Adam Smith Lives!

Malthus at Marginal Revolution

Not surprisingly, Tyler Cowen gets Malthus pretty much right at Marginal Revolution.  He begins with what David Levy and I have written at Econlib -- that Malthus was no Dismal Scientist but instead allowed for foresight to intervene between population pressure and starvation -- and then moves on to the overriding role of God (or providence) for Malthus:

I view Malthus as a tempered social revisionist who knocked down myths, thought in terms of social science mechanisms (he had both supply and demand and Keynesian macro in surprisingly sophisticated forms, not to mention an early form of Darwin's theory of evolution), and was painfully aware of the importance of contingent human choices.  He is one of the five most underrated, and also least understood, economists.  To be sure, he favored small government and opposed the Poor Laws.  But he was skeptical enough about the notion of a voluntary self-regulating order that I would not quite call him a classical liberal.  I read his economics as starting with the Bible, and asking whether any mechanisms might bring us to a less tragic outcome than what is found in the Old Testament.  He was never quite sure of the answer, and his mix of moralizing and skepticism later attracted Keynes.

Anthony Waterman and Samuel Hollander have both written a good deal on how scarcity is a moral issue, one that raises questions about the beneficence of God.  Hollander writes:

There are then two theological Malthuses at work, one proposing the ideal solution to the problem of the threat of poverty created by potential population pressure; and the other, warts and all, and arriving at a wholly difference set of recommendations.  ... The vision [in 1803 and thereafter] was a bright one, not a dismal one, for 'the evils resulting from the principle of population have rather diminished than increased, even under the disadvantage of an almost total ignorance of their real cause.  The original theological problem had thus been entirely superannuated by events; and the revised theological problem of the need for the 'painful' check of chastity before marriage was merely theoretical, considering the ongoing acceleration of the national product, or, at worst, a problem for some distant future. (Hollander 1997, pp. 942, 947-8).

Jared Diamond at Severance Hall

This week Jared Diamond pretty much filled Cleveland's beautifully restored Severance Hall, speaking on his recent book, Collapse.  I like "big picture" stories -- lots of entertainment value and just enough good stuff that makes sense.  I've attended several sessions in the past year on Robert Heilbronner to convince me that stories, narrative, style, and big themes have a huge impact on the profession and the reading public, whatever the niggling issues about details of argument and presentation. 

So, Diamond's talk was about why some highly-developed societies, like the Anasazi of the southwest, collapse, while others do not.  It's a story about the environment.  Exogenous environmental change and, then, "choices" made in the face of new constraints.

Missing, in my mind, was any sort of story about institutions that affect the sorts of choices that emerge in the face of environmental challenges.  The question and answer was most telling:  a question about why some countries in the middle East now fare less poorly than others yielded the answer:  they're in the middle of a desert.  Yes, but so are countries that are fare much better.  The thing that varies isn't so much land quality or climate but institutions.

One niggling detail has to be corrected:  So obvious, apparently, it was treated as a throw away line.  What?  Rwanda.  The Rwandan genocide was said to be the fulfillment of Malthus's predictions.  Really?  It seems to me that Malthus argued the opposite.  For Malthus, institutional arrangements matter:  with secure property rights, people could foresee the consequences of their decisions and they would limit family size.  So, crowding (conflict and death) would not be the result for Malthus because people would resort instead to the preventative check to limit births.  David Levy and I have tried to correct this still-widespread misconception of Malthus in our columns at Econlib.  Part 2 is called "Happiness, Progess, and the 'Vanity of the Philosopher'".   

Malthus, Population and Birth Control

The 2nd Malthus debunking article that David Levy and I have written for Econlib went online this week.  Malthus may be the most maligned and misunderstood of all economists.  All too many people think there's no difference between T. R. Malthus and Charles Darwin, mistakenly thinking Malthus doomed mankind to a life of poverty and misery.  We disagree:  Malthus argued that people were able to foresee the consequences of their actions and, accordingly, would limit family size if they were left alone to do so.

You can read the article here.  Here's how it's described at the Econlib site:

The dramatic episode that clarified the difference between classical political economy and Darwin's biology began on June 18, 1877, with the trial of two prominent neo-Malthusians, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, for the crime of publishing an 'obscene' book, a practical guide to contraception by the American physician, John Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy. Read abotu this fascinating historical moment, featuring the towering ideas of Malthus,Mill, Darwin, freedom of the press, and more.

George Stigler on Guaranteed Annual Income?

A couple of days ago, my friend, Evelyn Forget, wrote to the History of Economics list about the history of the negative income tax (guaranteed annual income) idea.  Evelyn is a fine historian of economic thought who also works on the economics of healthcare at the University of Manitoba.  Her query has stimuated some interesting responses on the list.  Perhaps most interesting, was this one by Dan Hammond:

It is well known that Milton Friedman argued for a negative income tax in Capitalism and Freedom (1962). But I recently came across a similar suggestion by George Stigler in "The Economics of Minimum Wage Legislation," AER 36 (June 1946). Stigler wrote, "There is great
attractiveness in the proposal that we extend the personal income tax to the lowest income brackets with negative rates in these brackets" p. 365.

This was news to me!  I asked my co-author, David Levy -- Stigler's graduate student -- and was surprised to get the answer: "No! Really!" from him.  If David doen'st know this, I figure not many others do.  So I decided to post this, another sort of debunking.  Sometimes we don't fully know even our immediate teachers, let alone the more distant past.

 

Mistaken Representations of the Past

I was a student of Sam Hollander at the University of Toronto.  Many of you will know that Sam has spent a great deal of energy convincing the profession that we have a largely mistaken interpretation of Ricardo and Malthus.  He's now working on Marx and I look forward to that (as well as his Say) with great interest.

So it'll come as no surprise that I like "debunking", research that corrects persistent mistakes or misrepresentations of our past in economics.  I also think it's important to reflect on the fact that the past is contested.  David Levy's Dismal Science is another example; we have a series at Econlib that makes the case with the wonderful title, "The Secret History of the Dismal Science."  We're now trying to make the case that Malthus has been horribly misrepresented in the secondary literature.

Here's a different example of this sort of thing.  It comes from my friend, Steve Medema, who recently told the History of Economics Executive:

I am pleased to be able to tell you that the Columbia Journalism
Review is now publishing commentary on the history of economic thought.
But it is better than just this; they seem committed to publishing
ideas that contain new and far-reaching insights that will
fundamentally alter the character of scholarship in our field. I will
quote from the December 2005 issue to give you a taste:

   1. We are informed by the author that Gary Becker is "in the
monetarist Milton Friedman mold."
   2. We are told that "law and economics" is "an extension of the
Friedman philosophy that seeks to explain behavior and mediate disputes
according to economic rules."

The full text is at  http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/6/Giuffo.asp.

I'm interested in additional examples; at some point I'd like to have a day of debunking at the Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economic Thought. Of course, finding the mistakes is one thing; convincing people of them is another; explaining them is yet another.