "tendencies," no possibilities...

...Moreover, I suspect that except in the rarest cases, lying on behalf of an interest is not performed as an act of conscious immorality, but because the ideologue is sufficiently convinced of the righteousness of his cause to justify admittedly "exaggerated" or "strictly" incorrect statements by some metamoral calculus...

...Ideology, or belief systems, to give them their more acceptable name, provide us with the comprehension by which the natural world is transformed into the social world...

...The interpretation of the market system as a mode of social integration that conceals older forms of social discipline is equally open to disagreement or rejection...

...It is that income is intrinsically a social concept, whereas "individual" is intrinsically a nonsocial one...

...On the basis of science and logic they should therefore be discarded, and replaced by other constructions and conceptions...

...That which is manifestly ideological in the "worst" sense, here, is that the Friedmans would, I am certain, recognize and pounce on the flimsy nature of their argument, if it was presented to them in defense of some principle in which they disbelieved...

...If ideology is to be criticized, vision is to be celebrated...

...No appeal to past or present experience can confirm or disconfirm these statements...

...Such general preconceptions cannot be proved or disproved—or worse, can all too easily be "proved" or "disproved" by appeal to historical example or introspection...

...No doubt Excerpted from Behind the Veil of Economics: Essays in the Worldly Philosophy, by Robert L. Heilbroner...

...The answer to their question is that there is indeed a difference...

...It is not considered to be a moral wrong that one person is beautiful and another ugly, but the fact that one person is rich 186 • DISSENT Vision and Ideology and another poor can indeed be considered a breach of morality...

...Virtually the first act the individual is called on to perform— in a hundred textbooks, not in life—is the rational, maximizing allocation of his or her income...

...By "worst," I do not mean a deliberate and knowing misrepresentation or manipulation of the truth...

...It lingers like an unwelcome presence, casting its shadow even when the pejorative word ideology has been replaced by the neutral belief system, or when the mystical and antiscientific term vision is announced as the "preanalytic cognitive act" without which the work of science cannot begin...

...the resemblance of social systems to biological orders...

...I do not ask these questions rhetorically, to set the stage for a ringing defense of economicsasscience...

...Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W. W Norton & Company, Inc...

...History and introspection will provide some support for many such general assertions, but it will also yield evidence for contrary kinds of generalization...

...the pacific or aggressive "nature" of the human species being, and its capabilities for socialization...

...But the analysis cannot begin without the conceptual units of a belief system...

...No doubt a solitary person can apportion his energies as he wishes, including in a rational and maximizing fashion, but energies are not "income" —if they were, all energetic individuals would be rich without further ado...

...Science concerns our comprehension of how the world functions, not of how we perceive it in the first place...

...In the visionary rather than ideological preface to inquiry, we treat of human behavior or social existence as "tendencies...

...A reviewer in the Journal of Economic Literature writes of this claim, "[E]ven slight damage would be hard to prove...

...The beliefsystems by which we perceive capitalism in this manner present for our analysis very different kinds of problems from those that would strike us if we perceived it as otherwise...

...The perception of history as progress or stasis or decline, of society as necessitously hierarchical or tendentially egalitarian, of human nature itself as given or made, not only defies all laboratory concepts of "testing," but gives rise to no paradoxes or logical flaws...

...The fact is, however, that economists continue to anthropomorphize property, speaking of land and capital as if they were embodiments of will and energy who would not perform their tasks if "they" (not their owners) were not motivated or rewarded by income...

...The problem of vision and ideology remains imperfectly examined...

...and yet other fundamental preconceptions about social reality...

...SPRING • 1988 • 191...

...There is no way of claiming precedence for one aspect of the psyche over another—love over hate, conformity over individuation, even self-interest over affect...

...As I have written elsewhere, this stubborn persistence of value judgments arises because the economist does not engage in his analysis from a wholly disinterested position, indifferent to the conclusions to which his analysis may lead: [T]he social investigator is inextricably bound up with the objects of his scrutiny, as a member of a group, a class, a society, a nation, bringing with him feelings of animus or defensiveness to the phenomenon he observes...

