Profiling the Forecasters
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Profiling the Forecasters The Economists By Leonard Silk Basic. 294 pp. $10.95. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman As SHORT-RUN forecasters, economistsat least since 1972-have been more frequently...
...As for Samuelson, his tremendous early renown as a theoretical economist -his dissertion was modestly titled The Foundations of Economic Analysis-joined his public fame as author of one of the most success?ful textbooks of the century to re-enforce faith in the American mixture of private capitalism and public intervention to stabilize the econ?omy and protect the losers in competitive races...
...His confidence that competition and political democracy march hand in hand recently led him to advise the Chilean junta...
...All five are past presidents of the American Economic Association...
...Leonard Silk's intelligent assess?ment of five prominent members of the guild-Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, Wassily Leontief, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Kenneth Boulding-combines biography with analysis of intellectual contributions...
...Otherwise the author sees much merit in the doctrines Friedman very lucidly explains...
...Boulding's position-much more elusive than those of his colleagues-is on the one hand an attempt to re?formulate economics much more broadly as a social science, and on the other, an effort to release the subject from its central focus upon acquisition as the explanation of all economic behavior...
...Nevertheless, economics retains its title as the most prestigious of the social sciences, possibly because sociology and political science are in even worse disarray, and corporations, banks and government agencies continue to recruit the masters and mistresses of econometrics from MIT, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Yale, and their lesser rivals...
...For economists, I suspect, Silk has per?formed the useful service of reenforcing existing preferences...
...Silk is sharply critical only of Friedman, both because of the Chilean episode and because of the Chicago school's ideologically excessive celebration of free markets...
...Silk has chosen his cast of characters wisely...
...Responding to critics of this assistance, Friedman predicted that after his free market approach improves the Chilean economy, the brutalities of the present regime will diminish and life for ordinary Chileans will improve...
...Samuelson is the only centrist in the group, an apparent believer in the compromises and trade-offs inherent in Democratic liberalism and recent episodes like the New Fron?tier and the Great Society...
...If this book does nothing else for general readers, it may suggest something of the variety of opinion that genuinely original economists hold about almost any topic...
...Of the remaining trio, Galbraith is now a self-proclaimed socialist and proponent of democratic planning...
...Boulding's deeply cherished Quaker faith helps explain his em?phasis on the limitations of private avarice and the importance of competing incentives to human action, notably love and fear...
...Fried?man, of course, is a notorious celebrant of free markets, even when in the eyes of skeptics they are in?visible...
...No one would be especially astonished if a Scandinavian jury taps one or both of the others in the next year or two...
...Galbraith's childhood on a Canadian farm and later experiences as a World War II price controller convinced him of the dichotomy between the planned world of the large corporation and the chaotic universe of small businessmen, family fanners and independent professionals, which is the central notion of his The New Industrial State...
...I like Galbraith even more and Friedman even less after reading The Economists...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman As SHORT-RUN forecasters, economistsat least since 1972-have been more frequently wrong than right...
...Leontiefs somewhat similar preferences are strengthened by a reliance upon better data and im?proved planning techniques entirely appropriate to the inventor of in?put-output analysis, one of the most useful planning devices in Socialist and non-Socialist societies...
...Three-Samuelson, Leontief and, just this autumn, Milton Friedman-have been awarded No?bel Prizes...
...Silk suggests that Friedman's brush with anti-Semitism in the university strengthened his perception that free markets are best for Jews, blacks and other minorities...
...Their record of identifying emergent global problems like re?source shortages, population pres?sure and redistribution from rich to poor countries has been, to render judgment tactfully, spotty...
...Their capacity to ignore domestic monopolies and transnational corporate giants as modifiers of their own theories is very nearly total...
Vol. 59 • December 1976 • No. 25
