Gregory Benford
Most important, a book should hold your interest. Uplifting tomes left unread help no one. For pure intellectual fun, I salute Michael Hart's The One Hundred: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. Like peanuts, it's hard to nibble on just one entry in this 570-page book.
Most undergraduates emerge from universities agreeing with Henry Ford, that history is bunk. This book can correct that, ladling in fascinating detail that makes the past seem real and relevant.
Hart plays around the usual dates-and-wars approach, avoids the social-movement models, and for his underlying drivers stresses two great currents in human endeavor: science/technology and religion. These, he argues in case after case, propelled humanity from hunter-gatherers to lords of the planet, for better and for worse.
When I bought the first hardcover edition in 1978 (a second, updated edition is now in trade paperback), I thought that in his list of those who have most moved humanity, surely I would know the top 10. I missed one, and no one I know has recognized his entry number 7: Ts'ai Lun, the inventor of paper. Yet Hart's case is compelling. This obscure Chinese eunuch devised paper in 105 A.D., and the Han dynasty kept the technique secret until 751, when Arabs tortured the trick out of Chinese craftsmen.
Paper was never separately invented, even though its existence was known for centuries. Hart argues cogently that China's rise to cultural superiority over the West for a thousand years in large measure arose from the organizing utility of readily available paper. Only when Johann Gutenberg (entry number 8) devised the printing press did the West redress the balance and draw ahead of China.
Hart's Top Ten balances science/technology with religion, beginning with Muhammad (because he both founded and spread a major religion), then in order, Newton, Christ, Buddha, Confucius, St. Paul, Ts'ai Lun, Gutenberg, Columbus, and Einstein. My only major difference with Hart's choices is that I believe Euclid, the sole figure who put mathematical thinking on an orderly basis, has been more influential than Einstein.
Necessarily, Hart has to guess at the long-range influence of those born in the last few centuries, but still, engaging patterns emerge. An unusually large number of major figures flourished between the sixth and third centuries B.C. From the 15th century on, each century supplies more names.
Natives of the British Isles turn up often, with Scots the true standouts. Hart argues cogently that scientists and inventors (37 entries) exercise more sway over later lives than politicians and generals (30 entries). Nineteen of the hundred never married, and 26 had no known children, with both these groups concentrated near the top of the list. Maybe family life gets in the way of greatness? Hart estimates that about half of the list have no living descendants. Seven were illiterate, principally military leaders. Oddly, at least 10 suffered from gout, a fact of interest in medical research.
The book abounds in insights, points worth arguing, quirks of history. It makes the past a living landscape, and as Hart hopes, does indeed "open, as it did for me, a new perspective on history."
Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Timescape.
Stephen Cox
Students who are trying to make sense out of history will probably not derive much help from the versions of historical theory that they encounter in the classroom. They will be especially disappointed if they want to understand the wonderful coincidence embodied in the progress of capitalist societies–the simultaneous expansion of personal liberty and material prosperity.
The historical theories that are normally embalmed in college syllabi won't come close to explaining how this happened. Some of them deny that there is such a thing as "progress" in the first place. Others view material progress as an effect of purely material forces, a kind of self-generating machine that periodically emits, as a byproduct, certain sentimental notions about the importance of individuals and individual liberty.
The conclusive refutation of all this nonsense can be found in Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine (Transaction Publishers). Paterson demonstrates the dependence of economic forces on ideas, which are the products of individual minds; and she shows that the key to material progress is the discovery of social and political mechanisms that allow individuals to think and act freely. If modern civilization can be likened to a machine, then the creative mind is its dynamo; its circuits of energy are maintained by capitalist institutions; and its improvement results from a gradually increasing understanding of the "engineering principles" of a free society. "These are not sentimental considerations," Paterson says. "They constitute the mechanism of production and therefore of power."
Paterson traces the history of the engineering principles from Greek science and Roman law to the system of limited government created by the founders of the American republic. She then describes the subversion of that system by collectivist ideas and practices. She presents a withering analysis of the managed economy, public education, state-sponsored "security" schemes, and the supposedly humanitarian impulses that lead people to favor the welfare state.
When The God of the Machine was published in 1943, it was shockingly unfashionable. "Fit audience, though few": The general public was not attracted, but Paterson was admired by such fellow iconoclasts as Ayn Rand, Albert Jay Nock, and Russell Kirk. The God of the Machine remains a classic of individualist thought. But it is not a pale historical artifact, locked in its time of origin. It is focused on the great continuing issues of civilization, which it confronts with the authority of Paterson's special character and experience.
Brought up in poverty on the Western frontier, educated by herself and educated superbly, Paterson became an important novelist and literary critic. She did not merely preach individualism; she lived life as an individualist. And she was not merely a theorist; she had the creative imagination that brings theory to life and challenges the imaginations of others. There was nobody quite like Isabel Paterson, and there is nothing quite like The God of the Machine.
Stephen Cox is professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego.
William C. Dennis
Among the intellectual openings to the further expansion of socialism that will plague the early 21st century, three appear to me to be particularly troubling: the question of race, the yearning for equality, and the worry over environmental degradation. Thus the friend of liberty will need to do some reading in all three of these areas if he is to be an able advocate of human freedom. On equality, one might first turn to the writings of the late Aaron Wildavsky, particularly his The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism (1991); the Heartland Institute's recent Ecosanity (1994) would be one good place to start thinking about the environment for liberty.
But on the question of race, the premier scholar of good sense is Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. To his Race and Economics (1975), Markets and Minorities (1981), and Ethnic America (1981), among others, Professor Sowell has added this year Race and Culture: A World View (Basic Books). In these books. Sowell deals with how culture and background influence the statistical outcome of group behavior. He does this not to denigrate the role of individual effort in life achievements but to show how different starting points, values, customs, attitudes, and beliefs are bound to make a difference in how persons in a particular ethnic or religious group turn out.
Starting points matter. They do not determine, but they do influence. How could things be any other way? Nor would we want them to be, for otherwise the wonderful variety of humanity would be reduced to some colorless norm. Therefore, Sowell argues, if one bases governmental policies on statistical "disparities" of group outcomes, he will, perforce, ignore culture, history, choice, and preference as he tries to wrench the lives of real people into patterns more closely aligned to his theories of how things ideally should be.
Yet this is not a book where Sowell imposes some end state view of his own to substitute for those of the coercive utopians. Rather this is a work that might be subtitled, "On How to Begin Thinking About Race." Full of interesting examples of group differences throughout history and around the globe, Sowell's book has thoughtful discussions of paternalism, slavery, migration and conquest, discrimination and segregation, the counterintuitive and unintended consequences of government planning, the question of racial reparations, and the idea of social justice, among other topics.
Sowell's chapter on race and intelligence is one of his best–undogmatic and sensible throughout. Even to discuss such questions as these frankly would keep this book off most college syllabi, but the implications of Sowell's study for current policy are so "politically incorrect" that I would not be surprised to hear of a book burning on one of our campuses this autumn. Come to think of it, this book has a lot to say about the problems of equality and of the best environment for humanity, as well.
William C. Dennis is a senior program officer at Liberty Fund Inc., in Indianapolis.
Thomas W. Hazlett
I once heard a very important second-year assistant professor in economics pronounce harsh verdict upon Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions (Basic Books, 1980). "The book has nothing that's really new," he declared. "The entire 400 pages is little more than an application of the basic model."
How right he was. And how wrong. For the colossal achievement of Sowell's masterpiece is that it extends the essential logic of microeconomic analysis–and that's nothing new–into the very far reaches of modern life. That is. Organized not in the manner of an economics text but as a classic social science reference work, the book repeatedly busts out of the narrow confines of pure theory.
For instance, in Part I, devoted to Social Institutions, Sowell divvies up his subject matter into Economic Trade-Offs, Social Trade-Offs, and Political Trade-Offs. In Part II, Trends and Issues, he categorizes his topics as Historical Trends, Trends in Economics, Trends in Law, and Trends in Politics. The book's title exemplifies its purpose: to show how people use their brains to make choices. That is the classic inquiry of economic analysis, often lost over the past two centuries in the relentless march of formalism. This book puts meat back on the bones of a war-weary homo economicus.
Sowell manages to squeeze out the jargon in marvelous fashion–ceteris paribus. He craftily replaces the obtuse "marginal analysis" with the paradigm of "incremental vs. categorical thinking." Categorical thinking is exemplified by such economic illogic as that employed by the jury that went lightly on a rapist because his victim offered him a condom. Incremental thinking focuses more clearly on the issue at hand: Given that one finds oneself in an injurious situation, it is intelligent to mitigate damage. Rational action to limit damages is hardly to condone the perpetration of a felony. The analytical result of this sort of clearheadedness is that the reader is painlessly processed through the economist's workshop. And thanks mainly to Sowell's relentless pursuit of institutional detail, the excursion turns out exotic.
On social issues, Sowell bravely travels where few economists dare to explore, and charts the incremental gains and losses from various sorts of personal relationships. Sowell's pathbreaking work in the economics of ethnic rivalry give him a wealth of fascinating material to drop on the reader regarding racial and gender matters. The means by which discrimination works–and by which it fails–is especially intriguing.
But do not be surprised that topics such as discrimination and affirmative action are not the primary focus of this book; they simply provide a rich contextual reality for the larger framework of "incremental thinking." Indeed, the author spends perhaps more time on details of the camera market than on race, as he is an ardent photography buff.
On page 339, Dr. Sowell offers an observation that both demonstrates his mode of analysis and casts light upon the issue at hand–at least to many striving academics: "An intellectual is rewarded not so much for reaching the truth as for demonstrating his own mental ability. Recourse to well-established and widely accepted ideas will never demonstrate the mental ability of the intellectual, however valid its application to a particular question or issue. The intellectual's virtuosity is shown by recourse to the new, the esoteric, and if possible his own originality in concept or application–whether or not its conclusions are more or less valid than the received wisdom. Intellectuals have an incentive 'to study more the reputation of their own wit than the success of another's business,' as Hobbes observed more than three centuries ago."
In truth, Thomas Sowell does little more than bring Adam Smith's "invisible hand" up to the late 20th century–with metaphors in technicolor. Nothing particularly "elegant" or "rigorous" or "interesting" about that. Except to the human race.
Contributing Editor Thomas W. Hazlett teaches economics and public policy at the University of California, Davis.
Loren E. Lomasky
We are a species of busybodies, and no lesson is harder to learn–and more in need of frequent relearning–than forbearance. For most of us meddling comes all too naturally. Whether prompted by the love of virtue or abhorrence of vice, by outpourings of benevolence or stern imperatives of rectitude, we continually find ourselves impelled to extend our noses until they are firmly implanted in the business of others. In part we do so because to butt in is exquisitely pleasant. That, though, is only half of the story. Pleasures, even addictive ones, can be resisted. But when to the joys of intrusiveness is added the conviction that one is simply doing one's duty, the siren's call becomes well-nigh irresistible. That is why leaving other people alone is so terribly hard.
It is to the credit of the liberal philosophical tradition that its theorists have struggled heroically to set up sturdy bulwarks against this predilection. John Locke's Second Treatise on Government, J. S. Mill's On Liberty, and Immanuel Kant's Theory of Right develop conceptions of human beings as self-determiners thereby entitled to a domain of action within which they are not subject to interference. These and other philosophical classics must be part of our hypothetical student's curriculum. But alongside them ought to be a copy, a well-thumbed copy at that, of Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.
"An etiquette book?" some will ask. "Is it really necessary for someone to know which fork to use with Belgian endive or how to address the Duchess of Kent at the Wimbledon reception?" No, of course not; though such tidbits of knowledge certainly don't hurt and may be no less illuminating than numerous others that could be culled from our scholar's social science textbooks. It is not merely disjoint instructions for performance that are to be gleaned from Miss Manners but rather an ethos.
Think of people as millions of vehicles whizzing along the superhighways, back roads, and interchanges of life. They set their courses independently and travel at different speeds. Sometimes they collide, and then carnage ensues. Last-second application of anti-lock disc brakes can avert some crashes, and when cars do collide, airbag deployment reduces injury. These devices are like moral codes and legal institutions, kicking in when collision appears imminent or has already occurred.
But skilled motoring features little reliance on brakes and none at all on airbags. One avoids the necessity of their use through taking prudent precautions: keeping a safe distance, staying in one's own lane, signaling intentions clearly. That is precisely the function of etiquette.
It is not a labyrinthine ritual of studied ostentation nor a mechanism of social dominance brought to class, race, or gender warfare, although etiquette can be misapplied in these ways. Rather, good manners are a means by which people preserve necessary distance between each other. They are how we send out signals that keep one person from veering suddenly into the path of someone else. Manners are not a substitute for moral imperatives or legal restraints any more than a course in defensive driving substitutes for having well-maintained brakes on one's car. Rather, etiquette complements morals and law. Each is an indispensable ingredient of civility.
Miss Manners (also known as Judith Martin) demonstrates for hundreds of life's mundane occasions how proper attentiveness to the principles of etiquette enables individuals to pursue their plans and projects while minimizing incursions on the interests of others. Rudeness, she insists, is not excusable even when–or perhaps especially when–it is prompted by allegedly higher motives. So, for example, the incontrovertible value of sincerity does not excuse one's failure politely to inquire, "How do you do?" when one is utterly uninterested in the content of the answer. Nor may one invoke honesty as a justification for responding to that question with a litany of one's current and prospective woes.
Please, no disapproving accusations of hypocrisy: This is not to announce an endorsement by etiquette of insincerity or dishonesty. Rather, the little ritual in which we engage when we meet is a wonderfully efficient formalism through which we acknowledge our interlocutor's status as a person deserving of solicitude and respect; that acknowledgment is duly reciprocated by a display of dignified restraint.
Of rules of etiquette there is no end, and Miss Manners seemingly knows them all. So too, no doubt, do dozens of dreary chiefs of protocol. But Miss Manners is no pedant; she is a sage; moreover, a sage who writes like a demon. That is why she amply merits her place on our student's reading list. And since academics can't resist piling footnote upon footnote, I hasten to add that should there be in the audience any postgraduates on the verge of establishing their own domestic nests, to you I commend as follow-up reading Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children.
Contributing Editor Loren E. Lomasky is a professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University.
Mark O. Martin
"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination," wrote John Dewey. A lovely phrase, but one that hardly reflects the image of the scientist encountered by the public. This is a shame, since the practice of science has transformed both the nature of our world and how we perceive our place in it.
Yet science and scientists are repeatedly portrayed by the popular media in an unflattering and inaccurate light, as dinosaur-cloning profit mongers or monomaniacal and bespectacled superbomb designers. As I am a bespectacled microbiologist, this imagery concerns me a bit.
I know a number of scientists, and while there are those with more than a healthy dose of ego, the vast majority are nothing like the two-dimensional shadows created by Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg. Still, media images are powerful and pervasive. How could anyone honestly expect the general educated public to know better?
There is a solution: the award-winning novel Timescape by Gregory Benford.
Fictional depictions of scientists have usually been unrealistic to say the least. Overly heroic attempts (Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis) are stacked against an almost rock-star focus on the pursuit of recognition (The Double Helix by James Watson).
Benford's novel bridges this gap in a balanced manner which is at once literate, accurate, and moving; it lacks the stereotypes of 1950s Giant Ant movies and our present media-powered fascination with the toppling of ethical standards. Timescape is a novel about interesting and intriguing people who happen to be scientists.
It takes place in two segments of time: an ecologically threatened 1998 and the more innocent world of 1962. A British scientist, as the millennium slouches toward a darker Bethlehem, has developed a technique to communicate a warning to the past. The enigmatic message from the future is received by a new professor (seeking tenure) at a California university in the fresh and optimistic days of JFK's version of Camelot.
Two world views collide in a spectacular fashion: Will the warning from the future be received, and understood? The concept of causality–the connections between past and future–shines brightly in Benford's prose, which is both clear and scientifically accurate.
More to the point, the scientists themselves come alive as people, not calculator-wielding plot devices. The triumvirate of scientific "types" (Theorist, Experimentalist, and Bureaucrat) reveal themselves in both 1962 and 1998. Their interactions remain fresh and vital, and uncomfortably familiar to anyone conversant with the true world of science.
When friends ask me what it is like to "do" science for a living, this is the book I hand them. We do not clone dinosaurs, nor release designer plagues into the world for profit. Benford's novel shows scientists realistically: men and women who work, love, and learn as their lives unfold.
Timescape can act as a conduit between C. P. Snow's two cultures, allowing the English major to appreciate that scientists are little different from other people who love their work. It is, perhaps, the antidote for the Creeping Crichtonism shouting from the many throats of the media today.
Mark O. Martin is an assistant professor of biology at Occidental College.
Donald N. McCloskey
Someone here will mention Milton and Rose Friedman's Free to Choose (1979), and I concur, adding only Wicksteed, Bastiat, and Adam Smith. Fine books, and seldom seen on college reading lists.
The problem, however, is that doctrine and counterdoctrine are not going to work with the audience we have in mind. We the middle-aged want to save the young the trouble, indoctrinating them with conveniently brief pamphlets about health reform or the crime bill. But the indoctrination hasn't worked in the college classroom. It's not going to work in the Offlist List, either.
Better reach for their culture. That's why Ayn Rand continues to sell. Ditto science fiction of a libertarian sort. Storytelling and symbol-making think for us. We do not speak the language, said Coleridge: the language speaks us. Some rock music attacks collectivism, as it certainly did once in Eastern Europe. Movies about the modern state, such as In the Name of the Father, are more educational than any number of essays about liberty under socialism.
I can't tell you about rock music or television, though not because I believe that print available in 1940 is all one needs of culture or that the American mind has closed since I was a lad. It's merely that I stopped listening to rock music in 1959 and am ill-equipped to analyze the politics of The Brady Bunch. I leave that side to younger people, as in the new magazine of cultural libertarianism, The Exchange.
My side is old-fashioned and literary. Like the kids, though, I'm looking for sensibilities with no whiff of Lenin, Mussolini, Bertrand Russell, or the Bauhaus. The worst in 20th-century culture comes from the mixture of Science and Romance concocted by intellectuals in the 19th century. The best looks like Swift, Voltaire, Hume, Smith.
So give the students anything by Borges, such as Labyrinths (1969), or his luminous poetry, Selected Poems, 1923-1967 (1972, with the Spanish on one side and translations by English-language poets on the other). Or anything by Mencken, such as the old Vintage Mencken edited by Alistair Cooke in 1955, or his autobiographies. Or anything by Eric Hoffer (surprisingly little is in print).
The deep literary thinkers at The New York Times to the contrary, there are numerous English professors who have the sensibility I'm looking for, whatever the details of their politics. An example is the late Northrop Frye, as in The Educated Imagination (1964), the text of a series of Canadian radio talks. Another is Wayne Booth, as in Now Don't Try to Reason with Me (1970). Or Paul Fussell, in Thank God for the Atomic Bomb, and other Essays (1988).
Joseph Epstein and the magazine he edits, The American Scholar, convey the 18th-century, unromantic, ironical, satirical, individualistic, hardminded yet courteous tone I have in mind. It spreads with bourgeois virtue. I'm hoping it will make the next century less of a slaughterhouse than the one we have just been through.
One book? All right, I'll cheat. No one can browse the four volumes of George Orwell's The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1971) and still celebrate the ideologies of the 20th century. Put it on The Offlist. Put it on The List.
Contributing Editor Donald N. McCloskey's latest book is Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge).
Richard Mitchell
Welcome to college. Be careful. In these days, when most of the preachers have lost their clout with intellectuals, one of which you are about to become, our professors, like our politicians, have taken over the preaching, laboring mightily to foster true belief in notions defensible by faith alone. Nietzsche predicted it long ago. Don't worry. You can still be free, still get educated, nourished, and made even better than you are.
To do that, though, you may have to read even more than is assigned. Look around for authors who have been dead for a long time. Your advantage in reading the dead lies in this: They too may have had axes to grind, but nobody swings those axes anymore, so it is easier to find in them some ideas that might be continually true and useful even when the agendas they might have had for their readers are as dead as they are.
Here's a case in point. Lucius Apuleius, who died about 1,800 years ago, was an unreconstructed Roman, who became an initiate of the cult of Isis, a weird sort of mystery religion which, like the more famous Mysteries at Eleusis, had no creeds, no scriptures, and no clergy. Nevertheless, from lots of contemporary evidence, such mystery religions seem to have made people happy and decent. How they did it, we don't know; the initiates were sworn to secrecy, and none of them seem to have blabbed.
Except, maybe, for Lucius Apuleius. He wrote a rowdy, raunchy novel now called The Golden Ass. It's about a bright, handsome young man, maybe much like you, setting out to make something of himself. But, alas, through some indiscretions of a delicate nature, he finds himself transformed into a jackass, and, even worse, stolen by a band of robbers who use him as a pack animal. His adventures are various and entertaining, but still not to his liking. He would still rather be a man.