...Moreover, even if it were so recognized, its power of belief conversion is small...

...It is in this manner that economics spreads its ideological veil over capitalism, shielding from inspection its regimelike character and allowing us to see instead a depoliticized and desocialized "price system...

...But that is no more than a possibility...

...Of course it is not fair...

...Values come first in our search for meaning in history and society...

...As we have seen, these concepts may lead to logical contradictions or paradoxes, or they may have no operational usefulness...

...Visions differ from ideologies in at least two significant ways...

...It is their failure to apply the same degree of intellectual rigor to their own arguments as they would to those of the opposition that makes their statement an obvious example of "blatant" ideology...

...Ideology is part of economics—not the whole, but a constitutive part...

...2. The tasks of science and ideology are different...

...They are, if you will, "metaphysical" or, perhaps better, heuristic...

...Is the invocation of science as the ideal of economics no more than a chimera—worse, a pious self-deception...

...The centrality of power and affect, crucial to my discussion, can certainly be contested...

...Too often a vehicle for mystification, economics can best become an instrument for enlightenment if we see it as the means by which we strive to make a workable science out of morality...

...I believe it is usually easy to do so, as a few examples may illustrate...

...I have said that ideology penetrates and permeates economics, not because its telltale signs cannot be discerned, but because its capacity to allay the need for a value framework cannot readily be overcome...

...and the various disguises by which we come to terms, especially in capitalist society, with the primary but hidden sources of social orchestration— domination and acquiescence on the one hand, affect and sociality on the other...

...Schumpeter is right: without vision there can be no analysis...

...With economics too, the reach of economic science cannot extend to the matter of concept formation...

...At this deepest level of social inquiry our analytic and expository powers diminish almost to the vanishing point...

...What, then, can be said...

...Many texts compound the conceptual problem by asking the individual to allocate his wages— introducing a class term as well as a social one...

...In all these instances, ideology is identifiable either by its indifference to the generally recognized facts of economic or social or political life, its manifestly weak or questionbegging logic, or by its reckless overstatement...

...A few other instances deserve mention, even if only in passing...

...Perhaps the best known of these is the conflation of the physical agencies of land and resources with the social claims of "Land" and "Capital...

...Yet Irving Kristol, who has a sharp eye for such reductionisms when committed in the name of Marxism, is quoted on the paperback jacket of Wanniski's book to the effect that it is "the best economic primer since Adam Smith...

...It is possible to present beliefs, no matter how passionately held, in a manner that weighs evidence, considers alternatives, and makes assertions as hypotheses, not dogma...

...In this way, "land, labor, and capital" are identified as the "factors of production," thereby tacitly eliding the crucial social difference between labor and property...

...Along similar lines, George Gilder tells us in Wealth and Poverty that "capitalism begins with giving," a view that appears to change the meaning of "giving" one hundred and eighty degrees, insofar as the drive to accumulate is described by Gilder as "altruistic...

...I think they perpetrated most of the social injustice...

...Indeed, as we have seen, it establishes the concept of "economics" itself as a mode of social articulation that is separated from—not built atop—older modes of social orchestration...

...Is there then no possibility of throwing off the biases and prejudices—in politer words, the value judgments—of ideology...

...The historical basis or bias of my own views can readily be challenged...

...Of course we find precisely the same flaws in the blatant ideologies of socialism as in those of capitalism...

...None of them, however, will ever be able to claim science as its paternity...

...Its motivations are not only powerful, indeed inescapable, but legitimate...

...Our deep-lying, perhaps unanalyzable notions concerning human nature, history, and the like...

...There can be no "income" in a Robinson Crusoe economy of a single individual...

...Such building blocks of economic theory as "individuals" or "society," "utility" or "value," "labor" or "capital," are created by observers from the protean stuff of the external world and inner promptings...

...If I am correct that capitalism is moving through a period of difficult adjustment, perhaps the discrepancies and inadequacies of its regnant belief system will intensify, leading to a differently constituted, more historical and self-scrutinizing set of conceptual building blocks...

