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Review of Stephen Marglin on economics and community
Wow, is this scathing (or try this version). It's by E. Roy Weintraub. I found the pointer on the Oxonomics blog.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 19, 2008 at 12:15 PM in Books | Permalink
Comments
That one's under their pay-wall. (one thing especially don't like about sciencemag is that you need to log in before you find out the contents isn't covered by your free subscription.)
Posted by: aaron at Jun 19, 2008 12:27:29 PM
"ECONOMICS: First, Kill the Economists"
Wow, indeed! How's that for a provocative title! ;-)
Posted by: Speedmaster at Jun 19, 2008 12:28:56 PM
Why "now-defunct"? I saw no notice...
Posted by: Gabriel at Jun 19, 2008 12:34:39 PM
Marglin was interviewed by Russ Roberts in March. More here :
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/03/marglin_on_mark.html
Posted by: Stephane at Jun 19, 2008 12:41:22 PM
Hi Tyler, thanks for the link but we're not defunct! posting is just a bit slower as we all have to write our dissertations!
Posted by: Mark Koyama at Jun 19, 2008 12:59:37 PM
Can't see it. Could anyone post a quick synopsis?
Posted by: Greg at Jun 19, 2008 1:44:29 PM
Based on reviews on the web, Weintraub doesn't provide any new insights. Just the same old socialist complaints that they have recycled for 200 years.
Posted by: fundamentalist at Jun 19, 2008 1:47:28 PM
I'm sorry. I meant Marglin doesn't provide any new insights.
Posted by: fundamentalist at Jun 19, 2008 1:48:33 PM
There is now a non-gated link in the post...
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Jun 19, 2008 1:49:26 PM
I'm reminded of Rogoff's letter to Stiglitz. Violently negative reviews like this say more about the reviewer than the reviewee. Weintraub doesn't really address the point of the book. It's not as though the subject of whether markets undermine community cannot be intelligently discussed - consider Olken (http://www.nber.org/~bolken/tvandsocialcapital.pdf) for example. But the reviewer isn't interested in the subject of the book, only in destroying the author.
Posted by: paul at Jun 19, 2008 2:11:08 PM
Both links are still subscription-required, but here's a rough draft of the review, provided by Weintraub on his website.
Posted by: ranger_granger at Jun 19, 2008 3:25:11 PM
p.s. Disclaimer about a disclaimer: While the final version of the review likely reflects the same overall opinion as the draft, as per the disclaimer preceding the draft's text, the author asks that it not be quoted or cited (w/out permission).
Posted by: ranger_granger at Jun 19, 2008 3:34:30 PM
This author sounds like a major d-bag. From this point on, he will be refered to as Guy LeDouche.
Posted by: A. Nonymous at Jun 19, 2008 6:23:09 PM
A reviewer at EH.net argues that Marglin also has at least some of his history wrong: http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/1308
Posted by: Craig Newmark at Jun 19, 2008 11:40:27 PM
Let's be real here. What the Maglins of the world need to realize before they commit mass career suicide is that Naomi Klein worked and crossed over into mainstream thought not because her ideas had any merit or even cohesion, but because she was kinda hot and spouting anarchist rhetoric you'd typically only hear from stoners at a punk rock concert but with the sophisticated sentence structure of an English teacher and the stamina of a marathon runner. We read No Logo because we wanted to be punished and gave up arguing against her nonsensical theses after about 10 pages. She was kinda hot, she was punishing us, we could rationalize continuing to pay attention in the irony of the brand she discovered for herself. Stephen Maglin should have known in some innate biological sense that he could not match that. He ought to be pilloried mercilessly for wasting our time.
Posted by: BoscoH at Jun 20, 2008 2:09:36 AM
I wonder how many of the commentators above actually bothered to take a look at Marglin's book. I am an economist, more right wing than left, and I thoroughly dislike Naomi Klein's work - and yet, I found Marglin's book a highly stimulating read. Provocative in the good sense, forcing me to come up with good defenses of economic ideas that I hold dear, and realizing that sometimes that wasn't very easy. To me, Marglin's main point was that mainstream economics doesn't understand community very well, and that this ignorance leads to some questionable policy recommendations. (And no, that's certainly not how the book comes across in the review, but that says more about Weintraub.)
Here's a thought: suppose that Marglin is right in so far as saying that economists by and large have a poor understanding of the notion of/workings of community. How is this affected by the fact that the great majority of economists presumably spend their formative years at a far remove from the communities in which they grew up? It is easy to forget that which is absent in our lives. Sure, academia is a sort of community, and economics and it's various branches constitute a kind of communities within communities, but frankly occupation-as-community is something very different from what we traditionally mean by the term.
One more thought: get an economist talking about rent control. (Disclosure: I am opposed to rent control.) Ask a sociologist or anthropologist to listen to the economist. Then ask the listener whether the economist seems to have a good understanding of the notion of community. I know what answer I would expect, and that, in a nutshell, is something I gained from reading Marglin's book.