In the middle of the book, he is in a cave with two women, one an old crone cooking up some chicken soup for the other, a blushing young bride kidnapped at her wedding and being held for ransom. To comfort the girl, the old woman tells a story, a perfectly beautiful and wonderful story, which very possibly a man is not supposed to hear. But, of course, there's no man there, just this jackass. But the story sets the hero on the road to becoming a man again.
Young men will find this book valuable. They will, like all men, have to escape jackasserie again and again. Young women will find this book valuable. They will probably understand the story told in the cave, and even see the importance of letting a jackass overhear it once in a while. And no one at all is in any danger of being gulled into the cult of Isis. A very good book.
Richard Mitchell, who was the publisher of The Underground Grammarian, is the author of several books, including The Graves of Academe (Little, Brown) and The Gift of Fire (Simon & Schuster).
Ethan A. Nadelmann
Psychoactive drugs are not easily understood in American society today. Most Americans mistakenly assume that alcohol and tobacco are safer than most illicit drugs. Cocaine and heroin are blamed for many social problems, with little regard for the ways in which drug prohibition makes drugs even more dangerous than they need to be. All sorts of myths are associated with psychedelic drugs like LSD, mescaline, and psilocybic mushrooms.
Andrew Weil has long been a brilliant analyst of psychoactive drug use around the world. His first book, The Natural Mind (Houghton Mifflin, 1972, 1986), explained drug use in terms of a near-universal human desire to alter one's state of consciousness. A second book, The Marriage of the Sun and Moon (Houghton Mifflin, 1980), examined the diverse ways in which people around the world alter their consciousness–from peyote-based religious ceremonies to eating hot peppers, sitting in sweat lodges, munching on fresh mangoes and experiencing lunar eclipses. From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs (Houghton Mifflin, 1983), written with Winifred Rosen, completes his trilogy on drugs and drug use, providing a valuable antidote to foolish thinking about drugs.
Designed as a drug education book for both young people and adults, From Chocolate to Morphine is remarkably well written and accessible. Weil and Rosen make clear from the start that the best way to avoid problems with drugs is never to use them in the first place. But they also know that virtually all of us are likely to use psychoactive drugs in one form or another, even if we restrict our consumption to those that are legal.
Weil and Rosen describe what drugs are, where they come from, and what their effects are likely to be. They provide guidance as to which drugs and means of consumption are safer or more dangerous. They suggest how to recognize the point at which drug use becomes habitual or otherwise dangerous. And they emphasize that human beings, not drugs, are ultimately responsible for the relationship between the two.
There is no question that drug policy in the United States would improve dramatically if policy makers properly digested this text. No other domain of policy affords public speakers such latitude in substituting distortions, lies, and ignorant beliefs for well-established truths backed by historical and scientific evidence. As enthusiasm for the "war on drugs" fades, there is reason to hope that public discourse and policy increasingly will be shaped by scientific evidence and common sense. From Chocolate to Morphine should be priority reading for anyone who uses drugs, wants to use drugs, wants to know about other people who use drugs, just wants to learn about drugs, or wants to shape policy on drugs.
Ethan A. Nadelmann is director of the Lindesmith Center in New York City.
Steven R. Postrel
Choosing books for others, especially young people, always brings out the pomposity in an intellectual–if you read this, You Will Be a Better Person, goes the subtext. In that vein, I considered recommending Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War for its unparalleled description of civic virtue and vice and for the pity and terror it evokes at the grim realities of power politics and total war. The Apocalyptics by Edith Efron, which is the best antidote to Rachel Carson and the popular hysteria over cancer from industrial chemicals, almost got the nod as well.
Instead, I chose a book that I can honestly say might make the reader a better person–Vladimir Bukovsky's To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter. First published in English in 1978, it is the gripping story of a man whose thirst for liberty and sense of integrity were so strong that he could not submit to the will of the Communist Party, even when his defiance brought down upon him the entire repression apparatus of the Soviet state.
When imprisonment in the gulag wasn't sufficient to break his spirit (and his survival techniques are fascinating), Bukovsky was declared insane and placed in a mental hospital to be cured of his anti-communist delusions. Even there, surrounded by truly demented psychotics and threatened with horrifying drug treatments and physical torture, he managed to resist–smuggling out his medical records for independent evaluation by Western psychiatrists, exposing the fraud of Soviet psychiatry to the world at large, and becoming an internationally known prisoner of conscience whose fame intimidated the authorities.
Bukovsky's memoir offers the contemporary American college student many valuable things. It demonstrates the meaning of political courage in the most direct way and shows that flinty toughness rather than squishy compassion is the key to resisting oppression. It explodes the idea that propaganda and re-education can reshape human nature, undermining the fashionable notion that our ideas are determined by the oppressive power of "privileged" texts. It brings back to fresh, vivid life the meaning of individual rights, such as freedom of speech and due process of law, whose perceived importance has been dulled by ritualistic invocation.
Battles over political correctness at universities take on clearer perspective after reading Bukovsky's accounts of his "crimes," their adjudication, and their punishment. On the one hand, the self-correction sessions, guilt by ideological accusation, and illogical charges are eerily familiar; on the other hand, the punishments meted out to campus dissidents today seem paltry in comparison to the kind of thing Bukovsky and his fellows took for granted.
Perhaps the most valuable commodity To Build a Castle provides today's campuses is its exploration of the fundamental evil of Soviet communism, now in the process of being forgotten or trivialized. Bukovsky ties that evil directly to the professed ideals of the regime: "You have to understand that without the use of force it is realistic to create a theoretical equality of opportunity, but not equality of results. People attain absolute equality only in the graveyard, and if you want to turn your country into a giant graveyard, go ahead, join the socialists." Now there's a statement just perfect for use in your sociology class.
Steven R. Postrel teaches management strategy at the University of California, Irvine.
Paul A. Rahe
There was a time, not so long ago, when the study of war, politics, and power was thought to be part and parcel of an undergraduate education. In the course of the last four decades, this has ceased to be the case. Except at a handful of institutions, such as Ohio State University and Yale, military history has been abandoned. Within today's academy, the practitioners of this dying art are shunned as pariahs, for it is assumed that no one would devote a career to the study of armed conflict who is not somehow morally deranged. Programs in peace studies and in conflict resolution abound; rarely does anyone face up to the fact that conflicts quite often get resolved, and peace achieved, through the successful conduct of war.
One consequence of the reigning academic pieties is that in college one is far more likely to encounter an offering in the history of women's fashion than to have the opportunity to study Napoleon's campaigns. This is not because of a lack of demand. Books in military history have always sold well and still do; undergraduates are quick to enroll in courses dealing with politics and war when given the chance. Red-blooded they always were, and red-blooded they remain. Therein lies hope.
Ten years ago, the obvious place to begin would have been Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War. Nowhere can one find a subtler depiction of the moral and practical dilemmas faced by the statesman in a world torn by conflict. Moreover, Thucydides' environment was bipolar–as was ours in the great epoch of struggles on the European continent that stretched from 1914 to 1989–and Thucydides' war pitted a maritime power, such as we were, against a power, such as Germany or the Soviet Union, threatening dominance on land. But the two great world wars are now long gone; the Cold War has come to an end; and we no longer find ourselves hovering on the verge of conflict with a single foe.
Our situation more closely resembles the plight of the late Victorians than that of Pericles, Archidamus, Alcibiades, and Lysander; and while we still have much to learn from Thucydides, there is something to be said for asking contemporary students to read Winston Churchill's lively accounts of the dirty little wars that his countrymen had to fight at the end of the last century in defense of their empire and their way of life.
Unfortunately, the best of these--The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (London; Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899)–was never reprinted in its original, two-volume edition. Those in search of instruction will have to turn to the library or even to interlibrary loan. The rewards will amply repay the effort of acquisition, for the reader will have no difficulty in understanding why Churchill was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
Churchill's great, neglected work is, like Thucydides' history, a prose epic. His subjects–the Nile and its peoples; the conflict between Islam and modernity; the origins, character, and course of the Mahdist revolt against Egyptian rule within the Sudan; the resistance mounted by General Gordon at Khartoum; the fecklessness of Gladstone's Liberal administration; and the campaign of reconquest ultimately mounted on behalf of Egypt and Britain by Sir Herbert Kitchener–offered him the same sort of canvas available to Thucydides, and he took the endeavor as an occasion for reflection on the moral responsibilities attendant upon great power and as an opportunity to explore the relationships between civilization and decadence, between barbarism and courage, and between modern science and the changing character of war.
In an age when Americans are likely to be called on to respond to ugly little conflicts marked by social, sectarian, and tribal rivalries in odd corners of the world–the Arabian peninsula, the Caucasus, the Horn of Africa, the Balkans, Central Africa, the Maghreb, and the Caribbean, to mention the most recent examples–I can think of no other historical work that better deserves our attention.
Paul A. Rahe chairs the department of history at the University of Tulsa. His book Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution was reissued in August by the University of North Carolina Press in a three-volume paperback edition.
John Shelton Reed
Maybe it's not helpful to start by questioning this assignment's premise, but in fact I'm not sure there any longer are such things as "typical college syllabi," at least in the humanities and social sciences. With a few honorable exceptions, college faculties have exploited the elective system to make an implicit pact with our students: We don't require them to read anything in particular, and we get to teach whatever we want. The upshot of this cheerful permissiveness is that there's almost nothing except maybe The Color Purple that all students have read, and almost nothing–Zane Grey's novels, Turkish cookbooks, the opinions of Justice Brennan–that one can't imagine being assigned by some professors, somewhere.
Notice I said "almost nothing." We do have our orthodoxies, and it's tempting to suggest books just because they're offensive to received collegiate opinion: Jean Raspail's Camp of the Saints, for instance, or Michael Fumento's The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, Steven Goldberg's The Inevitability of Patriarchy, or anything by Arthur Jensen on group differences in intelligence. But it's a pretty safe bet that students aren't much better acquainted with Plato, the Bible, or Shakespeare, so maybe they should read some of the staples of the old "Western Civ" courses first–except, of course, that one shudders to recall how the classics are often taught these days.
Anyway, enough stalling: I'll play your game. You want one book?
My nominee is I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, published in 1930 by "Twelve Southerners," most of them literary chaps associated with Vanderbilt University (all white males, and all but one now dead). "The Vanderbilt Agrarians," intellectual historian Richard King has written, "offered the closest thing to an authentic conservative vision which America has seen," and certainly John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and their colleagues stand in a tradition of anti-industrial, anti-modern thought far better represented in England and on the Continent (and latterly in the Third World) than in the United States, a tradition today's students will find almost totally unfamiliar.
Like their antebellum cousins the pro-slavery theorists, the Agrarians started with reasonable, even commonplace, observations, but took them in startling directions. They disliked alienated labor and automobiles, ecological degradation and total war, all fashionable complaints on modern campuses. But their prescriptions were very old-fashioned: The family farm. Revealed religion. Good manners. And, Lord knows, most of the 12 could write.
What would MTV addicts make of Andrew Lytle's admonition to turn off the Victrola and take the fiddle from the wall? What would a generation of mall rats make of his paean to the spinning wheel? I don't know, but it would be fun to see, and those who are capable of being puzzled might be the better for it.
John Shelton Reed is William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Lynn Scarlett
So many and varied are the niches of inquiry left unexamined in our schools that I feel obliged to recommend as an educational supplement a nonfiction epic of ideas. Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty is such an epic.
Education should nurture the capacity to think about ideas and their consequences. Hayek counts among those ideas worth revisiting "that ideal of freedom which inspired modern Western civilization and whose partial realization made possible the achievements of that civilization."
The idea of liberty deserves particular attention because, as Hayek proposes, it is "not merely one particular value but…the source and condition of most moral values. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free."
But just what is this liberty (or freedom) of which Hayek writes? Why should we care about it? How do notions of freedom relate to current events and issues?
These are questions Americans need to ask. The Constitution of Liberty can assist in this inquiry.
Abraham Lincoln wrote that "we all declare for liberty: but in using the same word, we do not mean the same thing." Hayek unpacks the rhetoric of freedom. He contrasts at least four different concepts: political freedom (democracy); inner freedom (free will); freedom as power (to do or get what we want); and freedom as the absence of coercion.
It is the fourth concept that Hayek views as essential to human progress. The first concept, political freedom, he regards as instrumental to real freedom only if limited. The other two concepts he regards, respectively, as an irrelevant fiction and a dangerous conceit.
Hayek's discussion of the idea of progress contrasts evolutionary, unplanned progress-spontaneous order–with attempts to deliberately design the "good world." Socrates wrote that "the recognition of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom." Hayek develops this Socratic idea as it relates to human institutions, economic action, and progress. For Hayek, a central human problem is how to coordinate human actions and pursue human ends in a context of ignorance. Hayek's writings on progress and knowledge anticipate the more contemporary works of Aaron Wildavsky (Searching for Safety) and Peter Huber (Liability) when he suggests that "progress depends on accidents." And his writings on progress and knowledge anticipate the great modern debates about urban planning and environmentalism.
The Constitution of Liberty offers a compact history of politics and Western political theory; of economics; of public policy; and of that oft-neglected concept, morality. Unlike some of his other renowned works, such as the three-volume Law, Legislation, and Liberty, The Constitution of Liberty is eminently accessible. Hayek reminds us that arguments for limited government are best cast in terms of fundamental principles about human progress and moral values. Arguments about the inexpedience of particular government measures simply reinforce the idea that "the desirability or undesirability of a particular measure could never be a matter of principle but is always one of expediency."
Lynn Scarlett is vice president for research at the Reason Foundation.
The post Extracurricular Reading appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The simplest mark of a comedy is a happy ending. In the late 1940s, as the notorious author of The Road to Serfdom, estranged in marriage, Friedrich Hayek did not view his life as a comedy. Yet it ended in 1992 on the whole happily. An anti-socialist born in Vienna in 1899 who saw socialism triumph on the left, right, and center, he flourished into his 90s, and through communism's collapse. An economic theorist regarded until 1945 as the equal of Keynes, yet who five years later was spurned for an appointment in economics at the University of Chicago, he lived to get a Nobel Prize in the subject and to see his ideas again taken seriously. It's a sweet story, and a painless way to begin reading Hayek.
Stephen Kresge is the general editor of The Collected Works of Hayek, being published by the University of Chicago Press in 19 volumes, of which this book is a supplement. Its two sources are autobiographical notes by Hayek himself and numerous interviews, some published (one by Thomas Hazlett in REASON in July 1992, shortly after Hayek's death). Though Kresge and Wener have worked diligently at the weaving, the result has disproportions. The index of persons, a good idea, is uneven and inaccurate. The long and chatty introduction by Kresge is worshipful. Hayek said thus and such, and "Einstein has said much the same thing." The portraits include one of our hero's great-great grandfathers. Altogether it's an unsteady book.
Yet it's the best route to Hayek I know, much better than Hayek himself. Reading the great man can be a trial. Hayek said the introduction and the first couple of chapters of The Road to Serfdom were the best writing he did, as writing. Here is the opening sentence of the introduction: "Contemporary events differ from history in that we do not know the results they will produce." The concluding sentence: "It was the prevalence of socialist views and not Prussianism that Germany had in common with Italy and Russia—and it was from the masses and not from the classes steeped in the Prussian tradition, and favored by it, that National Socialism arose." The prose of his academic books in not up to this standard.
Hayek himself explained why he was such a poor writer. Some people, unlike him, "are able to restate chains of reasoning that they have once learnt," and they are the good writers—the Keyneses and Schumpeters of this world. He, on the other hand, "had painfully to work them out anew almost every time."
Further, Hayek's kind of working out did not lend itself to storytelling. He was a seeker after patterns, metaphors, timeless structures. Not a page of Keynes or Schumpeter lacks a story. It's hard to find one in Hayek's books. Aside from the story of socialism's rise, expressed abstractly, Hayek had no tales to tell. He made even evolution sound boring.
Approaching his thought through the story of his life, then, is a better idea. For example, Hayek said that he would have become, like his father, a biologist but for the timing of World War I. As an Austrian officer on the Italian front he "served in a battle in which eleven different languages were spoken. It's bound to draw your attention to the problems of political organization." He was not a superb student at university, being too undisciplined and slow. Contrast again Keynes and Schumpeter, who remind one of Thomas Mann's description of the brightest high-school boys in Germany: "small, ambitious lads, far ahead of their age, who were brilliant in subjects that could be got by heart."
Hayek's thinking by his own account often came from his slow-witted attention to the very words: "in that process I often discovered the flaws or inadequacies of the generally held views." He attributed one of his main ideas to reflection on the redundancy in the economist's phrase, "given data" (as in "assume a given can-opener"), a subject of merriment around the London School of Economics. "That led me, in part, to ask to whom were the data really given. To us, it was of course to nobody….That's what led me, in the thirties, to the idea that the whole problem was the utilization of information dispersed among thousands of people and not possessed by anyone."
The fulcrum of the Hayek bildungsroman is the triumph and disaster of The Road to Serfdom, published in Britain in 1944. Suddenly famous in the United States on the strength of a skillful condensation in Reader's Digest, Hayek was surprised to be rushed off on a book tour, speaking to thousands. He notes, "I discredited myself with most of my fellow economists by writing The Road to Serfdom, which is disliked so much." That the book alienated so many economists, especially in the United States, shows how optimistic the average egghead was about socialism at the time and how cross when his optimism was questioned. Much looser books by socialists such as R.H. Tawney—an egregious book on China in 1932, for example—were taken seriously as scholarship.
Hayek wrote the book when there were 12 democracies left in the world, and prophets like Anne Morrow Lindbergh were saying that totalitarianism, after all, had some good points and was anyway the wave of the future. From the other side, in 1945 Charles Merriam and Maynard Krueger at the University of Chicago argued optimistically with Hayek that "the political process" would overcome socialism's flaws. It's how we thought in that bright dawn before Vietnam, urban renewal, the war on drugs, and Clinton's demand-side health reform. Greater fools we.
A fellow Austrian shows up Hayek's isolation. Joseph Schumpeter's book of 1942, Socialism, Capitalism, Democracy, did not admire socialism, but it did not argue against its rise. The book became fashionable with statists like Merriam and Krueger. Schumpeter was a rhetorical fatalist. Hayek notes that, like many modernists, "Schumpeter had, in the last resort, really no belief in the power of argument. He took it for granted that the state of affairs forces people to think in a particular manner….Schumpeter's attitude was one of complete despair and disillusionment over the power of reason."
Schumpeter had written in 1942, "The case for capitalism…could never be made simple. People at large would have to be possessed of an insight and a power of analysis which are altogether beyond them. Why, practically every nonsense that has ever been said about capitalism has been championed by a professional economist." So he surrendered to fate—unlike Hayek, who argued and argued and argued with the socialists about economic histories and economic futures.
Like an early 19th-century liberal, Hayek believed throughout in the power of argument—as does, say, Milton Friedman. The pessimists about argument like Schumpeter and George Stigler look clever at the time, men of the world not fooled by mere words, but in the long run they join the greater fools. In A History of Economic Analysis, on which he was working when he died, Schumpeter put the clever, unargued case this way: "We may, indeed, prefer the world of modern dictatorial socialism to the world of Adam Smith, or vice versa, but any such preference comes within the same category of subjective evaluation as does, to plagiarize Sombart, a man's preference for blondes over brunettes." Finely put; so much cleverer than Hayek's leaden prose (Stigler was a better writer than Friedman, too). But in the long run it is fool's talk. Words matter.
Hayek's optimism did not extend to the scientific method. Unlike Friedman, he did not swallow the modernism of "prediction" as the master virtue in science—perhaps because of his training in biology, which is a pattern-finding discipline. Hayek's ideas were impossibility theorems. He said it is impossible to predict more than pattern in social life. It is impossible to plan production for an entire country. It is impossible to be a socialist and remain a democrat.
"This is, incidentally," he remarked, "a reason why my views have become unpopular." People want predictions—of the coming Great Depression of 1990 (I bought Ravi Batra's book the other day for $5.99) or the coming greenhouse catastrophe of 2010—not denials that prediction and control are possible. Friedman and many other economists this century have fallen under the modernist spell, articulated, for example, by Wesley Clair Mitchell in 1924: "In economics as in other sciences we desire knowledge mainly as an instrument of control. Control means the alluring possibility of shaping the evolution of economic life to fit the developing purposes of the race."
More than any economist, Hayek was out of step with such erotic fascism of prediction and control. In another way that left him out of step, Hayek disagreed with his predecessor as doyen of the Austrian School, Ludwig von Mises. Hayek gradually realized that he had more in common with the Scottish enlightenment than with the French, and that Jeremy Bentham was the French element in British thought. "I believe I can now…explain why…[the] masterly critique by Mises of socialism has not really been effective. Because Mises remained in the end himself a rationalist-utilitarian, and with a rationalist-utilitarianism, the rejection of socialism is irreconcilable….If we remain strictly rationalists, utilitarians, that implies we can arrange everything according to our pleasure….In one place he says we can't do it, another place he argues, being rational people, we must try to do it."