...We cannot expect the commandments of scientific discipline to override these considerations, especially insofar as science itself is not immune to protecting its belief systems from a confrontation with unwelcome ideas...

...or two realms rather than a single unstably constituted regime...

...Thus the issue is not at all that of "equality of outcomes," but of a distinction between social, and therefore corrigible, inequalities and natural—presumably incorrigible—handicaps and advantages...

...That simple SPRING • 1988 • 189 Vision and Ideology admission of fallibility, consciously held and vigorously maintained, is enough to loosen, although not to untie, the constraints that ideology imposes...

...Of far greater consequence are statements that have none of these egregious defects but that must nonetheless be revealed as "ideological" because they can be shown to be false or contradictory, although not wittingly so...

...it can also take the form of the inheritance of talent—musical ability, strength, mathematical ability...

...In one case as in the other, however, there is no reason to fear that ideology ineluctably pushes its spokesmen into excesses of apologism or polemic...

...Must economics, of necessity, always bear the marks of its subservience to a social order...

...If my preceding argument has any validity, it makes impossible such a last minute resort to intellectual patriotism...

...In The Way the World Works Jude Wanniski writes, "A child's principle [sic] trading partners are his parents," and "In mother and father, the child has a diversified portfolio...

...Let me again illustrate the problem with a few examples...

...Its reach does not extend to the creation of the conceptual units by which that world assumes its "empirical" form...

...At least since the time of John Stuart Mill, economists have understood the difference between the contribution of actual land and resources to production and the claims of their owners to a share in the product...

...In a word, his position in society—not only his material position, but his moral position—is implicated in and often jeopardized by the act of investigation, and it is not surprising, therefore, that behind the great bulk of social science we find arguments that serve to justify the existential position of the social scientists...

...Visions remain visionary...

...Few of us can trace to their social or personal roots the experiences that frame our own visions...

...However, unfairness can take many forms...

...In yet another example, Robert E. Lucas, a well-known conservative theorist, makes this reply to the question of whether governments do not try to resolve social injustice: "That wouldn't be anything like my view...

...I put the word into quotes, however, because the workings refer almost exclusively to movements on the surface of the economy—what I have described as its "market" aspect—rather than inquiring into the social and political depths below—my concept of a "regime...

...They are constructed at too high a level of abstraction to entail illogical consequences...

...Science is concerned with the testing of theories about the empirical world...

...There will be nothing to analyze...

...What is important is to agree that more than one set of conceptual elements can be formulated to explicate the problems to which economists set their minds...

...or to see "individuals" rather than individuated social beings...

...3. Such an acknowledgment does not remove ideology but legitimates it, and defines its task vis-a-vis that of science...

...The key word is "individual...

...Science then explores and examines the empirical data that this particular set of values identifies, constructs theories from the data that have been identified as relevant, tests these theories, usually by examining the robustness of their predictive implications, and alters its beliefs if the theories fail to yield useful results...

...Defining Vision The question of how a social order might respond to challenges against its belief system brings us to the question of vision—our deepest, often only half-consciously held notions with respect to such vast but vague ideas as "human nature" or "society," "history"" or "progress...

...For Tullock's unsupported claim of mass murder (which implies also intent), the irresponsibility is enormous...

...Copyright © 1988 by Robert L. Heilbroner...

...It can take the form of inheritance of property—bonds and stocks, houses, factories...

...The alternative views are certainly not themselves immune from the charge of being "ideological" in their nature—that is, of containing arguable premises, perhaps internal inconsistencies...

...In Free to Choose, Milton and Rose Friedman write: Much of the moral fervor behind the drive for equality of outcomes comes from the widespread belief that it is not fair that some children should have a great advantage over others simply because they happen to have wealthy parents...

...A generally held idea of conventional economics is that its fundamental SPRING • 1988 • 187 Vision and Ideology conceptual building block is the idea of the "rational, maximizing individual...