Posted by: Johan at Jun 20, 2008 3:12:16 PM
Steve Marglin is no dummy. He knows neoclassical economics very well (look at his earliest publications which earned him tenure at Harvard) and hasn't forgotten it -- and thus understands a good deal more about production, exchange, and distribution than who spout off their opinions without any backing. His classic 1974 article "What Do Bosses Do?" [available at http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/marglin/files/What_Do_Bosses_Do.pdf] is essential to understanding the economics of organization.
That said, he's chosen to develop his ideas down a different path, and is now one of the Grand Old Men of the Radical Political Economy crowd. There will be few who buy his book who don't know who he is. It would be very surprising to hear him praise markets, decentralization, and the cosmic justice of the price system (indeed, if he did, I would suspect a brain tumor.)
This stuff is meant to be read and debated, not taken on faith as true. I'd advise people to read the book carefully before jumping to conclusions that this work is at the supremely atheoretical level of Naomi Klein, rather than a provocative and heterodox look at phenomena we think we fully understand.
Posted by: AGMycroft at Jun 20, 2008 5:13:06 PM
I agree with AGMycroft's comment, above, and just want to add one thing: I believe that Weintraub did science, and Science, a disfavor by writing such a haughty and shallow review. What were THEIR editors thinking?
Posted by: Johan at Jun 21, 2008 2:51:35 PM
Encouraged by the generous comments of Johan and ACMycroft, I am taking the liberty of sharing a response to Roy Weintraub’s review that I sent to Science, a response that the editor declined to print.
The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community, argues that the very assumptions of economics make community invisible, and that a world built in the image of economics marginalizes community. Other than complaining that these are not new ideas, Weintraub has nothing to say on the substance of my argument. He might have said the foundational assumptions of economics do not make community invisible. Or that I confuse the messenger with the message: whatever problems the market may pose for community, economics merely tells it like it is. He might argue that I get the consensus wrong, that economics is much more than what I identify as the mainstream. Instead, he simply asserts that I have “no historical or philosophical expertise,” presumably making it unnecessary to engage on the merits of my case.
Weintraub’s main point of substance is that I am confused about the history of economics, that I wrongly attribute ideas of recent vintage to an earlier era. My criticism is indeed leveled against the mainstream consensus of today, not the variety of economics and economists that have existed in the past. But this consensus didn’t come out of nowhere: it is rooted in the historical experience of the modern west over the last 400 years. The folks who did economics in the 17th century may not have called themselves economists and—unlike Monsieur Jourdain who was delighted to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life—might have resisted the label, but they walked the walk and talked the talk. Weintraub might start with Joyce Appleby’s Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England if he wants to educate himself in this regard. So it is not off the mark to argue, as I do, “For four hundred years, economists have been active in the enterprise of constructing the modern economy and society.”
Perhaps not satisfied that he has properly disposed of my book, Weintraub takes on my teaching: “Is not Marglin’s Harvard College teaching and instruction of the young designed to shape their preferences?” Of course, but the difference is that I don’t present economics or my views on economics as neutral, detached science: I own up to the ideological element that shapes the views of both economists and critics.
Not content with attacks on my book and my teaching, Weintraub goes after my publisher and even after one of the kind souls who wrote a dust-jacket blurb: “I note in closing that the lead dust-jacket blurb for this volume was provided by the noted economist and social theorist Bianca Jagger (sic). Whatever was Harvard University Press thinking?” I don’t know what HUP was thinking (maybe about selling books), but I can tell you what I was thinking: economics is too important to be left to the economists, and an endorsement from a noted human rights activist was intended to signal that my book would be of interest not only to academics concerned with understanding how economics undermines community, but to people struggling to build a better world, of which one part is surely stronger and more vibrant communities. The challenge of the 21st century is precisely how to build those communities without sacrificing the values of diversity and tolerance, values which unfortunately have been minority values both within and outside the modern west.
Posted by: Steve Marglin at Jun 24, 2008 7:43:21 PM
Mr. Marglin's human rights activist blurb-er sure is into ripping off the community -- or does Mr. Marglin teach that rent control is good for the community?
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 19, 2007
A state appeals court ruled yesterday that a landlord could evict Bianca Jagger from her rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper East Side. The landlord, the Katz Park Avenue Corporation, had argued that the apartment, on Park Avenue, could not be Ms. Jagger’s primary residence because she was in the country on a tourist visa. In a 3-2 decision, the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court agreed. It noted that Ms. Jagger, the former wife of Mick Jagger, is a British citizen who keeps at least one apartment in London. The ruling reversed a decision by a lower court and sent it back there to determine how much Ms. Jagger owes in back rent and legal fees. Ms. Jagger withheld rent and sued Katz Park Avenue in 2003, saying that toxic mold in her apartment had made her sick. (New York Times)
Posted by: Not Kenneth Arrow at Jun 27, 2008 4:10:45 PM
Pure ad hominem. What the Hell does Bianca Jagger's rent-stabilized apartment have to do with Marglin's argument?
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