It's what's wrong with much of modern economic thought, this utilitarian rationalism—in Stigler's political economy as against Friedman's, or in Richard Posner's law and economy as against Ronald Coase's. The philosophers and literary people call it the "aporia [contradiction, indecision] of the Enlightenment project," which is to say the contradiction, most plain in France, between freedom and rationality. Hayek was two centuries behind the times, a resident of Edinburgh rather than Paris, an exponent of bourgeois virtue rather than of a new aristocracy of experts. By the end of the 20th century, though, he is old-fashioned enough to be postmodern. You read it here: Hayek has more in common with Jacques Derrida than with Bentham and Comte and Russell.
Contributing Editor Donald N. McCloskey teaches economics and history at the University of Iowa. His latest book is Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge).
The post The Persuasive Life appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>John Carey's readable book, which was successful in Britain and is now issued over here, assaults what is known in English departments as "modernism." Modernism was best summarized by the poet Philip Larkin, who was also a jazz critic, as the "Three Ps": [Ezra] Pound, Picasso, and [Charlie "Bird"] Parker, the three artists who in Larkin's view destroyed modern art. Modernism's main shtick was and is obscurity. When T.S. Eliot versified in The Waste Land about the vulgar suburbanites coming to work—"Unreal City,/Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many"—he required two footnote references, one to Baudelaire and the other to the Inferno, III, 55-57.
In 1924 Virginia Woolf, who along with Eliot was one of the chief modernist baddies, declared: "On or about December 1910 human character changed." You bet. What did change on or about December 1910, give or take a decade, all over Europe, was the artistic theory of the avant garde. It was a burst of artistic -isms, from Italian futurism, French cubism, and German architecture to American imagism in poetry and Russian formalism in literary theory.
Carey's wider point, which brings the book out of the Department of English, is that the avant garde was in this way fleeing its bourgeois origins and keeping clear of the proletariat masses. It was making itself, at any rate in its imaginings, into a new aristocracy. "The intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy. But they could prevent them from reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand." The obscurity of modernism kept literature (and music and painting) in the hands of cultured chaps. It kept it out of the hands of clerks, suburbanites, Eastern European immigrants, and the other nasty creatures growing in such numbers.
Numbers. The specter that haunted Europe and America circa 1910 was Malthusian numbers of vulgar clerks and dirty proles and foreigners, as in Eliot: "And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,/Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp." Says Carey: "Rewriting or reinventing the mass was an enterprise in which early twentieth-century intellectuals invested immense imaginative effort." The masses were Them; we were the New Aristocracy, who could read Ezra Pound and listen to 12-tone music.
It was a European obsession, tied up in European fears of a Malthusian crisis, which was adopted after a lag by American writers such as H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis. Baudelaire and Nietzsche were the pioneers, leading their followers to an aristocratic contempt for democracy, capitalism, bourgeois values, and the United States of America. Baudelaire had spoken for example of "a knave in Benjamin Franklin's style, the rising bourgeoisie come to replace the faltering aristocracy." A nostalgia for aristocracy bubbled up in the century after 1848, a treason against the liberal polity. Modernism, says Carey, is a literary theory of fascism. One finds it still among certain literary intellectuals, many of whom think of themselves as politically progressive.
Carey's hero is Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), who wrote novels that clerks could read. Bennett was aware he stood apart: "Bennett's whole quarrel with intellectual contempt for the masses is that it is a kind of deadness,…a dull, unsharpened impercipience shut off from the intricacy and fecundity of each human life." Bennett, like Dickens or the Brontë sisters, "did not see why what the masses liked should automatically be accounted trash." He wrote in 1901 that "everyone is an artist, more or less," in their lives and perceptions.
The modernist baddies are Nietzsche (Great Satan to all baddies) and his English-writing progeny Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Russell, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene. The tiny band of bourgeois goodies down to the present includes Bennett, G.K. Chesterton, Conan Doyle, George Orwell, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes.
The clerks around 1910 read Shaw and H.G. Wells, too, though Shaw and Wells, lucid in their writings and nothing like modernists in literary theory, preached an apocalypse in which supermen would run the show. Wells in particular, who figures as both a goodie and a baddie in Carey's book, grew pessimistic in a Malthusian way. The sheer bulk of the masses would overrun the earth, he lamented, spoiling the trout streams. (The contribution of Malthus to the social experiments of our century—eugenics, Lebensraum, extermination camps, urban renewal, and zero population growth—needs to be looked into.)
"All those damn little clerks," says a character in a Wells novel of 1901, with "no proud dreams and no proud lusts." The "swarms of black, brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people…have to go." George Bernard Shaw wrote the same way in 1910: "Extermination must be put on scientific basis." And D.H. Lawrence, who in Aaron's Rod (1922) advocated "a proper and healthy and energetic slavery," in 1908 had written presciently, "If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly . Then I'd go into the back streets and bring them all in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed."
It was not just literary men who talked this way, of course. They got their talk from scientists—and not, as is sometimes claimed by philosophers of science, from mere "pseudo-scientists," either. Malthus was a great scientist, if gravely mistaken. The social Darwinists were nobody's fools. In 1900 the great Karl Pearson, who invented modern statistics, wrote in his neopositivist bible The Grammar of Science: "What we need is a check to the fecundity of inferior stocks. It is a false view of human solidarity, which regrets that a capable and stalwart race of white men should advocate replacing a dark-skinned tribe." In 1925 he advocated in a scientific paper stopping Jewish immigration to Britain.
Carey piles up the evidence for his proposition that literary modernism and fascism are more than merely chronologically linked. George Moore, a leading figure in the Irish renaissance, wrote in 1888, "Injustice we worship….What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under Pharaoh's lash or Egypt's sun? It was well that they died that I might have the pyramids to look upon. I would give many lives to save one sonnet by Baudelaire."
The "proud dreams and proud lusts" of an aristocratic character, said to be so foreign to the masses of clerks, had their chief political expression in World War I. (The clerks in fact volunteered in great numbers, in the "Pals" battalions, and fought with aristocratic elan.) Thus the writer H.H. Munro ("Saki") wrote in 1914, "I have always looked forward to the romance of a European war," and two years later got his wish fulfilled personally by a German shell. Clive Bell, an art critic and friend to Woolf and to John Maynard Keynes, had this to say in 1928 about political theory: "To discredit a civilization it is not enough to show that it is based on slavery and injustice; you must show that liberty and justice would produce something better." Carey has compiled hundreds of such remarks.
His argument works. The modernist writers he attacks are The Canon in the study of literature. He is arguing, to use a form of words he would dislike, for widening the canon, bringing back to the center the writers who supported bourgeois life and democratic institutions. Casey even uncovers an anti-feminist line in modernism, the claim that women are more earthy than men and are therefore ethical idiots—this in sharp contrast to the Victorian notion that women embody ethical standards. Children come off badly, too: "Literary intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century tended to opt for childlessness or child neglect." One puts down the book wondering how one could have admired for so long the wannabe aristocrats like Eliot or Lawrence, capable of such evil words.
Unhappily, Carey ruins his argument with a "Postscript," a mere seven pages that lead one to rethink whether he knows what he is talking about. Astonishingly, after all his exposure of "intellectual phobias about the masses" arising from a Malthusian aversion to population growth, the Postscript declares Carey himself to be a thoroughgoing Malthusian. It is hard, I suppose, to escape all the prejudices of the Sunday supplements, and we should be thankful that Carey has escaped so many of them.
Amazingly, he quotes with approval from Mein Kampf: "The day will certainly come when the whole of mankind will be forced to check the augmentation of the human species. Nobody can doubt that this world will one day be the scene of dreadful struggles for existence." In a sentence that could have come equally from Mein Kampf or the newsletter of the Sierra Club, Carey writes: "The remedies of the twenty-first century…will entail the recognition that, given the state of the planet, humans, or some humans, must now be categorized as vermin." My Lord. As Carey himself says of the crypto-fascist director of the Third Programme of the BBC, Rayner Heppenstall, this detestation of humanity "is perhaps best regarded as insane."
One should adjust for the sanity of the source, therefore, when hearing a page later in the Postscript that Carey also detests literary theory, which he collapses, as do the deep literary thinkers at The New York Times, into that most terrifying of words, "deconstruction." (What do you suppose the conservative judge and writer Richard Posner titled the section of Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relationship [1988] when he wanted to frighten his lawyer readers into rejecting all interpretation of law or literature? "Deconstruction and Other Schools of Criticism." It's enough these days to call someone a "deconstructionist" to arouse a McCarthyite fury.)
True, some literary theorists are anti-bourgeois, anti-meaning, anti-capitalist, like their heroes and heroines the literary modernists. Shame on them. We should ask them all to take a course in economics and in modern economic history. The literary critics should learn that modern economic growth can easily handle much greater human numbers, that natural resources have become a trivial constraint on production, and that the real welfare of the workers has increased since the 18th century by a factor of 12. But the hysteria against deconstruction has, as hysterias tend to do, blotted out distinctions. It is surprising that Carey, who is Merton Professor of English at Oxford, should descend to such crudities—although not perhaps in view of the Canon Wars that have so embittered English departments in Britain. Wars do that.
I wish Carey had not written the "Postscript." I would prefer to think of him as a literary man who knows enough about economics to know that Malthus was wrong and enough about literary theory to know that critics do much good work with its aid. But on his own theory of literary interpretation I cannot. If D.H. Lawrence's epistolary insanities about the will to power are to color our readings, so must Carey's postscriptive insanities about the future of the race and the wickedness of Jacques Derrida. It's a pity, because otherwise he has written a most illuminating book.
Contributing Editor Donald N. McCloskey teaches economics and history at the University of Iowa. His latest book is Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge).
The post The Unquashed Masses appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the 19th century, liberals worked to limit the role of government in economic matters, under the banner of free trade, laissez-faire, and the rights of property and contract. But around the turn of the century, in England and America, liberalism changed its course. As against the classical liberals, modem liberals wanted to expand government's power to regulate private economic activity and transfer wealth among its citizens.
Liberalism as a doctrine may be out of favor, but we still live in a liberal regime, with all the programs that liberals argued and lobbied for successfully: regulation of the economy as a whole through fiscal and monetary policy; regulation of individual sectors through regulatory agencies; welfare programs for the poor; and "social insurance" programs—unemployment benefits, Medicare, Social Security—for the entire population. Even conservative politicians now take these programs for granted.
It is therefore useful to know the arguments, the political philosophy, that made modem liberalism so successful. The best guide to this philosophy is L.T. Hobhouse's little book Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 1964). During his career, Hobhouse taught at Oxford and the University of London, was a journalist at the Manchester Guardian and other papers, and lectured widely in England and America. Liberalism is his attempt to justify the growth of the state by appealing to the individualist ideals of classical liberalism. Though the book was first published in 1911, it might have been written yesterday by the editorialists of The New York Times, if they took the time (and had the ability) to formulate the principles behind their positions.
Hobhouse thought that the ultimate good is the self-realization of the individual: "the development of will, of personality, of self control, or whatever we please to call that central harmonizing power which makes us capable of directing our own lives." Self-realization is the product of the individual's own voluntary initiative and choice; it cannot be compelled. But he claimed that the individual is not fully autonomous. His nature is shaped by society, and his exercise of choice depends on certain conditions that society must provide, including the provision of goods like education as well as the exercise of coercion by the state to regulate economic production and exchange.
Liberalism discusses the standard programs liberals sought, the standard rationales for them, and—most importantly—the redefinitions of classical-liberal concepts (freedom, rights, and equality, among others) that made the rationales seem plausible. The writings of later liberals, from John Dewey to John Rawls, contain little that one cannot find in Hobhouse, usually stated more clearly and economically.
As a counterpart to Liberalism, I would recommend the writings of Ayn Rand, especially her essay "What is Capitalism?" in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Point for point—on human nature, on coercion and rights, on wealth and equality—Rand engages the issues on the same philosophical level as Hobhouse. Because she defends laissez-faire capitalism on moral grounds, she comes to grip with Hobhouse's arguments in a much fuller way than a purely economic critique could do.
David Kelley is executive director of the Institute for Objectivist Studies.
Published in early 1949, George Orwell's 1984 is the most important piece of political satire of our times. To this day, Orwell's one truly great book impels us to launch giant antitrust suits against companies like AT&T and IBM. Big Brother. The Thought Police. Newspeak. Doublethink. These are all Orwell's words, Orwell's ideas. In fact Orwell has added his own name to the English language: OrweIlian—the word is filled with chilling power.
The future that Orwell describes in 1984 is a future of an evil machine controlled by an evil ministry. Orwell calls the machine "the telescreen"—a sort of two-way television set. Telescreens are bolted to every wall, they hang on every street comer, and in every living room, even in the toilets. There is no way to shut them off. The telescreen connects to a huge Ministry that towers over central London. The machine is evil because it serves as the eye and ear of the Ministry. And the Ministry is powerful because it is master of the machine. Indeed, Big Brother, the omniscient, omnipotent leader of the state, has never been seen in the flesh. He is nothing more than a face and a voice on the telescreen. And every minute of the day and night, Big Brother is watching…you.
Technology has taught us otherwise. If you want to transmit large amounts of information, to and from large numbers of people, efficiently, flexibly, and reliably, you must use many switches, many points of interconnection. Unless you disperse the power, the system just won't perform. Thus, the centralized mainframe computer is being broken apart and spread out into hundreds of desktop machines. The large, central telephone exchange is being replaced by distributed switches with multiple levels of interconnection among them. We are building networks of networks—one for conventional telephone, several for cellular telephone, several for data transport, several for video transport, all interlinked and interconnected like the ribs and spines of a geodesic dome.
In a world of really advanced communication—the world now unfolding before us—people will be able to form communities, collaborations, alliances, almost at will, over any distance, from San Francisco to Singapore. The telescreen gives a man eyes and ears that can see and hear at any distance, and a tongue that can speak to anyone on the planet. The telescreen frees a man's senses, and his voice, and thus frees his intellect and his conscious mind. The telescreen gives man the power to hear, see, and speak, to be heard and seen, in the company of his own choosing, wherever it may be found. With the telescreen, men can create new cities whenever they need them, in the capacious light beams of the network and the airwaves of the stratosphere. For the first time in history, it is becoming possible to have brotherhood without Big Brother.
Orwell imagined the world of Stalin filled with Apple computers and concluded that it would be more horrible than any world ever seen before. Orwell was wrong. As Ithiel de Sola Pool would explain in his landmark 1983 book by that title, telescreens are, in fact, Technologies of Freedom.
Peter W. Huber is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist at Forbes.
My candidate for one of the most wrongheaded books of the last 50 years is the 1982 book by Ira Magaziner and Robert Reich, Minding America's Businesses. I chose this book not because the authors are evil or the book is awful but because the book promotes the profoundly pernicious view that the government can and should have a "rational" industrial policy to guide the allocation of labor and capital. Moreover, the authors are now in positions of substantial responsibility, Magaziner as the major architect of the Clinton health plan and Reich as secretary of labor, so there is reason for concern that they may have maintained this perspective.
As I mentioned, this book is wrongheaded but not awful. The authors were careful about the facts. The analysis was plausible to most people other than economists; the authors, for example, do not understand comparative advantage or the causes of inflation, but neither do most people. And the book provides a useful summary of our government's messy de facto industrial policy.
The conceptual case for industrial policy is that the returns to some investments are higher than the returns to the investor. The primary weakness of this case is that the government does not have either the information or the incentive to support these investments. The information necessary to identify a promising technology, product, or firm is decentralized and often contrary to the conventional wisdom. The characteristic incentives of government are to support old technologies, failing firms, and technological fads. Magaziner and Reich have a perception that is either naive or arrogant—that appointing the right people to high office is sufficient for a rational industrial policy. The Clinton administration promises to be an interesting if costly test of this perspective.
The most effective early responses to this book were an article by Charles Schultze in the Fall 1983 Brookings Review and Chapter 3 of the 1984 Economic Report to the President. More interesting, perhaps, the 1990 book by Robert Reich, The Work of Nations, makes the case that government's primary focus should be on improving the skills of the labor force, not on the allocation of investment.
One's ability to identify great heroes and villains is much enhanced by the telescope of time. My pantheon of heroes probably includes many of the same men and women that most REASON readers honor. And our lists of great villains probably also share such names as Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Proximity, in contrast, clouds the analytic senses. Greatness, for either good or ill, is difficult to discern among people one has met or seen on television. My tentative judgment is that Magaziner and Reich have done only little harm as authors but that they have the potential for great mischief as government officials.
William A. Niskanen is chairman of the Cato Institute.
For a while during the late 1960s and early '70s, it was a rhetorical fashion to say, "Any nation that can land a man on the moon can [fill in the blank]." My own contribution to this cliche was, "Any nation that can land a man on the moon can abolish the income tax." But mostly this nostrum was deployed by Sens. Humphrey and McGovern or the editorial writers of The New York Times in relation to poverty or some other intractable social problem.
Because Marxist-inspired class warfare has never resonated very well in American politics (as President Clinton found out to his surprise in the tax bill fight), establishing and enlarging the redistributionist state required a more nuanced justification rooted in the nation's middle-class "can-do" spirit, which was best exemplified in the moon-landing crusade. The breakthrough book that provided this rationale was Michael Harrington's The Other America, published in 1963. Together with J.K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society, Harrington's book supplied the intellectual basis for the Great Society's vast expansion of the welfare state beyond its previous New Deal borders. President Kennedy read The Other America shortly before his death and is said to have been moved by it to order his New Frontiersmen to begin drawing up policy blueprints based on the book.
Harrington contended that the number of Americans living in poverty was much larger than the usual statistics showed. But the most important part of his argument was a new conception of the nature of poverty. Harrington attempted to debunk the common view that poverty was chiefly the result of defects in character and initiative among poor people, arguing instead that the poor were victims, trapped in a culture that was structurally sealed off from economic progress and expanding prosperity. A rising tide wouldn't lift boats with holes in their hulls.
Appealing to the American can-do spirit, Harrington argued that an institutional attack on poverty could help produce the moral regeneration necessary to end poverty. "There is only one institution in the society capable of acting to end poverty," Harrington concluded. "That is the Federal Government." The War on Poverty was declared.
The obvious antidote book is Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (though one should not overlook the early challenge to the poverty warriors from Edward Banfield's 1969 book, The Unheavenly City). Murray copiously documents the perverse results of this misbegotten crusade so effectively that today's poverty warriors either accept or must take account of his arguments and evidence. For example, Mickey Kaus's recent tract, The End of Equality, which rehearses many of Harrington's old themes about the structural nature of poverty, contains several discussions of Murray but not a single reference to Harrington. And central to Kaus's book is the admission that big-spending "money liberalism" won't work.
The War on Poverty is destined to continue for a long while yet, but thanks to Murray and the growing recognition that social problems aren't engineering tasks to be tackled like moon landings, we can hope that perhaps it won't end up being a fruitless Hundred Years' War.
Contributing Editor Steven Hayward is research and editorial director for the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco.
In 1942 Joseph Schumpeter, the outstanding Austrian economist, published Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, a collection of loosely connected essays. The book is justifiably considered a classic. His analysis of political democracy in terms of competition for political leadership was profound, and it influenced my approach and that of many others to this important subject. The book also contains many other insights.
But two major themes not only have turned out to be wrong but have had a pernicious influence on subsequent discussions of capitalism. The more important is Schumpeter's claim that capitalism was doomed—not by its failures, as in Marxian analysis, but by its successes. For according to Schumpeter, capitalism alienated intellectuals, who were unhappy because they are not important players in a decentralized free-market system. Moreover, intellectuals do not like the profit motive that drives this system. But Schumpeter greatly exaggerated the long-run influence of intellectuals on public policy.
Schumpeter joined his pessimism about the future of capitalism with unwarranted optimism about the economic potential of socialist and communist economic systems. That a great economist believed socialism might work successfully gave much reassurance to the many intellectuals attracted to socialism during the middle of this century.
He apparently believed that weak individual incentives under socialism would be compensated for by stronger group incentives: "The socialist order presumably will command that moral allegiance which is being increasingly refused to capitalism"; "there might be more self-discipline and more group discipline in socialist society, hence less need for authoritarian discipline than there is in a society of fettered capitalism"; "the vested interest in social unrest may be expected to disappear in part"; and "socialism might be the only means of restoring social discipline" (italics in original). He even claimed that "intellectuals as a group will no longer be hostile" and that trade unions will develop "into exponents of the social interest and into tools of discipline and performance, acquiring an attitude so completely different from that which is associated with trade unions in capitalist countries." These comments on socialism now seem quaint and naive, although, in Schumpeter's defense, he wrote before most of the evidence about socialism and communism was readily available.