...Let us begin by taking up the question of ideology at its worst...

...The mother and father of all social constructs remain of necessity the human being who is driven to "discover" concepts in order to come to terms with its existential plight...

...This is because the human psyche is itself full of contradictions, all aspects of which are mirrored in historical experience...

...Our visions are concerned with such matters as the "natural" orientation of human society toward hierarchy or toward equality...

...By screening out all aspects of domination and acquiescence, as well as those of affect and trust, it encourages us to understand capitalism as fundamentally "economic" —not social or political—in nature...

...Thus it is not to diminish the idea of economics that I seek to reveal ideology and vision beneath its veil...

...If, as I deeply believe, there is no escape from the influence of visions and ideologies, then we must learn to live with them—not by abandoning all hope of examining society in a dispassionate and penetrative manner, or by resigning ourselves to becoming mere lackeys of interest and slaves of unexamined promptings, but by taking the measure of these hidden forces as best we can...

...I leave the worst of the worst for last: Gordon Tullock, writing on the Economics of Income Redistribution, ranks the croprestriction program of the New Deal "with the work of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao among the major mass murder programs of our time...

...That which remains unacknowledged is the substratum of beliefs that causes us to structure our perceptions in terms of an "economy" rather than a sociopolitical order...

...The inheritance of property can be interfered with more readily than the inheritance of talent...

...Belief structures linger on, almost impervious to fact or logic, because they allay the "tumult of the imagination" —the anxiety, we would say—that Adam Smith cogently identified as the primary need to which theorizing addresses itself...

...It is that we do not attach any moral significance to unfairnesses that arise from the dispensations of nature, whereas we do attach such significance to those imposed by society...

...Dogma and increasingly rigid orthodoxy are responses to challenge as much as reflection and adaptation...

...and this belief system, in turn, must reflect the nature of the human adventure as we half-consciously — perhaps wholly unconsciously—understand it...

...188 • DISSENT Vision and Ideology Can We Be Unbiased...

...I cannot imagine a conventional economist, who may have just encountered for the first time the illogicality of the concept of the income-allocating individual, renouncing his confidence in the belief structure of economics that is erected on that concept...

...Can one recognize such "blatant" ideology...

...I shall make a few points that will not remove the problem of ideology —it is irremovable—but that may make it easier to accept and to use it constructively: 1. It is possible to construct alternative ideologies...

...Of necessity, these concepts must embody the value-laden elements that is their primary raison d'être...

...I can't think of explaining the pharaohs as being in existence to resolve the social injustice in Egypt...

...It follows that if plastic surgery can change ugly people into beautiful ones at acceptable cost, then beauty, like wealth, may become a candidate for moral concern...

...Ideology, even in its extreme interpretation as lying, means lying on behalf of an idea or an interest...

...This "economistic" representation of human nature, which runs through the book and supports its strong free-enterprise orientation, is a reductionist depiction that would put the most vulgar Marxism to shame...

...Second, our visions, unlike our ideological beliefs, never contain logical contradictions...

...Subtle Ideology Blatant ideology is thus not the aspect of the veil of economics that I find interesting or important...

...The first is that they are never 190 • DISSENT Vision and ideology falsifiable in the sense in which at least some ideological concepts can be shown up as partial construals of reality (pharaohs as government) or excessive description (crop restriction as mass murder...

...What is the problem here...

...As the example of modern physics makes clear, science often busies itself with concepts whose "meanings" —even whose "existence" —is only a mental convenience to allow theorizing to take place: thus we have "particles" that have "color," "charm," "strangeness," and the like...

...Indeed, the strongest belief statements usually have this quality of modesty and diffidence, which immeasurably strengthens their plausibility...

...Why each of us becomes radical or conservative, reformist or cynical, optimist or pessimist remains, in general, a problem of near impenetrable complexity—or, worse, a problem whose profound importance and elusive character do not even enter our minds...

...There is ample room for economic analysis, indispensable for unraveling the movements of a capitalist system...

...But from an ethical point of view, is there any difference between the two...