Robert Heilbroner
Levinson, Mark
"WHATEVER Dissent's problems," living Howe once said to me in the 1980s, "we at least have two of the most literate economists alive." He was referring to Robert Lekachman and...
...What I need to do now is make sense of it all...
...MARK LEVINSON is chief economist for UNITE HERE...
...Bob was on the Dissent editorial board for more than thirty years...
...On the obsession of modern economics with statistical and mathematical models, he remarked that it produced "rigor, but, alas, also mortis...
...He quoted Galbraith, "The economy for its success requires organized public bamboozlement...
...He had a simple style, seemingly easy but in fact almost impossible to copy...
...He asked big questions...
...His crystal-clear writing, for which he was so famous, was the result of disciplined hard work...
...He often noted, with amazement, that in leading economics textbooks, whether written by Greg Mankiw or Joseph Stiglitz, the word capitalism never appeared...
...In a field that is often obscure, he was a master of lucid prose...
...Consider the titles of his books: The Limits of American Capitalism, The Great Ascent, Inquiry into the Human Prospect, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism, Between Capitalism and Socialism, The Future as History, The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economics, Business Civilization in Decline, and, of course, The Worldly Philosophers...
...Modern economics, in his opinion, was becoming "like medieval philosophy— precise, elegant, and meaningless...
...His essays, marvelous examples of intellectual trespassing, drew from his vast reading in economics, history, sociology, political science, and psychology...
...dissertation under Robert Heilbroner...
...Bob Heilbroner was a man of prodigious energy...
...He studied with and wrote his Ph.D...
...He could be a very tough critic, and he didn't exempt his friends...
...I murmured something about how tough that must be...
...His first book, The Worldly Philosophers, sold nearly four million copies and is the second best-selling economics textbook of all time, after Paul Samuelson's Economics...
...A typical Heilbroner lecture, for example—although insightful and wide-ranging, a restless mind thinking out loud—was not nearly as polished as his books and essays...
...Rather than producing clear judgment, the moral power of his argument is, finally, dissipated in wit...
...He never finished that project...
...Most economists at the time criticized Galbraith's economics and praised his writing...
...He wrote hundreds of articles and more than twenty books that sold in excess of ten million copies...
...He couldn't read anymore, he replied, because his eyes were giving him trouble...
...But in a lifetime of work he made more "sense" than any economist I know...
...I've read enough," he said...
...He wanted to face the hardest questions, not to argue against the feasibility or the morality of socialist reform, but rather to proDISSENT / Spring 2005 113 CHRONICLES tect the socialist movement from unnecessary disappointments...
...For Bob, the more "scientific" economics tried to be, the less it was able to provide useful guidance about the most fundamental social questions of capitalist society—inequality, poverty, environmental degradation...
...He was referring to Robert Lekachman and Robert Heilbroner...
...We had lunch shortly before his illness made it impossible for him to work...
...Among the best essays he wrote for Dissent were tough-minded critiques of the socialist project—articles on feasible socialism, reviews of Alec Nove and Michael Harrington, debates with Irving Howe...
...For all his renown as an economist, he was something of an outsider in the economics profession...
...Bamboozlement" allows an issue of the most searching importance to be passed over in a mood of raillery...
...I asked if he had read a recent book on economics...
...Any other—"deception," "fraud," "untruth"—would amount to a declaration of war...
...For example, he wrote a surprisingly critical review of John Kenneth Galbraith's The New Industrial State...
...114 DISSENT / Spring 2005...
...Galbraith, he said, is an economist of considerable merit whose fatal weakness is his celebrated style...
...Bob took the opposite tack...
...Bob responded: The word "bamboozlement" is the clue...
...This writing did not come naturally...
...Bob had no patience with the boundaries of academic social science and disdained the narrowness of contemporary economics...
Vol. 52 • April 2005 • No. 2