Fortunately, Schumpeter's forecast of capitalism's future was dead wrong. Capitalism has especially thrived in the 1980s and '90s because public opinion has been far more impressed by the success of the Asian Tigers and other free-market economies, and the economic failure of socialist and communist countries, than by theories about capitalism's performance, including Schumpeter's sophisticated form of negativism.
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy was both a great book and a dangerous one. The danger came from the support his subtle but flawed analysis of the future of capitalism and socialism gave to intellectuals who did not need further reasons to dislike a decentralized, free-market, profit-oriented system.
Gary S. Becker, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, is University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago.
No book since The Feminine Mystique has had a greater impact on contemporary American feminism than Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Harvard University Press, 1982). A Harvard psychology professor, Gilligan challenges the "masculine bias" of theories that stress the development of an autonomous self as a prerequisite to mature intimacy.
Psychologists such as Erik Erickson, Gilligan complains, acknowledged that psychological development was different for the young woman (who must "attract the man…by whose status she will be defined" and for whom, therefore, self is defined through relationships) yet canonized the "male" process of individuation as the norm, disregarding values rooted in female experience. Through interviews with male and female children and young adults, she seeks to demonstrate that whereas men base their moral judgments on individual rights and abstract principles of right and wrong, women's moral understanding is "contextual," emphasizing human needs, empathy, and interdependence.
Many feminists were disturbed by Gilligan's apparent validation of sex stereotypes and traditional feminine virtues, yet she was championed by such prominent female commentators as Ellen Goodman, and Ms. put her on the cover as Woman of the Year in January 1984. Although, in contrast to legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, Gilligan sees women as moral agents rather than passive victims of patriarchy, her brand of feminism opens the way to fresh charges of male oppression: Institutions are sexist not only if they exclude women but if they include them on "male" terms (expecting them to be as competitive and individualistic as men) and fail to incorporate "female" values. In the past decade, Gilligan's influence has surfaced in educational theories that call for more cooperative, intuitive learning styles attuned to "women's ways of knowing," in claims of women's distinct "caring" political agenda (more social programs), and in feminist jurisprudence, which derides individual rights and objective rules as male fixations.
To a degree, Gilligan corrects the oversights of earlier feminists who seemed to think that liberated women would just assume male roles and life would go on as if the traditionally female nurturing tasks weren't even needed. Yet she is especially irked by the view (espoused by some of the male psychologists she takes on) that "female" moral judgments are appropriate primarily in the personal sphere. While In a Different Voice steers clear of explicit politics, Gilligan's assertion that "male" ethics are based on the obligation not to hurt others and "female" ethics on the obligation to help others ("a morality of rights and non-interference may appear frightening to women in its potential justification of indifference and unconcern") engenders a nagging suspicion that "female values" may be a code word for socialism.
Gilligan's methods and conclusions have been challenged by a number of social scientists and writers, including feminists Susan Faludi and Katha Pollitt. The most thoughtful critiques can be found in A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight From Equality, by Wendy Kaminer (Addison-Wesley, 1990), which shows the dangers of constructing legal norms based on the presumption that women are more nurturing and "connected" than men, and The Mismeasure of Woman, by Carol Tavris (Simon & Schuster, 1992). Tavris argues that Gilligan tends to absolutize often small statistical differences between the sexes, minimizing the female desire for autonomy and the male desire for intimacy.
Indeed, reading In a Different Voice, one often feels that Gilligan is arbitrarily interpreting the subjects' statements to fit her theory of sex differences. Responding to the hypothetical dilemma of Heinz, whose dying wife needs a drug that he can't afford and for which the druggist won't reduce the price, a male subject says Heinz is justified in stealing the drug because "human life is worth more than money," while a female subject says he should steal the drug because his wife "is another human being who needs help." In Gilligan's view, the male response appeals to an abstract hierarchy of priorities and the female response to an actual person's needs; yet aren't both really saying the same thing?
Recent studies have offered at best slim support for Gilligan's findings, showing that male and female college students, at least, are much more alike than they are different in balancing intimacy and autonomy. In politics, Bill Clinton is far closer to Gilligan's "female" model than is Margaret Thatcher. Generally, Tavris's conclusion that both men and women sometimes act in "feminine" ways (when caring for a sick relative) and sometimes in "masculine" ways (when competing for a promotion) seems to be solidly grounded in common sense. Yet, at least in academic feminism, the Gilligan model—often framed in terms of much more absolute gender division that Gilligan herself proposed—reigns supreme.
In the 1950s, women with overly individualistic personal values were often stigmatized as masculine. In the '90s, women with overly individualistic political values are often stigmatized as "male-identified." Have we really come a long way?
Contributing Editor Cathy Young is a writer in Middletown, New Jersey.
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) became the inspiration for the environmental movement. Its elegant prose expressed passionate outrage at the ravaging of beautiful, unspoiled nature by man. Its frightening message was that we are all being injured by deadly poisons (DDT and other pesticides) put out by a callous chemical industry. This message was snapped up by intellectuals, and the book sold over a million copies. Many organizations have sprung up to spread Carson's message.
Rachel Carson set the style for environmentalism. Exaggeration and omission of pertinent contradictory evidence are acceptable for the holy cause.
The book starts with a romanticized vision of a world in harmony, followed by a horror story of an "evil spell that settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died….Children…would be stricken and die within a few hours….The few birds seen anywhere were moribund…and could not fly…a white granular powder…had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and the streams."
The powder was DDT, which actually saved tens of millions of lives, more than any substance in history, with the possible exception of antibiotics. The benefits of DDT were omitted from the book. Silent Spring said the American robin was "on the verge of extinction," yet Roger Tory Peterson (the dean of American ornithologists) said it was the most numerous bird on the continent. DDT was highly toxic to mosquitoes but of very low toxicity to honey bees and higher animals. In the Third World, DDT saved the lives of millions of children who otherwise would have been exposed to malaria and other insect-borne diseases.
DDT displaced the more toxic and persistent lead arsenate. DDT was the first of a series of synthetic agricultural chemicals that have advanced public health by increasing the supply and reducing the price of fruits and vegetables. People who eat few fruits and vegetables, compared to those who eat about four or five portions a day, have about double the cancer rate for most types of cancer and run an increased risk of heart disease and cataracts as well. Thus, pesticides lead to lower cancer rates and improved health. Life expectancy has steadily increased in our era of pesticides. Pesticide residues in food are trivial in terms of cancer causation or toxicity. There has never been any convincing evidence that DDT (or pesticide residues in food) has ever caused cancer in man or that DDT had a significant impact on the population of our eagles or other birds.
Carson's fundamental misconception was: "For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death." This is nonsense: Every chemical is dangerous if the concentration is too high. Moreover, 99.9 percent of the chemicals humans ingest are natural. For example, 99.99 percent of the pesticides humans eat are natural pesticides produced by plants to kill off predators. About half of all natural chemicals tested at high dose, including natural pesticides, cause cancer in rodents. People determined to rid the world of synthetic chemicals refuse to face these facts. Risk assessment methods build in huge safety factors for synthetic chemicals, while natural chemicals are ignored. Current policy diverts enormous resources from important to unimportant risks.
Bruce N. Ames is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and Thomas Jukes is a professor of biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ralph Nader's Unsafe At Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile, a blistering attack on the Chevrolet Corvair and the whole American auto industry, was the first assault of the consumerist movement. Published in 1965, this book had an immediate impact on the American political scene. General Motors was immediately placed in the spotlight, and within a year Congress enacted the Motor Vehicle Safety Act. Spurred on by his victory, Nader redoubled his assaults against America's producers and innovators, pushing a spate of regulatory initiatives. Congress, in turn, passed the Wholesome Meat Act, the Comprehensive Occupational Health and Safety Act, the National Gas Pipeline Act, the Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act, and more. For the next three decades, American automobiles, as well as other consumer products, would increasingly be designed by politicians rather than corporate engineers.
The significance of Nader's book goes beyond its direct political ramifications. Nader's work profoundly changed the way risk and safety were viewed in the American polity. Regulators and consumer activists were immediately cast as noble crusaders who sought a safe, clean, healthy world—thwarted by those willing to place a price tag on a human life, to assign a dollar value to a clean environment. Health, safety, and environmental risks, Americans came to believe, could only be addressed by pervasive political controls. Laws mandating "safety" at any cost have accounted for much of the growth in government for the last three decades.
Aaron Wildavsky in Searching for Safety sought to reframe this debate—to reexamine the argument that the choice was one of safety vs. profits. A safer world, he noted, often reflects the adoption of "unsafe" products that are safer than the products they displace. Fire was—and remains—a highly risky technology, but a fireless world faces even greater risks. Society must create institutions that balance risks against risks—the risks of allowing a certain product or technology to be used versus the risks of banning that product.
Wildavsky pointed out that societies cannot anticipate all the possible risks that an uncertain world entails, and rather should strive to increase wealth and knowledge so as to become more resilient, more able to overcome dangers of whatever sort. Wealthier societies, Wildavsky also noted, are safer (and healthier and cleaner) societies. Political regulators aren't engaged in easy morality plays but rather complex risk-balancing tasks in which the risks reduced by their regulations must be contrasted with the direct and wealth-reduction risks stemming from their actions. This is a fact that Nader and his followers have yet to learn.
Unlike Nader's book, Wildavsky's writings have not yet led to massive changes in the political landscape, but his work provides the intellectual basis for current risk reform efforts. Sadly, Aaron died earlier this year at the age of 63. His Searching for Safety is one of the most important, and tragically under-read, books of the post-war period.
Fred L. Smith Jr. is the founder and president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
My candidate is The Crimes of Punishment, by Karl Menninger (Viking, 1968). The gist of Menninger's message is illustrated by the following excerpt: "The word justice irritates scientists. No surgeon expects to be asked if an operation for cancer is just or not….Behavioral scientists regard it as equally absurd to invoke the question of justice in deciding what to do with a woman who cannot resist her propensity to shoplift, or with a man who cannot repress an impulse to assault somebody." Heaping praise on the book, the reviewer for The New York Times wrote: "As Dr. Menninger proves so searingly, criminals are surely ill, not evil." The book made the Times bestseller list.
If crime is sickness and punishment is crime, then punishment too is a sickness. The self-contradictory character of Menninger's thesis did not diminish its appeal to the liberal-psychiatric mind set, determined to replace penal sanctions with involuntary psychiatric "treatments." Indifference to fundamental rights to liberty and property, rejection of personal responsibility, and a pervasive erosion of justice and order are just some of the obvious consequences of this wrongheaded view.
Actually, in The Crime of Punishment Menninger systematically articulated a set of ideas and policies that had long been integral to psychiatric doctrine, namely the proposition that crime is a mental illness that should be controlled by means of coercive psychiatric interventions ("hospitalization" and "treatment"), rather than penal sanctions. Menninger himself had advanced these ideas in his earlier writings.
I hope it does not violate the canons of modesty appropriate for this occasion to suggest that the best "antidotes" against The Crime of Punishment are my own writings, in which I defend the case for treating so-called mental patients as moral agents, entitled to liberty if they obey the law and deserving of punishment if they violate it. The books in which I present this view most fully are Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry (1963), Ideology and Insanity (1970), and Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences (1987).
Contributing Editor Thomas Szasz is professor of psychiatry emeritus at the SUNY Health Science Center in Syracuse.
Like most graduate students in economics during the last 40 years, I spent many painful hours plowing through Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (Harvard University Press, 1947). From that sacred text we novices learned how to prove many specific theorems. Far more important, we learned how neoclassical economics—"modem economic science"—was supposed to be done.
We built mathematically specified "models," sets of equations describing the relations of selected economic variables. Model in hand, we proved that it had a stable equilibrium, then characterized the relations of the variables in that blessed state. Altering the "data" or the "parameters" of the model, we ascertained how a new equilibrium differed from an initial one. In its advanced form this protocol rendered most older economists instantly obsolete, but for young math wizards like Samuelson it opened up the prospect of "new realms of aesthetic delight." Eventually most economists entered those realms. Playing increasingly clever mathematical tricks with the models constituted "scientific progress."
Samuelson fashioned his models, which set the standard, after 19th-century physics. Functions were assumed to be smooth and continuous. Economics was reduced to various types of the same calculus problem: finding a constrained extremum. The economist's job was to state the objective function and the constraints, then grind out the solutions. This required considerable mathematical ability and stomach for tedium but little imagination and no familiarity with economic reality.
By the 1960s, if not earlier, academic economists who quarreled with this way of doing the job were, as Roy Weintraub put it, "regarded by mainstream neoclassical economists as defenders of lost causes or as kooks, misguided critics, and anti-scientific oddballs." By aping 19th-century physicists, neoclassical economists convinced themselves and others that they were doing science, but the effort was basically misguided, not so much scientific as, in F. A. Hayek's term, "scientistic." Human beings, purposeful and creative, are not like atoms; nor is a market analogous to a physical or chemical system. In the view of Hayek and his teacher Ludwig von Mises, neoclassical economics is, in critical respects, pseudo-science.
James Buchanan's What Should Economists Do? (Liberty Press, 1979) presents a telling critique of mainstream economics. "Its flaw lies in its conversion of individual choice behavior from a social-institutional context to a physical-computational one," he writes. Further, the obsession with equilibrium gives rise to "the most sophisticated fallacy in economic theory, the notion that because certain relationships hold in equilibrium the forced interferences designed to implement these relationships will, in fact, be desirable." Mainstream economists cannot move the earth with a mathematical lever, because they have no place to stand—no "given" information about property rights, consumer preferences, resource availabilities, and technical possibilities. What neoclassical economics takes as given is, in reality, revealed only by competitive processes. "Most modern economists," Buchanan aptly concludes, "are simply doing what other economists are doing while living off a form of dole that will simply not stand critical scrutiny."
Robert Higgs is a visiting professor of economics at Seattle University.
The brothers Polanyi, Karl (1886-1964) and Michael (1891-1976), raised in the sunset of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, cover the range of reasonable responses to the 20th century. One response is to think of the market as the problem and the government—reinvented, of course—as the solution. Thus Karl's book published in 1944 about the rise and decline of modem capitalism, The Great Transformation.
People love it. Though hardly beach reading, it's well written, a piece of higher journalism. The theme is that the market was a recent invention, a mere novelty that has spoiled life. "The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system….Leaving the fate of soil and people to the market would be tantamount to annihilating them." That theme is an old one, of course, echoed by greens and reds down the decades since 1848. But Polanyi put it well, giving three generations of English-speaking intellectuals a story to warrant the welfare state.
In other words, you have to give the book its intellectual due. Most fields of history have gone through a (Karl) Polanyi Period, in which the master's notion that the market is new and nasty has been applied afresh. Someone in African history or Mesopotamian history or American colonial history or (I am not making this up) Viking history runs across Polanyi's book, from which he discovers that he does not have to learn economics to sneer at markets. Eventually a reaction sets in, when the historians realize that the market is forever. The cycle takes about 20 years. New fields keep falling into it, 50 years on.
The book has never gone out of print. Professors still assign it. Intellectuals who want to learn about economics, but are afraid to ask, still pick it up and devour it. No book on the half century past has had more influence on social thinking.
The antidote? Any of the books by Karl's smarter brother, Michael. Michael was a famous chemist before turning to philosophy and public policy and therefore knew that proving something about the world is tough. He was not a consistent libertarian and even on occasion sounds like Congressman Kelly of Florida: "The free enterprise system is absolutely too important to be left to the voluntary action of the marketplace." But by the standard of the time, and certainly by the standard of the Polanyi family, he was a veritable Hayek.
Like his brother, he wrote well in his adopted language. Find his book Personal Knowledge (1958), an exploration of how, really, we know. Or, directly after sipping Karl's book, take a long drink from Michael's The Logic of Liberty (1951). In The Logic he argues, for example, "there exists no fundamental alternative to the system of money-making and profit-seeking" and "the social management of polycentric tasks requires a set of free institutions." Michael's response to the 20th century was to think of government as the problem and the market as the solution. Neither brother so much as mentions the other in his writings. It's no wonder. Karl was the poison and Michael the cure.
Donald N. McCloskey teaches economics and history at the University of Iowa. His latest book is Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge University Press).
John Wesley Powell's exploration of the Grand Canyon in 1869 required mental and physical heroism of Randian proportions. The one-armed Civil War veteran led expeditions down the uncharted Green and Colorado rivers, overcoming torrential rapids, near starvation, and hostile Indians. In the process, he mapped thousands of miles of unexplored territory and gained dramatic insights into the challenges confronting the Western United States, challenges that remain today. Sadly, one of the best American writers of this century, Wallace Stegner, uses Powell's exploits as the foil to showcase his radiant defense of Progressive Era policies as the way to meet these challenges.
The first half of Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (Penguin, 1954) is devoted to the gripping account of Powell's two trips through the beautiful canyon country. Stegner chronicles the action and natural grandeur to potent effect. The excitement builds as one appreciates how the explorers confront disaster and death countless times. Yet Powell, with his quiet resolution to advance scientific understanding of the West, never wavers in the face of staggering adversity.
As a result, one begins the second half of the book with great admiration for Powell and his vision of the West. Stegner carefully plays on this to draw the reader into sympathetic agreement with Powell as he turns his vast energy into forming one of our first Progressive Era bureaucracies, the U.S. Geological Survey. Powell envisioned an agency run by well-informed, scientifically trained elites who would ensure that the fragile ecology of the West would be managed to provide the greatest public good for his and future generations. The USGS served as the model for many later government agencies and the training ground for countless bureaucrats who staffed these new agencies. Powell, "both the bureaucrat and the idealist knew that private interests, whether they dealt in cattle or sheep, oil, mineral, coal, timber, water, or land itself, could not be trusted or expected to take care of the land or conserve its resources for the use of future generations. They could be trusted or expected to protect neither the monetary nor the nonmonetary values of the land."
This book should be read by anyone concerned with liberty or the American West. Stegner writes with authority and sensitivity about real problems that to this day plague the West: water allocation, political control over resources that leads to exploitation or misuse, and the myths and realities of economic existence in this arid region. Though the book was written in 1954, it offers a persuasive case for why Powell's vision should still be pursued. Stegner subtly validates the basic premises of enlightened rule by scientific experts, premises all too popular in Washington today.
This book is an excellent example of how the case for activist government can be successfully advanced using romance, history, adventure, and human interest. Until classical liberals are able to bring similar forces to bear in support of our arguments, we will lose more often than we will win. With respect to the West, a good start has been made in Free Market Environmentalism, by Terry Anderson and Don Leal, and Visions upon the Land, by Karl Hess Jr. But the ultimate refutation of Stegner is yet to be written.
William H. Mellor III is president and general counsel of the Institute for Justice in Washington, D.C.
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]]>"Bourgeois virtues"? Don't make me laugh. The bourgeoisie may be useful, even necessary. But virtuous? Since 1848 or so the intellectuals, who at first welcomed the bourgeoisie most cordially, have been sneering this way at the very idea of "virtue" in the middle class. "Man must labor, / Man must work," says a nursery rhyme for moderns, "The executive is / A dynamic jerk."
Charles Dickens, the first and most successful of the anti-bourgeois writers, loved peasants and proletarians most warmly and had a kind word even for some of the aristocracy. But he detested the merchants and mill owners. The merchant Scrooge hurls his "Bah: humbug!" at a Christian holy day, a celebration of peasant virtues. Mr. Gradgrind, teaching little children to be wage slaves, declares, "Now, what I want is, Facts." The motto, "Facts alone are wanted in life," rejects all that is noble and aristocratic and romantic in the talk of virtue.
We talk of virtue in one of two ways only, the patrician or the plebeian, the virtues of the aristocrat or of the peasant, Achilles or Jesus. The two vocabularies are heard each in its own place, in Camp or Common. The one speaks of the pagan virtues of the soldier—courage, moderation, prudence, and justice. The other speaks of the Christian virtues of the worker—faith, hope, and charity. Achilles struts the Camp in his Hephaestian armor, exercising his noble wrath. Jesus stands barefoot on the mount, preaching to the least of the Commoners.
Camp and Common, the romantic hero or the working-class saint: That's been our talk of good and bad. And yet we live now in the Town, we bourgeois, or are moving to the Town and bourgeois occupations as fast as we can manage.
The prediction that the proletariat would become the universal class has proven to be mistaken. Half of employment in rich countries is white collar, a figure that's steadily rising. Jobs for peasants, proletarians, and aristocrats are disappearing. The class structure that the intellectuals analyzed so vigorously in 1848 and have since tried to keep in place is going or is gone.
The explanation is that the production of things has become and will continue to become cheaper relative to most services. In 50 years, a maker of things on an assembly line will be as rare as a farmer. The proletariat, an urban and secular version of the rural and religious peasantry, have sent their children to Notre Dame and thence to careers in plastics. Brahmins may lament, churchmen wail, bohemians jeer. Yet the universal class into which the classes are melting is the damnable bourgeoisie.
The result will be a massively bourgeois Town. It's time for the intellectuals to stop complaining about the fact and to recognize the bourgeois virtues.
To sing only of aristocratic or peasant virtues, of courage or of solidarity, is to mourn for a world well lost. We need an 18th-century equipoise, a neoclassicism of virtues suiting our condition. We are all bourgeois now. For some decades about 80 percent of Americans have identified themselves as "middle class" (such consciousness of course may be false). The ideals of nationalism or socialism have not suited our lives (refer for empirical verification to records of the Great European Civil War 1914–1990). The ideals of the townsperson, by contrast, have suited us peacefully, and no surprise.
Bad news? A future of selfish SOBs? The country club regnant? The death of community? No, unless you swallow the talk of Western clerks and scribblers since 1848.
The growth of the market promotes virtue, not vice. Most intellectuals since 1848 have thought the opposite: that it erodes virtue. As the legal scholar James Boyd White puts the thought in his otherwise admirable Justice as Translation, bourgeois growth is "the expansion of the exchange system by the conversion of what is outside it into its terms. It is a kind of steam shovel chewing away at the natural and social world."
And yet we all take happily what the market gives—polite, accommodating, energetic, enterprising, risk-taking, trustworthy people; not bad people. In the Bulgaria of old the department stores had a policeman on every floor, not to prevent theft but to stop the customers from attacking the arrogant and incompetent staff selling goods that at once fell apart. The way a salesperson in an American store greets customers makes the point: "How can I help you?" The phrase startles foreigners. It is an instance in miniature of the bourgeois virtues. As Eric Hoffer said, "It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives….We are made kind by being kind." Thank you very kindly.
It is usual to elevate a pagan or Christian ideal and then to sound a lament that no one achieves the ideal. The numerous bourgeois virtues have been reduced to the single vice of greed. The intellectuals thunder at the middle class but offer no advice on how to be good within it. The only way to become a good bourgeois, say Flaubert and Sinclair Lewis, is to stop being one. The words have consequences. The hole in our virtue-talk leaves the bourgeoisie without reasons for ethics. Since they cannot be either knights or saints they are damned, as we are all, and say: To hell with it.
Consider the virtues of the three classes, matched to their character, aristocrat, peasant, or bourgeois (the "character" of a class will sometimes be its character in the eyes of others, sometimes in its own, sometimes in fact). Thus:
The point is to notice the third, bourgeois column, the third estate of virtue, not to elevate it above the other two. Courage is in some personal experiences and social institutions a virtue. So is humility. But when the class left out is half the population, the old dichotomy of masters and men is not doing its ethical job.
A potent source of virtue and a check on vice is the premium that a bourgeois society puts on discourse. The aristocrat gives a speech, the peasant tells a tale. But the bourgeois must in the bulk of his transactions talk to an equal. "I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following….What news on the Rialto?" It is wrong to imagine, as modern economics does, that the market is a field of silence.
Talk defines business reputation. A market economy looks forward and depends therefore on trust. The persuasive talk that establishes trust is of course necessary for doing business. This is why co-religionists or co-ethnics deal so profitably with each other, as Quakers or overseas Chinese. The economic historian Avner Greif has explored the business dealings of Mediterranean Jews in the Middle Ages, accumulating evidence for a reputational conversation: In 1055 one Abun teen Zedaka of Jerusalem, for example, "was accused (though not charged in court) of embezzling the money of a Maghribi traders, [and] merchants as far away as Sicily canceled their agency relations with him." A letter from Palermo to an Alexandrian merchant who had disappointed the writer said, "Had I listened to what people say, I never would have entered into a partnership with you." Reputational gossip, Greif notes, was cheap, "a by-product of the commercial activity [itself] and passed along with other commercial correspondence." Cheating was profitless within the community. The market does not erode communities; it makes them, and then flourishes within what it has made.
The aristocrat, by contrast, does not deign to bargain. Hector tries to, but Achilles replies: "argue me no agreements. I cannot forgive you. / As there are no trustworthy oaths between men and lions, / Nor wolves and lambs have spirit that can be brought into agreement." The Duke of Ferrara speaks of his last duchess there upon the wall looking as if she were alive, "Even had you skill / In speech—(which I have not)—make your will /Quite clear to such an one…. /—E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose /Never to stoop." The aristocrat never stoops; the peasant or proletarian stoops to harvest or to tend the machine. The bourgeois stoops daily to make his will quite clear, and to know the will and reasons of the other. The aristocrat's speech is declamation (imitated by the professoriate). The aristocrat's proofs are like commands, which is perhaps why Plato the aristocrat loved them so. They convince (vincere, to conquer). The bourgeois, by contrast, must persuade, sweetly (suadeo, from the same root as "sweet").
The bourgeoisie talks with a will. About a quarter of national income is earned from merely bourgeois and feminine persuasion: not orders or information but persuasion. One thinks immediately of advertising, but in fact advertising is a tiny part of the total. Take the detailed categories of employment and make a guess as to the percentage of the time in each category spent on persuasion. Out of the 115 million civilian employees, it seems reasonable to assign 100 percent of the time of 760,000 lawyers and judges to persuasion, and likewise all the time of public-relations specialists and actors and directors. Perhaps 75 percent of the time of 14.2 million executive, administrative, and managerial employees is spent on persuasion, and a similar share of the time of the 4.5 million teachers and the 11.2 million salespeople (excluding cashiers). Half of the effort of police, writers, and health workers, one might guess, is spent on persuasion. And so forth. The result is that 28.2 million person-years, a quarter of the labor force, persuades for a living.
The result can be checked with other measures. John Wallis and Douglass North measure 50 percent of national income as transaction costs, the costs of persuasion being part of these. Not all the half of American workers who are white collar talk for a living, but in an extended sense many do, as for that matter do many blue-collar workers, persuading each other to handle the cargo just so, and especially pink-collar workers, dealing all day with talking people.
And of the talkers a good percentage are persuaders. The secretary shepherding a document through the company bureaucracy is called on to exercise sweet talk and veiled threats. The bureaucrats and professionals who constitute most of the white-collar work force are not themselves merchants, but they do a merchant's business inside and outside their companies. Note the persuasion exercised the next time you buy a suit. Specialty clothing stores charge more than discount stores not staffed with rhetoricians. The differential pays for the persuasion: "It's you, my dear" or "The fish tie makes a statement."
The high share of persuasion provides a scene for bourgeois virtues. One must establish a relationship of trust with someone in order to persuade him. Ethos, the character that a speaker claims, is the master argument. So the world of the bourgeoisie is jammed with institutions for making relationships and declaring character, unlike that of the aristocracy or peasantry or proletariat, who get their relationships and characters ready-made by status, and who in any case need not persuade.
Hollywood producers spend hours a day "buffing," which is to say chatting with their business peers, establishing relations. On the foreign-exchange markets the opening business of the day is to trade jokes useful for making human contact with clients. Ethos is all, as much as with any sneering aristocrat—or maybe more, since claimed less confidently. In Thomas Mann's first novel, the story of his German merchant family, the head of the firm scolds his unbusinesslike brother, a harbinger of bohemianism in the family: "In a company consisting of business as well as professional men, you make the remark, for everyone to hear, that, when one really considers it, every businessman is a swindler—you, a businessman yourself, belonging to a firm that strains every nerve and muscle to preserve its perfect integrity and spotless reputation."
Bourgeois charity, again, if not the "charity," meaning spiritual love, of the King James translation of the Bible, runs contrary to the caricature of greed. More than the peasant or aristocrat, the bourgeois gives to the poor—as in the ghettos of Eastern Europe or in the small towns of America. Acts of charity follow the bourgeois norm of reciprocity. The American Gospel of Wealth—founding hospitals, colleges, and libraries wherever little fortunes were made—is a bourgeois notion, paying back what was taken in profit. Middle-class people in the 19th century habitually gave a biblical tenth of their incomes to charity. The intrusion of the state into charity killed the impulse, remaking charity into a taille imposed on grumbling peasants: I gave at the office.
One could go on. The bourgeois virtues are in for a long run and need exploration and praise. We already have Japanese bourgeois and now Korean and Taiwanese; later Pakistani in volume, and Mexican. The world is about to become one Rialto.
And yet the intelligentsia detests this splendid bourgeoisie. The detestation is not new. Anciently the poet Horace prefers his Sabine valley to troublesome riches or recommends stretching one's income by contracting one's desires, even while accepting large gifts in cash or land from Maecenas and Augustus. The disdain for money grubbing becomes a literary theme and merges smoothly with the Christian virtues.
But over the past two centuries the hostility to the money-grubbing class has become frantic. After a brief flirtation with pro-bourgeois writing in the 18th century (Daniel Defoe is the high point; Voltaire admired the English and bourgeois virtues; Jane Austen, late, admired at least the marriage market), literature sinks into a sustained sneer. The novel begins as the epic of the bourgeoisie but becomes with Balzac and Dickens an anti-epic, a Dunciad of the middle classes. German romantics and French statists and English evangelicals in the early 19th century were bourgeois by origin but did not like it, not one bit. Overwhelmingly the French men of letters who barked at the bourgeoisie were the sons of lawyers and businessmen. So too were German men of letters, such as Marx and Engels. The American progressives, advocating a secularized but nonetheless Christian ideal for public policy, were the sons and daughters of Protestant ministers, bourgeois all.
It's a puzzle. In his astonishing Bohemian Versus Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century, Cesar Grana asks, "What is it in the spiritual scene of modern society that may account for such intellectual touchiness, willfulness, and bitterness" among the intelligentsia against the bourgeoisie? His answer was what has since been called the "aporia of the Enlightenment project," namely, the conflict between freedom and rationalism in modern life. The bourgeoisie is seen by intellectuals such as Dickens, Weber, and Freud as the embodiment of rationalism.
Grana is probably correct. An impatience with calculation has been the mark of the romantic since Herder. Don Quixote's idiotic schemes in aid of chivalry are precisely uncalculated, irrational but noble.
The modern men Grana writes about, however, have been mistaken all this time. They mistook bourgeois life, the way a rebellious son mistakes the life of his father. The life of the bourgeoisie is not routine but creation, as Marx and Engels said. What has raised income per head in the rich countries by a factor of at least 12 since the 18th century is originality backed by commercial courage, not science. Dickens was mistaken to think that Facts alone are wanted in the life of manufacturing. Manufacturing depends on enterprise and single-mindedness far from cooly rational.
Weber was mistaken to think that the modern state embodies principles of rationality in bureaucracy. Anyone who thinks that a large, modern bureaucracy runs "like an army" cannot have experienced either a large, modern bureaucracy or an army. Freud was mistaken to claim that modern life forces a choice between the reality principle and eroticism. A businessperson without an erotic drive (suitably sublimated) achieves nothing.
This lack of insight by the intelligentsia into business life is odd. It reminds one, I repeat, of an adolescent boy sneering at his father: Remarkable how the old fellow matured between my 16th and 22nd birthdays. The European novel contains hardly a single rounded and accurate portrait of a businessman (Thomas Buddenbrook is an exception). The businessman is almost always a cardboard fool, unless he proves in the end to evince aristocratic or Christian virtues. Intellectuals in the West have had a tin ear for business and its values. Thus Arthur Hugh Clough in 1862, "The Latest Decalogue": "Thou shalt have one God only; who / Would be at the expense of two?" and so on in the vein of a clever adolescent down to "Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat, / When it's so lucrative to cheat. / …Thou shalt not covet, but tradition / Approves all forms of competition."
Economics, as the science of business, has been similarly spurned since 1848, leading to more adolescent sneering at what the lad does not quite grasp. (Lad, not lass: Portraits of bourgeois women in literature are numerous and accurate from the hands of women novelists—or even from men, Defoe's Moll Flanders [ranging from whore to noblewoman, but always enterprising] or Flaubert's Madame Bovary or James's portrait of a lady, down to Brian Moore's Mary Dunne or Judith Hearne. It is bourgeois men on the job whom novelists have failed to grasp.) Early in the 19th century, writers like Macaulay or Manzoni read and understood economics and applied it intelligently. Manzoni's novel The Betrothed (last edition, 1840) contains an entire chapter on the unhappy effects during a famine of imposing price controls (un prezzo giusto).
But after 1848 the intellectuals construed economics as the faculty of Reason, arrayed against the Freedom they loved, a misunderstanding encouraged by the talk of "iron laws" among classical economists. Or else they portrayed businesspeople as mere con men (thus Twain and Howells). By the late 19th century economics had dropped out of the conversation entirely. No intellectual since 1890 has been ashamed to be ignorant about the economy or economics. It is a rare English professor—David Lodge, for example, in Nice Work—who can see the businessperson as anything other than The Other.
A change is overdue. To admire the bourgeois virtues is not to buy into Reaganism or the Me Decade. Greed is a bourgeois vice, though not unknown among other classes. But the market and capitalism produce more virtue than vice. We must encourage capitalism, it being the hope for the poor of the world and being in any case what we are, but our capitalism need not be hedonistic or monadic, and certainly not unethical. An aristocratic, country-club capitalism, well satisfied with itself, or a peasant, grasping capitalism, hating itself, are both lacking in the virtues. And neither works. They lead to monopoly and economic failure, alienation and revolution. We need a capitalism that nurtures communities of good townsfolk in South-Central L.A. as much as in Iowa City. We encourage it by talking seriously about the bourgeois virtues.
Being ashamed of being bourgeois has for two centuries amounted to being ashamed of America. The sneers at Ben Franklin like Baudelaire and D. H. Lawrence were notorious as anti-democrats and anti-Americans. Charles Dickens hated the United States as much as he hated businessmen. But America is not the only bourgeois society: Germany is, too, though one that in its intellectual circles wishes it was not; Italians are famous townsfolk; and China, having for centuries cities larger than anywhere else, must have a bourgeois tradition counter to the peasant or aristocrat.
We live not in a global village but in a global town, and have for a long time. A myth of recency has made the virtues arising from town markets seem those of a shameful parvenu. In economic history dependent on Marx, such as Weber's General Economic History (1923) or Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944), the market is seen as a novelty. From this historical mistake arose the 19th-century fairy tales of lost paradise for aristocrats or peasants. It has taken a century of professional history to correct the mistake.
Medieval men bought and sold everything from grain to bishoprics. The Vikings were traders, too. Greece and Rome were business empires. The city of Jerico dates to 8000 B.C. The emerging truth is that we have lived in a world market for centuries, a market run by the bourgeoisie. It is time we recognized the fact and started cultivating those bourgeois virtues, of which we are to witness a new flowering.
Donald McCloskey is John F. Murray Professor of Economics and professor of history at the University of Iowa.
The post Bourgeois Blues appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Paul Volcker, the cigar-chomping chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1979 to 1987, and Toyoo Gyohten, former Japanese vice minister for international affairs, represent the next-to-last generation of international money men. Their book tells the story of the 1971–1991 cycle from fixed to floating to quasi-fixed exchange rates. Most economists would agree with the story in outline, and with its moral: Economic policy must now be international.
The protagonist of the story is the dollar, a tragic hero whose hubris causes its fall from pre-1971 eminence. The system of fixed exchange rates before the fall was shaped in 1944 by the fine hand of John Maynard Keynes at a resort in New Hampshire called Bretton Woods. In the Woods the Americans assumed responsibility for the money of the world, as they had notably failed to do during the Great Depression. It was symbolic of the new order that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, both authorized at Bretton Woods, were built in Washington across the street from one another, a few blocks from the White House.
For a quarter of a century after the war the American dollar was the "reserve currency," officially and practically. If the French government wanted to back the franc it had to hold dollars, however distasteful that might be to a Frenchman, because under the rules of the Bretton Woods system it had to pay out dollars for francs on demand. Furthermore, the rules set the exchange rates for the major currencies in stone—or, at any rate, in reasonably stiff putty. The dollar was fixed to gold, and all the other currencies were fixed to the dollar. No looking in the newspaper for today's rate on the pound; the rate was $2.80 to the pound for years at a time, and that was that.
Bretton Woods was a good thing for the American government because it made the Treasury's printing press into the equivalent of a gold mine. Being the U.S. government from 1944 to 1971 meant never having to honor your checks.
At length Bretton Woods collapsed. It ended partly because the goldness of the dollar made it, as Volcker and Gyohten put it, "impossible to force the United States to take strong action to adjust its balance of payments deficit." The problem was and is just that of a banker who runs large deficits on his own account to pay off his gambling debts. As long as people believe he will pay up, he can go on making check money, without reforming his spending.
Like the banker, the American government during the go-go years of the Great Society and Vietnam did not reform the nation's spending. It merely printed more dollars, which the Japanese and Germans dutifully and stupidly hoarded. When the United States started to run large deficits in the late '60s and early '70s, the financial markets stopped believing in the dollar. The Japanese and German hoards were suddenly worth less. "The sad fact," the authors write, "is that the dollar stopped delivering…stability by the early 1970s." The money system depends on trust, and by 1971 no one trusted the dollar.
By now, after a 20-year interlude of floating rates, "the trend is clear: the intra-European system has moved strongly in the direction of fixed exchange rates," and as Europe goes, so goes the world. Fixed-rate systems are coming back for at least two reasons. For one thing, fixed rates exercise a discipline over domestic policy, notably lacking in many countries during the '70s. For another, fixed rates are convenient, though not in the short run obedient to supply and demand. It is nice for corporate treasurers, for example, not to have to worry about whether their overseas profits this quarter will be wiped out by a blip on the market for the yen, and corporate treasurers have a good deal of influence at central banks. But fixed rates are coming back on some basis other than American hegemony and the almighty dollar.
Volcker and Gyohten tell the story as a case of American "failure." Like other stories of American failure, theirs faces a bit of a problem: The failure, strictly speaking, did not happen. It only looks like it did in the newspaper headlines. Twenty years after the fall of Bretton Woods, the dollar remains in practice the reserve currency, stable or not. For all the Chicken Little talk, the United States is still the biggest economy in the world. If you want to do business internationally, you had better have dollars. The gambling banker has still not been required to reform his spending, for better or worse.
So the words of Volcker and Gyohten's subtitle, "the Threat to American Leadership," convey a mistaken hysteria. A "threat" to "American leadership" is nothing to worry about; that Japan and Germany have become important players is no shame; and America is still the world's banker.
Although the authors' theme of failure is wrong (and indeed is not carried through in the book), the rest of their story is right. From beginning to end, Volcker and Gyohten put domestic policy in an international framework. They recognize that the international economy can provide exactly the "discipline over domestic policy" that is the attractive feature of returning to fixed rates.
Under fixed exchange rates, or even under putty-like exchange rates, a modern economy is attached to the economy of the world. The price of TVs is fixed in Japan, the price of newsprint in Canada, the price of vacations in London, the interest rate on checking accounts in Geneva. Translated into American currency through a fixed exchange rate, American prices and interest rates are the prices and interest rates of the world. The American economy sits in the world, not on Mars.
Arthur Burns, the pipe smoker among Fed chairmen (1970–78), is a good example of the older, Martian view. He spoke and acted as though the United States were free to set its monetary policy from the Fed's board room in Washington, regardless of the rest of the world. To admit that the United States is part of planet Earth has long been considered an affront to national dignity. At a 1973 news conference in Paris a reporter asked George Shultz, then secretary of the treasury, what a floating dollar meant for American monetary policy. As Volcker recounts it, "Burns, always conscious of the prerogatives of an independent Federal Reserve Chairman, reached over and took the microphone from Shultz and pronounced in his most authoritarian tone, 'American monetary policy is not made in Paris; it is made in Washington.'" No, Mr. Chairman, it is not. Under fixed exchange rates, it is made in the markets of the world.
Burns's student long ago at Rutgers, Milton Friedman, thinks more clearly about the matter. Friedman, of course, is the wizard of monetarism, the conviction that controlling the money supply is the best way to keep the economy healthy. Friedman seems to realize that monetarism does not work if exchange rates are fixed. Fixed exchange rates bring the American economy down to earth. The United States cannot have an independent monetary policy, "made in Washington," if its prices and interest rates are determined abroad.
To ensure that American prices and interest rates are determined at home, a monetarist had better be in favor of floating the exchange rate. Friedman was. An enthusiast for laissez-faire in most things (except, oddly, the currency), Friedman was the main advocate in the '60s and '70s of floating exchange rates. Burns, on the other hand, hated floating exchange rates but loved the money supply.
The paradox of Volcker's career is that he, trained as a Keynesian economist in the East Coast temples of liberalism and with no love for the rightist ideologues of the Reagan administration, was chosen (by Jimmy Carter, it should be noted) to implement Friedman's two policies, devised in Chicago: floating exchange rates and control of the money supply (and the devil take the interest rate).
The paradox of Friedman's career, in turn, is that his scientific work in support of monetarism has depended on a Martian view of the American economy. His great book in 1965 with Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, covered a period of mostly fixed exchange rates. The book was the decisive blow in the intellectual triumph of monetarism. But it treats the American economy as though it were on Mars, unaffected—except through the money supply—by foreign prices and interest rates.
Whether or not they were correctly argued in his science, Friedman's policies were successful in Volcker's hands. At the level of politics, however, there is another paradox lurking, well brought out by Volcker and Gyohten. Floating exchange rates make a single country's monetary policy effective. Good. But floating exchange rates also make it possible for the country to inflate in the first place. Bad. Without the discipline of a gold standard or a Bretton Woods dollar standard or some other rigid standard, we have to depend on good behavior by central bankers and legislators.
The political problem with a floating exchange rate, as Volcker makes clear, is that the country apparently in charge of it is not in fact in charge. The American government does not set the exchange rate of the dollar. It takes two sides to set a price, and the exchange rate is a price of dollars for pounds or for yen. As Gyohten notes, "monetary authorities could not manipulate the exchange rate by simply intervening against an underlying market trend. That lesson cost us billions to learn." Yet it's hard to convince people that the U.S. government is not directly to blame for whatever value the dollar has. Whichever way the dollar floats, somebody complains.
That is another reason for giving up and going back to fixed exchange rates. Gyohten reports that in Japan during 1977 and 1978 the falling yen price of dollars "generated a big debate, with strong complaints mainly from exporters whose overseas orders were badly hurt by the strong yen." On the other hand, a long-fixed exchange rate makes people forget the notion that the government can set the value of its currency wherever it wants.
Governments and voters persist in having opinions about where "their" currency should be. In one of his few lapses into nonsense, for example, Volcker admits, "I may be old-fashioned about this, but I have never been able to shake the feeling that a strong currency is generally a good thing." "Strong" in this context means "having a high price." This is like saying that a high price for apples is generally a good thing. Well, yes, good for orchard owners—but bad for apple eaters. "The value of a currency is considered a matter of national sovereignty," Volcker notes disapprovingly, after recovering from his bout with old-fashionedness, "and countries were not prepared to surrender such sovereign decisions to the working of an automatic indicator"—or, for that matter, to a market.
The United States, Volcker emphasizes early on in the book, could not by itself set the price of dollars relative to yen or sterling. That's what the bargaining among finance ministers was about in the early '70s. As John Connally put it, speaking to other finance ministers, "The dollar may be our currency but it's your problem."
Connally's wisecrack was wiser than he knew. Because the value of the dollar is an international event, American monetary policy is not our own to make. Volcker and Gyohten have written a lucid, amiable guide to monetary policy at home and abroad which recognizes that fact. Policy makers in the '90s have awakened, like Gulliver, to find themselves bound to the earth by a thousand threads.
Donald McCloskey is John F. Murray Professor of Economics and professor of history at the University of Iowa.
The post Mars Collides with Earth appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Modern Times provides an incisive and readable portrait of world events since World War I, a cataclysmic tableau that should be understood by anyone hoping to lead the nation toward the 21st century. What makes Johnson's work particularly compelling is his devastating critique of both relativism and statism. The 20th century has been the "age of politics," he writes, and the grand experiment has proved to be a disastrous failure. As he observes: "The state had proved itself an insatiable spender, an unrivalled waster. Indeed, in the twentieth century it had also proved itself the great killer of all time." Modern Times might help officials at all levels learn not to look to politics—and ever newer and more expensive government programs—as the solution to today's problems.
What should government do? For the answer to this question the president should peruse Charles Murray's In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Rather than provide a laundry list of "good" and "bad" programs, Murray delves deeper, arguing that the only appropriate role of the state is to promote people's "pursuit of happiness," that is, he writes, to enable them "to go about the business of being human beings as wisely and fully as they could." That, he finds, is most likely to occur if the government does not interfere with private economic and social interaction, especially the operation of the "little platoons" so active in America.
Indeed, he concludes that government social policy has to be ultimately judged by its impact on the functioning of private society. The state has some duty to help the "little platoons" by, for instance, preventing crime, but, Murray argues, there must be a "stopping point" beyond which government does not try to supplant private efforts. He rightly concludes that people's "satisfaction depends crucially on being left important things over which we take trouble," something recent Congresses and presidents have increasingly failed to recognize.
Also on the president's bedstand should be Richard John Neuhaus's The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. The role of religion in the United States is a controversial one; some of the bitterest issues that a president confronts involve church-state relations. Neuhaus's thoughtful analysis should help the reader avoid both extremes: the sterile, even dangerous "naked public square," with religion banned from communal life, and the incestuous, equally dangerous union of church and state, with clerics and politicians allied for any number of dubious ends. What we need, Neuhaus argues, is a rearticulation of "the religious base of the democratic experiment." The Naked Public Square will help the president understand how he can simultaneously welcome religious values in the public debate and resist clerics who reach for the levers of power.
Contributing Editor Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of The Politics of Plunder: Misgovernment in Washington and Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics. He formerly served as a special assistant to President Reagan.
Robert L. Bartley
Every president for at least two decades has been blindsided by powerful international economic forces that few of us begin to comprehend and that most of us don't even begin to recognize. To start to grasp the real meanings of global interdependence, a president ought to read Kenichi Ohmae's The Borderless World (Harper Business/HarperCollins, 1990) and Walter Wriston's The Twilight of Sovereignty (Scribner's, 1992). For a sense of what can happen if you get these matters wrong, he could dip back into the interwar period for John Maynard Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1920). And he ought to ask his new treasury secretary to read all of them twice.
Robert L. Bartley is the editor of The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Seven Fat Years: And How to Do It Again (The Free Press).
Clint Bolick
Unless Frank Zappa experiences an unexpected electoral surge, it looks like our next president will need guidance not only in public policy but in the style of governance. No one personifies passionate and principled leadership better than Václáv Havel, and his Summer Meditations should top the president-elect's reading list.
Havel is the most heroic political leader to emerge on the world stage in recent years, and his life is an example of what it means to stand for something. His elegant and dignified leadership style stands in stark contrast to the frenzied arm waving and demagoguery that dominate American politics.
"Though my heart may be left of centre," Havel declares, "I have always known that the only economic system that works is a market economy," for "it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself."
Yet the task of building a "state of ideas" is not one of ideology, Havel insists. "Something more is necessary. For the sake of simplicity, it might be called spirit. Or feeling. Or conscience." Havel's introspections could go far in helping our own president rediscover the principles and spirit that made our nation great.
Turning to policy, no issue bodes more ominously than the future of American education. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the most brazen example outside China of unreconstructed socialism in the world today is America's public-school system. The primary victims are millions of low-income youngsters who are consigned to inner-city educational cesspools and lack access to the most basic skills necessary for responsible citizenship and productive livelihoods.
John Chubb and Terry Moe's Politics, Markets & America's Schools establishes convincingly that more spending and superficial tinkering will not cure the ails of public schooling. Rather, the flaws are inherent in a highly bureaucratic system driven not by consumer satisfaction but by special-interest politics. Nothing less than full-scale market competition and a transfer of power from bureaucrats to parents, Chubb and Moe demonstrate, will accomplish the goal of equal and high-quality educational opportunities.
But let's get real. We're dealing here with an American president. So my go-for-broke selection is The Little Red Hen, the perfect presidential bedtime story that says it all. Ms. Hen, one of the great feminist heroes in popular literature, asks her barnyard neighbors to help her harvest wheat and bake bread. "Not I!" they all respond. But in the end, they all want to share in the fruits of Hen's labor. Think again, cackles the red-feathered fowl.
Hen rivals Charles Murray's works as a scathing indictment of the welfare state and offers a stirring moral defense of free trade and private property. Eight-year-old writer and paleontologist Evan Bolick told me he was persuaded. Maybe it will persuade a president too.
Clint Bolick is litigation director at the Institute for Justice in Washington and author of the forthcoming Grass Roots Tyranny and the Limits of Federalism.
David Brudnoy
We may well never again have a president as plain-spoken, as unaffected, and as little disposed to bend with the winds (and whims) of fashion as Harry Truman, whose (very likely) definitive biography has been written by David McCullough. Truman (Simon & Schuster, 1992) is old-fashioned history, meaning that it tells us what happened, when, why, and where, and leaves to our own ruminations the deeper meanings of happenings. Truman's Fair Deal liberalism may not be everyone's idea of the perfect political philosophy, but it was grounded on a consistent theory of government as enunciated by an honest man.
Rising from provincialism to competence in personal and professional life, avoiding the taint of his machine-politics sponsors, studying the issues and concluding what by his lights was the best course, Truman did what he believed needed doing, growing nobly into the office that was thrust upon him. He was sometimes gawky in his bluntness, but he stood for something and Americans knew where we stood with him. To him, even before his victory in the great upset of all time, polls were nonsense, all save the poll on election day. To read Truman is to see what we're missing in the White House.
If we are not to be gobbled up entirely by an ever-growing fraction of the American people who are somehow on the dole, we had best get a handle both on expenditures in the "entitlements" category and on the reasoning, or lack thereof, that got us into this mess in the first place. No one has better analyzed the matter than Charles Murray, whose Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (Basic Books, 1984) puts firmly into perspective the gross social (as well as economic) effects of the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson and its, and its successors', perhaps well-intentioned but nonetheless woeful enlargement of the proto-welfare state. A decade of intelligent analyses along similar lines has subsequently emerged; all owe their initial insights to Losing Ground.
The tragedy of what was Yugoslavia; the splintering of what was the Soviet Union; the halving of Czechoslovakia; the francophone separatism in Canada; tribalism in black Africa; and a score of other recent and hundreds of long-standing ethnic and racial conflicts worldwide demonstrate the bankruptcy of the notion of multiculturalism. Mexican irredentism in our own Southwest, the on-going crisis of Haitians seeking asylum in the United States, and the craze for Afrocentric "education," to name just a few domestic instances, signal our own suicidal path if we don't snap out of the mentality that embodies the banal truism that "we're a nation of immigrants so no limits on immigration are just."
Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints (Scribner's, 1975, originally published in French in 1973, English translation by Norman Shapiro) creates in fiction a chilling dilemma: What will the advanced portion of the world do when the Third World claims a "right" to occupy Western lands without limit? On the one horn of this dilemma is the seeming cruelty of our recent policy of turning away the Haitians; on the other, to use words from the book jacket itself, is "the end of the white world."
Romantic sentimentality notwithstanding, our current policy merely advances the date by which we will be obliged to choose. The Camp of the Saints confronts our president for the mid-1990s with the bitter alternatives. At present our immigration "policy" is inertial and our internal posture vis à vis bilingualism and multiculturalism are morosely tepid.
Contributing Editor David Brudnoy is New England's leading nighttime radio talk host (WBZ-AM) and a commentator on the region's leading TV station (WCVB-TV).
James M. Buchanan
My recommended selection emerges from an initial concentration on the issues that the incoming president in 1993 needs to understand. These issues are, first, the overextension of politics and the apparently inexorable tendencies for this extension to proceed unchecked. Although his model of politics is not fully congruent with modern public choice, Anthony de Jasay's book, The State (Blackwell, 1985) does capture the dynamics of government growth in this century. I recommend this book as a precautionary tale.
A more specific issue, which is itself derivative from the larger one, is the apparent inability of post-Keynesian Western democracies to escape from the regime of continuous, and accelerating, budget deficits. Cole Brembeck's Congress, Human Nature, and the Federal Debt (Praeger, 1991) discusses the origins, the implications, and the consequences of the deficit regime.
Any appreciation of the overreaching of politics must be accompanied by an understanding of how markets can provide nonpoliticized alternative solutions, even if, in many cases, organizational judgments must be made by pragmatic comparisons between an imperfect politics and an imperfect market. David Friedman's short book, The Machinery of Freedom (first edition, Harper, 1973; second edition, Open Court Press, 1989), should be required reading for all those whose natural proclivity is to turn to government as the solution. The president must, somehow, absorb Ronald Reagan's basic vision that politics is the problem, not the solution.
James M. Buchanan is Harris University Professor at George Mason University and the 1986 Nobel laureate in economics.
Craig M. Collins
Political "lifers" like Bush and Clinton don't need to read. Their ambition is to win elections. Having won, they do not need to know more.
To avoid dissolving completely into cynicism, however, I try to believe that mixed up with their selfish motives are traces of a desire to further the public good—so long as it doesn't hurt them politically. For those rare occasions when they have an opportunity to do good, I suggest they read Richard Posner's Economic Analysis of the Law so they will know what to do. Posner minutely details the complex interconnectedness of laws and their many unintended effects.
Richard Epstein's Takings shows how we have socialized private property into near extinction. He generally concludes this was not a good thing.
Finally, Julian Simon's The Economic Consequences of Immigration shows that it was no accident that vigorous economic growth in this country occurred coincident with a significant influx of immigrants.
Teaching politicians the right thing to do is not the same as convincing them to do it. They well know their interests are vested in the present system of buying votes by reallocating property. For that to change, the public must first become aware of the corrupting effect of this system. This public awareness will not depend on which books the president reads. It will depend on which books the rest of us read.
Craig M. Collins, a former REASON assistant editor, is an attorney in Santa Monica, California, specializing in property law.
Steven Hayward
The problem of modern democratic government is not simply a tendency to bad policy; it is also that most modern politicians do not have a sufficient understanding of or respect for democratic institutions and procedures. A deeper understanding of the principles of limited government goes hand in hand with better policy. Hence what is most needed is remedial reading.
It may be wildly naive to suppose that, at the threshold of the Oval Office, our nation's pre-eminent political figure can be taught anything meaningful, but here goes. My first book is what I call "the owner's manual to the U.S. Constitution," The Federalist. Why not? Although it is true that these essays were the product of a partisan campaign, and are written in an unfamiliar idiom, there is nevertheless a carefully worked out theory of how our constitutional form of government should work. A president will learn as much from Publius's errors of judgment as from his wisdom. The Federalist shines especially brightly on the current problems of separation of powers, legislative and executive prerogative, and judicial review.
My second recommendation is Harvey C. Mansfield Jr.'s recent collection titled America's Constitutional Soul (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). In addition to Mansfield's always learned reflections on the state of constitutionalism and party politics in America, there are chapters analyzing the last four presidential elections, from which a president will learn that the distinction between politics and policy, between campaigning and governing, is false and pernicious. Mansfield's serious treatment of and obvious respect for the political ability and achievements of Ronald Reagan are a nice antidote to the standard cliches against Reagan.
My third recommendation is Jeremy Rabkin's Judicial Compulsions: How Public Law Distorts Public Policy (Basic Books, 1989). This may seem like an odd or narrow pick for a president's short reading list. But Judicial Compulsions focuses attention on a major crisis within our government that isn't receiving adequate attention and that impinges directly on a president's ability to administer the executive branch. Administrative law has become subject to a regime of judicial activism directed chiefly by special-interest litigation. What this means is that neither the executive branch nor the legislative branch is really in control of policy. The point is, limited government and the rule of law require a properly limited judiciary, and the president who understands this and sets out to tame the judiciary will render the republic a noble service. And the judiciary will probably be easier to tame than Congress.
Contributing Editor Steven Hayward is the research and publications director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francicso.
Thomas W. Hazlett
In the 1988 V.P. debate an uppity journalist asked J. Danforth Quayle what recent book he had enjoyed reading. A bit of tension ensued, as America experienced a collective moment of embarrassment. To his staff's credit, Quayle had the name of some erudite tome at the ready. This put that pipsqueak reporter in his place (especially since the debate format allowed no time-out in which to test the senator's comprehension coefficient). While I have no staff (not counting my laptop), I have been given advance warning of the question: Which three marvelous books should the new president read?
1. Hedrick Smith's The Power Game (1989). This artistic hunk of applied political science describes the sources and uses of political clout in Washington, revealing everything Jimmy Carter should have known but was afraid to ask about the national government. Those boneheads who believe that the pols are crazy and that things get screwed up because we don't have enough smart, good citizens in Washington simply don't see what Hedrick Smith knows: Things happen in government for good reason (even if the results for the lowly American taxpayers are ugly).
"Some like to say that the power game is an unpredictable game of chance and improvisation," writes the New York Times reporter. "But most of the time politics is about as casual and offhand as the well-practiced triple flips of an Olympic high diver." Filled with insights (example: "Congress has a stake in the inefficiency of federal bureaucrats: It lets their staffs become important fixers…."), this volume is an excellent substitute for a Ph.D. at the Kennedy School for a busy chief executive on the go.
2. Ithiel de Sola Pool's Technologies of Freedom (1984). A masterful treatise on the evolution of free speech, this book explains how the opportunities for greater liberty afforded by the revolution in computer intelligence may be sabotaged by the political ghosts of censorship past. The American tradition broke historic new ground in moving firmly away from the stultification of a government-licensed press, yet our First Amendment rights have gone into retreat with the emerging electronic communications media.
This uncivil rejection of our libertarian values is all the more ironic in light of the immense possibilities for genuinely democratic free speech that the new technology has given us. Our transition from a press of newsprint to one of electronics is now a century along; computer technologies are stupendously accelerating the passage. Yet our law and institutions have strangely afforded smaller scope for freedom to the newer forms of speech than to the old, a delineation that makes poor sense legally and no sense technically. (It makes perfect sense politically; see Hedrick Smith, above.) Pool, the late, famous professor of political science at MIT, reminds us of our magnificent heritage as the world's freest speakers nestled happily under the protections of the Constitution's First Amendment. Upholding such, Mr. President, will be your job.
3. Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson (either of the two volumes out now, or of the two due out soon). Caro's due diligence turned up the dirt on President Johnson, years after the legends (promulgated by the fearsome commander-in-chief himself) had been swallowed whole by journalists and biographers alike. Read Caro on Johnson and you will know a scoundrel. In glorious detail and riveting prose. Yeccccckkkkk! An odious perversion of public power on display for all the world to see. Can this massive dose of posthumous public shame inoculate our future president from hubris disease? Let us hope. Please read Robert Caro and remember: Someone will be watching. Closely.
Contributing Editor Thomas W. Hazlett teaches economics and public policy at the University of California, Davis.
David R. Henderson
Mr. President, you need three main things from your reading. First is a sense of what people's rights are and how a just government should treat them. Second is a basic understanding of how the world works. Third is a perspective on the 1980s. The following list meets the bill, to the extent any three books can.
1. Richard Epstein, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain. This book by a law professor starts from each person's right to his or her own body and ends up showing, on that basis, that government has no right to take people's property without just compensation. Epstein then shows, with flair and buzzsaw logic, that the Fifth Amendment's ban on takings without just compensation invalidates most zoning laws, all price controls, "progressive" taxation, and most government spending.
2. Paul Heyne, The Economic Way of Thinking. Because understanding how the world works requires a basic understanding of economics, I recommend this introductory textbook. It lays out beautifully how cooperation among people works in a free-market economy. It gives you a basic understanding of how a price system works, and works magnificently, to turn conflict into harmony. Among other things, Heyne's book shows why free trade makes both sides better off and how price controls cause destruction.
3. William A. Niskanen, Reaganomics. You cannot understand the 1980s without understanding what economic policies were and what effects these policies had. Niskanen, even though a Reagan partisan, gives the most even-handed treatment of Reagan's economic policies available. Indeed, Herb Stein, no partisan of Reagan himself, called Niskanen's book, "a lucid analysis of Reagan's economics by that rare creature, an objective insider." Lou Cannon, a "liberal" Washington Post columnist, called Niskanen's book, "a definitive and notably objective account of administration economic policy." Niskanen tells the good—some budget cuts, large cuts in marginal tax rates, and a substantial reduction in inflation—along with the bad—failure to get spending under control, huge deficits (caused by the failure to control spending), and protectionist trade policies. Niskanen also gives a sense of the relative importance of various economic issues.
Contributing Editor David R. Henderson is an associate professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and editor of The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics (forthcoming in 1993). He was previously a senior economist with President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers.
Rick Henderson
The health of the economy will be the most important issue the next president will address. Effective economic policy is no longer a purely domestic matter. It requires a global view.
Economists Richard McKenzie and Dwight Lee recognize this. In Quicksilver Capital: How the Rapid Movement of Wealth Has Changed the World, they say that the information revolution allows nations, not just local regions, to compete for investments in capital and labor.
Fifty years ago, F. A. Hayek argued that central planners never possess enough information to efficiently direct economic activity. Back then, when planners tightened their grip on entrepreneurs and employees, those people suffered. Now, say McKenzie and Lee, capital can (and does) move faster than central planners can try to manipulate it. Policy makers who try to increase taxes and regulations will find their capital bases moving to more hospitable climes. The authors also insist that, so long as government remains intrusive, no amount of "investment" in worker retraining and public works can prevent private capital from fleeing. There's plenty here for either George Bush or Bill Clinton to chew on.
The president will also face a nation with decaying cities, disintegrating families, and a breakdown of what European liberals call "civil society"—the informal network of neighborhoods, churches, and other voluntary arrangements that (besides work) provide meaning and relevance to people in their everyday lives. Charles Murray's In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government argues that government attempts to replace that voluntary sphere in poverty-stricken areas have had disastrous consequences.
How, Murray asks, can a person with little education or few skills find fulfillment? As a good neighbor, an effective parent, or a valued friend. If the government is incapable of keeping the streets safe enough for children to walk to school, neighborhoods—in any meaningful sense—can never come into being. Government can set the conditions that allow these bonds to form, for instance, by making neighborhoods safe. Otherwise, Murray says, it should get out of the way. A president who pays attention to In Pursuit could give millions of despairing Americans a chance to start working through these difficult times.
If Charles Murray provides theoretical justification for the importance of neighborliness, John Shelton Reed tells you how much fun it is to be a good neighbor. In Whistling Dixie: Dispatches from the South, the University of North Carolina sociologist spells out why minor-league baseball games, church picnics, and fishing trips are important.
Even though he calls himself a "crypto-semi-neo-Agrarian," Reed is not an enemy of modernity, he is no apologist for the Jim Crow days, and he doesn't imagine that everything was perfect 40 years ago. But he is onto something: Not so long ago, life was more civil. And (I would argue) we've lost much of that civility because we expect politicians and bureaucrats to solve every problem that comes our way.
John Shelton Reed and Charles Murray would probably agree about many things. The next president would be wise to listen to what they have to say.
Rick Henderson is Washington editor of REASON.
Karl Hess
Because the next U.S. president will face crucial decisions about abandoning or restoring a republican form of government, it is urged that he read two current books—In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government, by Charles Murray (Simon & Schuster, 1988), and The Disuniting of America, by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (W.W. Norton, 1992)—and the somewhat older The Institutional Imperative, by Robert Kharasch (Charterhouse Books, 1973).
Murray's book can take its place as the peer of any book ever written on the nature and propriety of government—not as an ideological treatise but as a careful questioning based on only one assumption: that the pursuit of happiness, person by person, is in fact why our own government, an epic and historic innovation, was created and constitutionally constrained. Murray writes about people, not society, and makes the difference crystal clear. His book is a guide to the preservation of liberty, which, in turn, is the essential condition for the pursuit of happiness. The next president, being a representative of some faction or another of exactly the sorts warned against in The Federalist Papers, probably will find Murray's book intolerable. Alas.
Because the next president will serve during a time when the factions will have developed their own special languages—and possibly will even have been elected by echoing special vocabularies—the Schlesinger book is a superb reminder of the success up until now of the melting-pot dynamics of the country that still remains the preferred destination of so many immigrants, legal or not. When people vote with their feet, they generally vote American, no matter the politically correct position of blaming America for most, if not all, the world's ills. The Schlesinger book is particularly impressive as a counter to anti-American slanders because of the author's long and honorable representation of the modern liberal position. In this book he even sounds a bit like a classical liberal.
The Kharasch book is one of those overlooked gems that can make your day when you find a copy on a shelf of used books. It is a lighthearted but actually most serious look at how bureaucracies operate. The Iron Law: Bureaucracies exist in order to exist, no matter their publicly stated goals or roles. Because the next president will be in large part ruled by the demands of the bureaucracies, this book is an essential guide to the facts behind the factions. It also presents serious recommendations as to how the bureaucracies could be tamed. An example: No agency authorized to declare an emergency should also be authorized to manage it.
Karl Hess is a writer living in Kearneysville, West Virginia.
John Hood
Despite the pandering rhetoric of the election campaign, foreign policy remains the first and foremost duty of any president. To fulfill that duty, our new president must first have a solid understanding of the century's worldwide conflicts, both their historical roots and their significance for future policy making.
If the rise and almost-fall of totalitarianism demonstrates anything, it is the principle that "ideas have consequences," as do idea makers. Intellectuals, far from being cloistered agents of learning and discourse, ultimately determine the course of human events—by creating rabid, revolutionary movements with millions of victims, or alternatively, by constructing a philosophical framework for protecting liberty. Leaders ignore the life of the mind to their peril. Today's philosophy students can be tomorrow's Khmer Rouge or Shining Path. Today's mild-mannered professor or author can be tomorrow's Karl Marx or Abimael Guzman.
Paul Johnson's Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties demonstrates that the conflicts and catastrophes of the century have their roots in intellectual trends. The new president must understand the importance of ideas, of philosophy, and of rhetoric, if he is to lead his nation out of its current post–Cold War torpor. Ronald Reagan, despite policy miscues, will always be counted as among the greatest of our presidents because of his implicit understanding of the power of ideas (gleaned, perhaps, from his career as an actor—a field not too distant, in many ways, from that of rhetoricians and scholars).
More specifically, the new president must thoroughly understand why Marxism failed, both as a political system and as a system of economic, psychological, and cultural insights. Reading Thomas Sowell's Marxism: Philosophy and Economics would be an excellent start.
For a little light reading, I'd advise my president to read the plays of Shakespeare—particularly Hamlet, King Lear, and Julius Caesar—for their insights into human action and the nature of leadership. Both George Bush and Bill Clinton escaped the American education system before its demise and thus have no doubt read these works. But Shakespeare is best savored, not simply skimmed. And if all the world is indeed a stage, then the next president of the world's only superpower will play the lead. He had best memorize the right lines.
Contributing Editor John Hood is editor of Carolina Journal and a columnist for Spectator magazine in Raleigh.
F. Kenneth Iverson
The president should read:
Trashing the Planet, by Dixy Lee Ray with Lou Guzzo. A well-known scientist gives an even-handed, common-sense perspective on environmental issues. It avoids the distortions and hysterical rhetoric that seem to be the order of the day.
The Fair Trade Fraud, by James Bovard. The author provides an in-depth look at our chaotic trade laws, which give incompetent industries an entitlement to milk the American consumer. The Fair Trade Fraud is the frightening story of the 8,000 tariffs and 3,000 quotas that restrict foreigners' rights to sell and American citizens' right to buy, and the description of an area where clearly the government has invaded the rights of the individual.
The Next Century, by David Halberstam. A short book by a thoughtful observer of society on our problems and the changes we need to make a better tomorrow.
F. Kenneth Iverson is chairman and chief executive of Nucor Corp.
Elizabeth Larson
Set in South Africa half a century ago, Alan Paton's deeply moving tale, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), is both a tragedy, in the classical meaning of the word, and a paean to the human virtues and dignity sadly lacking in much of American society today. Many nonfiction works have been written in recent years decrying the effects of the welfare society and the cult of victimization on personal morals and responsibility. For all their careful analysis, documentation, and statistics, however, none of those books brings home to the reader as Paton does the evil of abdicating individual responsibility and the human dignity of those who willingly live, and die, as a result of their actions.
A sidelight to Paton's central tale of a simple Zulu pastor and his wayward son is the story of the pastor's village—the land overworked and infertile and the people despondent. A wealthy white man arrives one day with plans to reverse this "tragedy of the commons" by dividing the land among the villagers. The right to private property is the subject of the other two books I suggest for our incoming president: Free Market Environmentalism, by Terry L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal (1991), and Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain, by Richard Epstein (1985).
Anderson's and Leal's environmental reader is the most important book for any political leader surrounded by aides, policy makers, and green advocates claiming that only the government can remedy environmental "crises." While other free-market environmental books are essential resources for information on specific environmental problems and why government "solutions" have made them worse, Free Market Environmentalism provides the fundamental principles used by every free-market environmental writer. Anderson and Leal explain, with many historical examples, that environmental problems can be solved by providing the right incentives to the people involved and by letting human initiative, not government mandates, take charge.
Particularly in light of recent battles between property owners and environmental activists over the "taking" of private property by restricting an owner's use of his land, Epstein's authoritative analysis of the concept of eminent domain restricted in the Constitution is the most important work on the subject available. The deceptively simple questions Epstein considers (What is a taking of property? Do current regulations—say, zoning or rent control—fall into that category?) ought to be posed to every policy maker from the president to your local zoning board—and, unfortunately for the security of property rights in America today, almost never are. A new president couldn't have a better foundation upon which to build his presidency than a profound respect for what the Founders considered one of the inalienable rights of women and men.
Elizabeth Larson is REASON's production editor.
Laura Main
Our nation's problems stem from an internal sort of cancer—call it lack of "family values" or, to be blunt, simply a lack of values. It touches every segment of our country, from crime on our streets to the well-being of our businesses, and it has very little to do with having children out of wedlock.
Even with large segments of the population receiving some sort of government aid, we still find a nation in the grips of so-called poverty. The book that blows the lid off the ineffectual hand-out system is Charles Murray's In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Murray quite graciously touches on every foundation that every individual needs to find true happiness—self-respect, education, a functional community, and family—and how our present system is providing everything but that. Everyone should read this book, not just the next president.
So that our president will further his understanding of the need for true self-esteem (not the pop version), I would recommend The Psychology of Self-Esteem, by Nathaniel Branden. And last, but not least, A Bend in the River, by V. S. Naipaul, to illustrate the negative effects of populating cities and towns with innumerable government employees ignorant of what a town truly is and what it means to be a citizen in one. A mere facade of freedom and prosperity, orchestrated by an irresponsible government, can only result in one thing: barely surviving in a jungle.
Laura Main, a former art director for REASON, is an artist and graphic designer in Los Angeles.
Donald N. McCloskey
If a president reads anything longer than 50 pages containing an argument, it's good news. Presidents—of universities and of companies as much as of the United States of America—have to be quick reads. But too much quick reading makes Jack a superficial boy. It makes him an arrogant boy, too, a Ross Perot, unaccustomed to the modesty of quiet listening. To read a good book with an argument you have to shut up and listen for a few hours, or you're not going to get it. The executive summary won't do. The last long-reading president was Harry Truman. Asked in his old age whether he liked to read himself to sleep he shot back, "No, young man: I like to read myself awake."
One book for the awakening would be Eric Hoffer's The Temper of Our Time (reprinted in 1992 by Buccaneer Books). Hoffer, who died in 1983, leaving 10 of these short but luminous books, was a San Francisco longshoreman and sage. He received no formal education, seizing it instead from libraries and bookstores on his way to pick fruit or offload cargo. He wrote in aphorisms, which make his books readable in rest periods from working out the schedule for the White House tennis court. Though a worker, Hoffer supported capitalism; though a thinker, he distrusted intellectuals. "In politics, the intellectual who as a 'man of words' should be a master in the art of persuasion refuses to practice the art once he is in power. He wants not to persuade but to command." A president should know that; Hoffer knew it at the height of American social engineering.
After Hoffer's aphorisms, try a sustained historical argument, from J. R. T. Hughes, a great economic historian at Northwestern who died this year prematurely: The Governmental Habit: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (new edition, Princeton University Press, 1991). From Hughes the president can learn the unhappy fact that we have always liked to interfere, we American individualists. Should "deregulation" be turned back by the new administration? Don't make me laugh. What Hughes called "the regulatory junk pile" is three centuries deep. We can crush modern economic growth with the junk pile if we try hard enough. The reborn state socialists in the environmental movement would like us to do just that. A president should know it.
And light relief: P. J. O'Rourke's A Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Tries to Explain the Entire United States Government (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991). The book is gutwrenchingly funny. Mark Twain called Congress "America's only native criminal class"; O'Rourke extends the characterization to the entire U.S. government. You can imagine the new president not joining the laughter. He should, and would gather thereby O'Rourke's serious point. It came to him in the middle of a New England town meeting: "The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it." There's something every president should know.
Donald N. McCloskey teaches economics and history at the University of Iowa. His most recent book is an edited collection, Second Thoughts: Policy Lessons from American Economic History, just out from Oxford University Press.
Michael McMenamin
Mr. President, economics has never been your strong suit. You showed no more appreciation of how to generate real growth in the economy than your opponent did. Yet if the economy in the next four years doesn't begin to demonstrate the kind of growth it enjoyed during the '80s, your party may well be shut out of the White House for the next generation.
So what books can you read during the next two and a half months that might really make a difference in your new administration? Given the constraints on your time, the books should be 1) relatively short, 2) entertaining, 3) a source of ideas for improving the economy (if not the government), and 4) written by someone who has no interest in being appointed by you to a high government office.
The three books I recommend are (in the order in which they should be read): A Parliament of Whores, by P. J. O'Rourke (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991); The Fair Trade Fraud, by James Bovard (St. Martin's Press, 1991); and For Free Trade, by Winston S. Churchill (Arthur L. Humphreys, 1906).
O'Rourke's A Parliament of Whores is the most accurate, insightful book on American government since Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Read it. Suggest to your staff that P. J. would make a fine White House director of communications. (Don't worry, he won't accept). Fire those who disagree. They have no sense of humor and you're going to need people who do in your administration.
Armed with your newfound insight into how American democracy really works, move right on to the next book. It's time to start saving the economy. The secret lies in two words: tariffs and quotas. Eliminate them. Totally. Unilaterally. The result will be a $1,200 windfall to every American family, which will return $80 billion to the private sector by lowering prices to consumers everywhere, especially food and clothing for the poor and middle class. As a bonus, you will reduce federal bureaucracy. You will not increase the deficit and you will also cut the cost of goods for U.S. industry, thereby making it more competitive in world markets. It's all there and more in Bovard's The Fair Trade Fraud. All you need is the political will and skill to bring it off.
Which leads to the third book. You and your opponent gave lip service to free trade during the campaign. Everyone does. Then they go out and vote for "temporary" quotas and tariffs in order to achieve a "level playing field" and pocket the campaign contributions from those businesses who benefit. What will you do without those contributions and how do you respond to the demagogues who claim it is unpatriotic to buy less expensive, higher-quality, foreign-made products? Study Churchill's book.
He knew more about the politics and economics of free trade by the time he was 32 (when For Free Trade was published) than any 10 politicians you will have to face in the next four years. The arguments haven't changed in 90 years, and the numbers are still on your side. There are more cost-conscious consumers and competitive U.S. companies who benefit from the lower prices of free trade than there are inefficient businesses who wrap themselves in the flag and ask the government to save them. Organize the competitive companies; mobilize consumers. Collect campaign contributions from the former and votes from the latter. Churchill will show you how. Plagiarize him. His book is in the public domain. And if the Library of Congress can't find its copy, I'll lend you mine if you promise a) not to mark it up and b) to return it in good condition in February. Good luck.
Contributing Editor Michael McMenamin is an attorney in Cleveland.
Charles Murray
Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain, by Richard A. Epstein, Harvard University Press, 1985. I grant that the possibility of George Bush or Bill Clinton actually getting all the way through Takings is, charitably, remote. But they should. Contrary to popular political rhetoric ("The United States is the only industrialized country in the world without a national…."), our country's excellence does not lie in becoming another Western European social democracy. Ronald Reagan had this one thing right: The United States is primarily not a geographic entity but the political expression of a few core ideas. The subtext of Epstein's intellectual tour de force is that those ideas are not rhetoric for the Fourth of July but are—or once were—the bones and muscle of the Constitution. It would be helpful to have a president who understood that.
Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Harper, 1935. This is not a joke. I read Little House to my youngest daughter a few months ago and was at least as engrossed as she was. Little House is not really fiction but a reminiscence of a real childhood and a common national experience. What comes home most forcibly to the modern reader is how much we once took for granted that people and neighbors could do, and would do, for themselves—and, in contrast, how pitifully small and cramped is the average politician's vision of the average citizen's capacity. We Americans like to think of ourselves this way. Perhaps we would like to live that way too.
There is also a delicious final touch to Little House, a tiny counterweight to the politically correct histories of the American West. Do you remember why Laura's parents had to abandon the farm they had carved out of the prairie? Because they had settled four miles inside lands that were granted to the Indians by treaty, and the U.S. Army forced the whites to leave.
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government, by Charles Murray, Simon & Schuster, 1988. OK, I understand that it's unseemly to choose one of my own books. But the point of In Pursuit was to lead people to think about the question, "What do we really want to accomplish?" in rigorous ways, applying it to the practical assessment of policy, and that is what being president is all about. It is a question neither Bush nor Clinton has visibly worried about in the past. It is time they did.
Charles Murray is the Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Charles Oliver
Finding three books that distilled all of the accumulated wisdom of mankind was hard. Finding three that would also appeal to a man who has neither the time nor the inclination to read fat books dealing with difficult ideas was nearly impossible.
Obviously, the first book on the list should be about economics. Voters consistently said that the economy was the most important issue in this year's election. Unfortunately, despite occasional bows to business, the president has never demonstrated that he understands how markets work. My first thought was to recommend Ludwig von Mises's Human Action. This exhaustive work starts with the basis of economic activity—individuals acting for their own ends—and explains in detail how markets work and why government interference keeps them from working. But the book, though clearly written, is long and complicated, one the president probably wouldn't pick up, much less finish. So instead I'm advising him to read Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. The best primer on economics, this book demolishes most of the fallacies the president will hear from his advisers.
The second big issue facing the country is race; divisions among various ethnic groups threaten to rip this country apart. I was tempted to pass along various books by Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Anne Wortham, and Stanley Crouch, but instead I advise the president to read Richard Epstein's new book, Forbidden Grounds. This sweeping book begins with the basic values of liberal society—freedom of contract and freedom of association—and shows how these values foster another liberal value, racial tolerance. Epstein then demonstrates how current civil-rights policies not only undermine freedom of contract and association but also promote racial division. Epstein's book should be the basis for a reevaluation of civil-rights law.
Deciding upon a third book proved to be the most difficult. Should I recommend something to counter all of the environmental doomsaying the president will undoubtedly hear from his advisers? Should I pass along a book outlining the benefits of free trade? What about foreign policy or defense?
I decided upon none of those options. Instead, I urge the president to read Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Why? First of all, it's a damned good read, the best of Heinlein's novels, so the president won't put it down. That's good because the first part of the book paints a believable portrait of how a truly free society would work. This book isn't abstract ideas but people, albeit fictional ones, dealing with problems and solving them without the government's help. Quite frankly, this book could do more to impress the value of freedom upon the president than any other I could recommend.
Charles Oliver is assistant editor of REASON.
Robert W. Poole Jr.
What has been most sorely lacking in the Bush administration is a basic vision, a philosophy of government. The most profound and important book on this subject in many years is Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions.
Sowell's inspiration was F. A. Hayek's 1945 essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society." Knowledge and Decisions is a book-length elaboration on that theme, drawing on the extensive body of knowledge produced during the '50s, '60s, and '70s in such fields as law and economics and public choice theory. The book's theoretical first half explains how knowledge is generated and used in society, the necessity of trade-offs (economic, social, and political), and the crucial importance of incentives in human organizations. Part II applies these principles to 20th-century trends in economics, law, and politics, showing how and why centralization of government fails to solve the problems it's intended to solve and creates a host of new ones. A thorough familiarity with these lessons would give the president a needed dose of humility about what government planning and programs can accomplish—plus a framework for shaping a new kind of presidential agenda.
Perhaps the most serious threat to Americans' well-being and prosperity today is the rise of pseudoscience—irrational attacks on foods, drugs, chemicals, energy supplies, and modern technology itself in the name of protecting us from cancer or saving the environment. The first book to document the perversion of science in the service of a new regulatory agenda was Edith Efron's vastly underappreciated 1984 book, The Apocalyptics. Efron's specific subject is cancer prevention, and she presents the book as an intellectual detective story: a journalist discovering and systematically documenting the gradual corruption of science in the service of environmental politics. The book's length can be intimidating, and its title may be off-putting. But Efron's message must be understood by policy makers, especially as the same type of pseudoscience now dominates far too much environmental and energy policy making.
Another issue high on any president's agenda must be urban policy. Yet until last year, most books about cities failed to acknowledge the profound changes that have taken place in urban form over the last two decades. Joel Garreau's Edge City is the first popular book to take seriously the shift of economic activity from traditional downtowns to suburbia. What makes Garreau's sometimes rambling account especially interesting is that he obviously began his research hostile to these changes but ended up discovering a highly decentralized market process at work—a process that reflects the way real people prefer to live and work. An urban policy based on trying to restore the predominance of traditional downtowns, served by traditional transit, is not only doomed to failure but also profoundly antidemocratic.
In recommending these three books, I take it for granted that the president-elect has already read David Osborne and Ted Gaebler's much-touted Reinventing Government. It reflects a "new paradigm" approach stressing choice, competition, cost-effectiveness, and accountability. While hardly laissez-faire, this approach would represent a welcome change of course.
Robert W. Poole Jr. is president of the Reason Foundation and publisher of REASON.
Virginia I. Postrel
Washington is a weirdly sterile place—the true home of the cultural elite, left and right—and the president is the most insulated person in America (with the possible exception of Michael Jackson). Reading should break the box and pull the president into the world where people don't all have identical suits, identical haircuts, and mostly identical ideas about what constitutes the good life.
For starters, I recommend two beautifully written books about the people who are transforming world business and world cultures: American Steel: Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt, by Richard Preston (Prentice-Hall, 1991), and The Outnation: A Search for the Soul of Japan, by Jonathan Rauch (Harvard Business School Press, 1992).
American Steel is an adventure, an absolutely riveting drama of the building of a minimill to make rolled steel with never-before-tried technology. This audacious undertaking is made all the more challenging by Nucor Corp.'s determination to do everything fast. The book has plenty to say about international and domestic competition—"man against man" in English-class jargon—but it is really about man against nature, about the joys and hazards of taming metal that's nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, "runny as water and as unpredictable as a cat."
And while Preston vividly portrays the romance of hot metal, American Steel is anything but romantic. A terrible accident destroys much of the mill and leaves a man to die a slow and painful death from burns. "Until you see the walls of a steel mill blown off and part of the roof blown away, the power of hot metal doesn't hit you." Neither I, nor I suspect the president, would be willing to take the risks that making steel requires. But some people relish them, and civilization is the better for it. The president should appreciate that. So should the risk-averse control freaks who populate Washington.
The Outnation is as tranquil as American Steel is hard driving. Less about trade, competitiveness, and international relations than about people, culture, and values, this tiny volume (180 pages, with photographs) has more insightful things to say about trade, competitiveness, and international relations than most books two or three times its length.
Those insights spring primarily from Rauch's willingness to look at Japan detail by detail instead of cramming an entire civilization—and a country of 125 million not-in-fact-homogenous individuals—into a tidy thesis for talk-show bookers. An enormously subtle book filled with well-chosen stories about real people, The Outnation appreciates and exposes the myths Japanese and Americans tell about our cultures and our differences. It is suffused with a sense of history and with a great appreciation for liberal values and why we value them. Reading it, we learn not only about Japan but about ourselves, where we come from, and, perhaps, where we're going.
Dedicated "to the unknown civilization that is growing in America," The Constitution of Liberty, by F. A. Hayek (University of Chicago Press, 1959), is three times as long as The Outnation, has no pictures, and tells no anecdotes. It is not journalism. But it is profoundly about "the real world" and, though philosophy, it is not abstract.
Hayek's is the nuanced world of history and action, in which knowledge emerges from experience and experimentation and principles are different from revealed axioms. The Constitution of Liberty is one of the wisest books ever written, the most appreciative of liberty, and the most distant from today's Washington—a place where people actually believe the man in the White House "creates jobs" and dictates culture. Entering Hayek's world, even for a chapter, would be a radical step out of the box.
Virginia I. Postrel is the editor of REASON.
Jonathan Rauch
Three books, Mr. President? I can think of three dozen, and I can think of one. High on a list of three dozen would certainly be Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations (Yale University Press, 1982), whose 10-year-old predictions today look depressingly accurate. Olson's hypothesis is that special-interest groups and their anticompetitive arrangements accumulate inexorably over time and gradually choke off economic and political vitality. Thus may postwar democracy, in America and elsewhere, seize up in much the way a man might choke on his own phlegm. Olson's hypothesis, though not uncontroversial, positively must be reckoned with, especially by a president, who needs to appreciate that pandering to interest groups is more dangerous than it seems.
Another among a handful would be Aaron Wildavsky's unheralded but fascinating The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism (The American University Press, 1991). Wildavsky looks at activists of seemingly quite different kinds, from land-use regulators to feminists to environmentalists to animal-rights advocates, and discovers a common cultural thread, namely the belief in the moral virtue of diminishing any given array of differences between people (or species). Most Americans believe in liberty and equality, but radical egalitarians are one-value people—like the antipodal radical libertarians, but much more influential."Egalitarians exist not to be satisfied," writes Wildavsky (italics his own). He will help show you what makes them tick.
But really there is only one book, on a list by itself. It was published in 1988 and has become a monument to the fact that liberalism still has millions of committed enemies, and they will hurt us if they can.
You ought to read The Satanic Verses and make sure everybody knows you are reading it. Then you should ensure that there will be no semblance of normal relations with Iran until the death sentence against Salman Rushdie is revoked. In 1989, George Bush's reply to the death sentence was of oatmeal consistency, and the White House has been silent on the matter ever since. Please do better. If the president of the United States does not stand stoutly beside those who exercise the right to criticize (as Rushdie's novel harshly and justly criticized both the Ayatollah Khomeini in particular and Islamic fundamentalism in general), then the world does not need him.
Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor of National Journal, is author of The Outnation: A Search for the Soul of Japan (Harvard Business School Press, 1992).
Jacob Sullum
It's tempting to recommend the works of important classical liberals or summaries of contemporary libertarianism. But I'm afraid these would be too easily dismissed as outmoded or radical. Instead I've selected three books that are provocative without being too threatening or alienating. Rather than produce instant converts, they should have a more subtle, long-term impact that may result in some salutary second thoughts.
Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross's Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Prentice-Hall, 1980) is, despite the forbidding title, quite readable (for a serious psychology book, anyway). Nisbett and Ross explore how people go wrong in making judgments about themselves and the world around them, mainly by relying too heavily on cognitive rules of thumb and by failing to understand or apply principles of statistics and probability that are familiar to scientists. The book has no obvious political bent, but its implications for public policy, especially with regard to regulation and risk assessment, are profound.
Another psychologist, Stanton Peele, has built a career on challenging the conventional wisdom about addiction. His Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out of Control (Lexington Books, 1989) is not a direct critique of the war on drugs, which may give his message a better chance of getting through. Like Thomas Szasz, Peele argues that the medical analogy has clouded our thinking about addiction and that we need to talk about people and responsibility rather than chemicals and diseases. He refutes many widely accepted myths about addiction, including the idea (accepted by a lot of Democrats and drug-policy reformers) that more money for treatment is the solution to "the drug problem."
Randy Barnett is not a psychologist, so far as I know. But he is the editor of and a contributor to The Rights Retained by the People (George Mason University Press, 1989), an attempt to understand the much-neglected Ninth Amendment. Although the book has a lot to say about liberty and individual rights—which you might think would be a turnoff for politicians—it draws on a wide range of perspectives, so it has a mainstream appearance.
Nevertheless, Barnett dares suggest that rights do not come from governments, that the Ninth Amendment might actually mean something, and that courts could even apply it in a principled fashion. Bold yet respectable, this book might plant a seed of doubt about the state's presumptions, or at least curiosity about our political heritage.
Jacob Sullum is associate editor of REASON.
Martin Morse Wooster
In asking this question, the editors of REASON are asking the president to do something that politicians rarely do—read for pleasure. Books are something most presidents avoid. Ronald Reagan read Tom Clancy, and John F. Kennedy enjoyed Ian Fleming novels, but Harry S. Truman was the last avid reader in the White House. Most presidents—and most politicians—subsist on a diet of words that consists of memos, government documents, and the occasional public-policy magazine.
So my first request would be that either George Bush or Bill Clinton find the time routinely to sit in a comfortable study full of books not directly related to his job. Most good writers are avid readers, and one of the reasons most politicians are incapable of giving a persuasive speech is that their "in" baskets largely consist of styleless mush. With that in mind, here are three books that will help the president sort through the issues of the day.
No better history of our sad and savage times exists than Paul Johnson's recently revised Modern Times (HarperCollins). Johnson wittily dissects the follies of dictators and statists in a stylish and decisive manner. Even though the age of tyrants has now mostly passed, Johnson's book is still essential for understanding how much of the world could have been deluded by fascism and communism.
Neither Ronald Reagan nor George Bush has done very much to alter the American welfare state, so Charles Murray's Losing Ground (Basic Books) is still essential, accurate, and necessary. Murray demolished the assumptions on which the welfare state was created, thus ensuring that welfare programs now have no intellectual base. Liberals have spent a great deal of time trying to refute Murray; they have found that his arguments are irrefutable.
Both Bush and Clinton want to reform American education, so they might learn something about how American education became as bureaucratic, sclerotic, and hierarchical as it is. There are not that many histories of education, but the best remains David Tyack's The One Best System (Harvard University Press, 1974). In this book, Tyack shows how misguided Progressives transformed American education from a decentralized system responsive to parental desires into a close-minded institution strongly resistant to change. The book is long out of print, but an enterprising reprint publisher should discover that this hard-to-find volume will have a wide audience.
Contributing Editor Martin Morse Wooster is REASON's magazine critic. His book on reforming public high schools will be published next year by the Pacific Research Institute.
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]]>Give me lever and a place to stand on, said boasting Archimedes, and I shall move the world. What is odd about his world of the classical Mediterranean is that for all its genius it didn't apply the lever, or anything much else, to practical uses. Applied technology, argues Joel Mokyr, was a Northern European accomplishment. The "Dark Ages" contributed more to our physical well-being than did the glittering ages of Pericles or Augustus.
From classical times we got toy steam engines and erroneous principles of motion. From the 9th and 10th centuries alone we got the horse collar, the stirrup, and the mold-board plow. From an explosion of ingenuity down to 1500 we got in addition the blast furnace, cake of soap, cam, canal lock, galleon, cast-iron pot, chimney, coal-fueled fire, cog boat, compass, crank, cross-staff, eyeglass, flywheel, glass window, grindstone, hops in beer, marine chart, nailed horseshoe, overshoot water wheel, printing press, ribbed ship, shingle, ski, spinning wheel, suction pump, spring watch, treadle loom, water-driven bellows, weight-driven clock, wee drop of whiskey, wheelbarrow, whippletree (see "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay"), and the windmill. Down to 1750 the pace merely slackened, without stopping. And then came "The Years of Miracles," as Mokyr calls them, 1750 to 1900.
In the end, the thing to be explained is the Industrial Revolution, which during a century and a half raised the bread, ships, and innocent amusement available to the ordinary person by a factor of 12. The Industrial Revolution, in Mokyr's view, isn't properly thought of as a late and sudden shift to capitalism. It was the culmination of a millennium of technological creativity. In the 1930s a British schoolboy, when asked on an examination to explain the Industrial Revolution, penned an immortal line: "About 1760 a wave of gadgets swept over England." Mokyr amends the child's wisdom: From about 900 to 1990 a wave of gadgets swept over Europe.
The Austrian economist Israel Kirzner has argued recently that profit is a reward for what he calls "alertness." Sheer—or as we say "dumb"—luck is one extreme. Hard work is the other. Alertness falls in between, being neither luck nor routine work. Pure profit, says Kirzner, earned by pure entrepreneurs, is produced by alertness.
Mokyr's story can be told with Kirzner's metaphors, to the advantage of both. As both emphasize, the systematic search for inventions can be expected in the end to earn only as much as its cost. The routine inventor is an honest workman but is worthy therefore only of his hire. The cost of routine improvements in the steam engine eats up the profit. It had better, or else the improvement isn't routine. Routine invention, as Mokyr says, isn't a free lunch. "The cold and calculating minds of Research-and-Development engineers in white lab coats worn over three-piece suits" created some of the inventions. But only some.
The classical economist down to the present says there is no free lunch. At the margin (and margins in the classical world are everywhere) no one earns supernormal returns. Classical economics lies behind the Marxoid view of the Industrial Revolution. The revolution, they say, entailed the sacrifice of the poor. The poor paid the price of industrialization. The parallel view among the anti-Marxoids is that it was, on the contrary, the rich who paid the necessary price, through their saving. Anyway, the classical theory is that someone had to sacrifice. You don't get something for nothing. Make more guns and you must make less butter. Scarcity reigns.
But the Industrial Revolution doesn't appear to have been a matter of scarcity and tradeoffs. Something happened beyond the grim sacrifice of one generation for the comforts of the next. There was, says Mokyr, "an increase in output that is not commensurate with the increase in effort and cost necessary to bring it about." The fact has been known in economics since the 1950s, when Moses Abramowitz and Robert Solow first drew attention to the "residual." The residual is the enrichment left over after routine investment has explained as much as it can. It is embarrassingly large.
Mokyr's book summarizes in a lucid and accessible way much of the attempt over the past decades to explain it, from Schumpeter's theory of great inventions through the cost-benefit studies by Robert Fogel, Nathan Rosenberg, and others in the New Economic History, down to the new institutionalism of Douglass North on the right and Alfred Chandler on the left (this last located, oddly, in the Harvard Business School), Mokyr brings the news that all these attempts to explain the residual by hard work have failed.
If hard work wasn't the cause of the Industrial Revolution, is the explanation to be found at the other extreme of Kirzner's spectrum? Was it sheer dumb luck? Mokyr turns over the notion that the revolution happened by luck and rejects it. After all, it happened in more than one place (in Belgium and New England as well as in Britain, for instance) but spread selectively (to Northern but not Southern Italy; to Japan and Korea but not China.)
Well, then, is it Kirzner's metaphor of "alertness" that explains Mokyr's "lever of riches"? Yes. Mokyr makes a distinction between microinventions (such as the telephone and the light bulb), which responded to the routine forces of research and development, and macroinventions (such as the printing press and the gravity-driven clock), which did not. He stresses throughout that both play a part in the story. Yet he is more intrigued by the macroinventions, which seem less methodical and, one might say, less economic. Guttenberg just did it, says Mokyr, and created a galaxy.
So Mokyr's story can be aligned with economic metaphors. But there is something missing in the metaphors and in the story, something needed to complete the theory. From an economic point of view, alertness by itself is highly academic, in both the good and the bad sense. It is both intellectual and ineffectual, the occupation of the spectator, as Addison put it, who is "very well versed in the theory of a husband or a father, and can discern the errors of the economy, business, and diversion of others better than those engaged in them."
If his observation is to be effectual, the spectator has to persuade a banker. Even if he is himself the banker he has to persuade himself, in the councils of his own mind. What is missing, then, from the theory of technological change is power. (Marxoids, rejoice.) Between the conception and the creation, between the invention and the innovation, falls the shadow. Power runs between the two. An idea without a bankroll is just an idea. In order for an invention to become an innovation the inventor must persuade someone with a bankroll.
This is as true of literary or scientific opportunity as it is of technological invention. Until he won the Goncourt Prize in 1919, the French didn't take Proust seriously. Until Saul Bellow put his imprimatur on William Kennedy's books, Kennedy (author of Ironweed) worked as a reporter on a bad newspaper. Intellectual bankers need to be persuaded as much as financial ones.
Mokyr understands this perfectly well, and calls it "openness to new information." He quotes a writer who contrasted the delightful stage of alertness with the less delightful stage of persuasion, which is "a struggle against stupidity and envy, apathy and evil, secret opposition and open conflict of interests, the horrible period of struggle with man, a martyrdom even if success ensues." Any academic or businessperson can supply instances. What matters, to put Mokyr's theme in rhetorical form, are the conditions for persuasion. Europe's fragmented polity made for plural audiences, by contrast with intelligent but stagnant China. An inventor persecuted by the Inquisition in Naples could move to Holland. "It seems that as a general rule…the weaker the government, the better it is for innovation."
Early in the book Mokyr asserts that there is no connection between capitalism and technology: "Technological progress predated capitalism and credit by many centuries, and may well outlive capitalism by at least as long." One doubts it. Capitalism was not, contrary to the Marxoid story that dominates the modern mind, a modern invention. As David Herihy, an expert on the Middle Ages, put it 20 years ago, "research has all but wiped from the ledgers the supposed gulf, once thought fundamental, between a medieval manorial economy and the capitalism of the modem period." And any idea requires capitalism and credit in order to become an innovation. The Yorkshireman who invested in a windmill in 1185 was putting his money where his mouth was, or else putting someone else's money there. In either case he had to persuade.
What makes alertness work, and gets it power, is persuasion. At the root of technological progress is a rhetorical environment that makes it possible for inventors to be heard. So the Industrial Revolution was rhetorical. It was the climate of persuasion that made Europe great.
The conclusion is pleasing, if it is true. Free speech leads to riches. The plain speaking that has characterized Europe since the dark ages is what has made it rich. No wonder that the nations where speech was free to a fault were the first to grow rich: Holland, Scotland, England, Belgium, and the United States. And no wonder glasnost pulls in tandem with perestroika, with Gorbachevian persuasion first of all.
Donald McCloskey is the John F. Murray Professor of Economics and professor of history at the University of Iowa and author of If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (University of Chicago Press).
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]]>Robert Fogel, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a towering figure in historical economics, has this to say about American slavery: It was not doomed. It had to be killed like a snake. The killing was a close thing: "Political forces, not economic ones, were the overriding factors in the destruction of slavery." The political forces depended on, of all things, religion. And the religion depended on individual people—old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness men and women—not on Progress or Capitalism or some other natural force shrieking aloud.
Fogel's book combines the best of economic history with the best of political and religious history. It gives the reader a short and lucid introduction to economics, demography, nutrition science, political science, British history, American history, Southern history, intellectual history, and Protestant theology. It teaches all these from a deeply moral point of view, namely, that we are responsible for our freedom. The book is a stunner.
But a story goes with it.
Back in 1974 Fogel and Stanley Engerman were victims of an academic riot. Their clumsily titled but finely researched book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery said what most historians of the subject already knew by then—that slavery was not an economic drain on the South. And it said what the historians should have figured out on their own—that an owner would not damage a slave whose purchase price was two or three times the average workingman's yearly income.
The notion that slaves were capital equipment offended some people in 1974, but not any professional historian. After all, that's how the slaveowners actually talked. A farmer does not buy a $50,000 tractor unless he reckons it will earn him something. And he does not damage the tractor after he buys it. That was the essence of the Fogel and Engerman book. The wonder is that it made so many people so angry.
In 1974, though, we had just come through an angry decade. Some of the anger had happened on college campuses, you may recall, and the professors were by then hardened to political thuggery. In the style of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's police force at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the academics who encountered Time on the Cross broke ranks and commenced flailing at Fogel and Engerman with any clubs they could get their hands on. Historians such as Herbert Gutman and a collective of angry economists on the left produced book-length replies of surprising violence. Time on the cross? No kidding.
Now a decade and a half later Fogel has replied, and he has passed beyond the critics to unify the old history with the new. Without Consent or Contract is merely the lead book of a set of four; the other three contain technical papers written by Fogel, Engerman, and their numerous students and collaborators. (Fogel wrote this book mostly as a sideline. His main project these days is a massive history of mortality and nutrition since the 17th century.)
The first half of Without Consent or Contract, describing the rise of slavery as a triumph of materialism, is a 200-page book on its own. It is weighty with new learning since 1974 on the condition of slaves and of the South. A great social scientist here invites the reader into the workshop.
Fogel writes clearly, and despite all provocations he is even-tempered throughout (probably because he has all the scholarly ammunition and can afford to be generous to his critics). He has won the debate, demonstrating beyond scientific doubt what was merely plausible in 1974: that slaves were well treated (better than Northern factory hands, for example), that slaves worked hard and well, that Southern agriculture was highly productive, that the South was prosperous under slavery—in short, that the system was not about to come crashing down of its own weight without abolitionist pressure.
The second half looks closely at that abolitionist pressure. Fogel tells a story of individuals who mattered, from William Wilberforce, the early British abolitionist, to William Garrison, Lewis Tappan, Preston Brooks, and numberless others. Mass events also mattered, such as the slowing of immigration late in the 1850s that kept the Know-Nothings loyal to the Republicans. But these too were often minor by the standard of movement history. Throughout the history of abolition, and especially in its last few years, Fogel writes, "the overarching role of circumstances in ultimate victory needs to be emphasized. There never was a moment between 1854 and 1860 in which the triumph of the antislavery coalition was assured."
Fogel is telling a common story: For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the battle was lost; for want of the battle, the kingdom was lost, and all for the want of a horseshoe nail. These days professional historians usually avoid this type of history for two reasons.
For one thing, the horseshoe-nail world is not stable. As students of "chaos theory" have pointed out, simple but unstable models can generate astonishingly complicated patterns, in which horseshoe nails and butterfly wings can have big consequences. They do in battles and in the weather. Fogel is making just such a point about the fall of slavery. American politics in the late 1850s, he says, depended on individual human wills. The slightest perturbation could have yielded a different history.
The trouble is that any old perturbation will do. The telling of the story becomes problematic if little things matter because there are so damned many little things. For example, some individual unknown to history might have had the power to stop the burning of the hotel in May 1856 that led to John Brown's outrages, but this individual failed to arrive in the posse (maybe he had a bad cold and was in bed). If this person had arrived, history might have taken a different turn, but we shall never know. It is so much nicer if one can attribute the fall of American slavery to, say, the self-interest of the bourgeoisie or the triumph of modernization rather than the actions, or lack of action, of millions of faceless individuals.
And that's the other reason the horseshoe-nail history is unpopular. It puts the individual with a moral choice at the center of history, or at least at the center of the periods and problems for which the nice linear models of big forces fail. It therefore enrages the left. The left wants individual generals and criminals and artists to be governed by social forces, the better for apparatchiki to govern them by formula. If the apparatchiki were so smart, of course, they would be rich; the economic objection to deterministic history does not occur to its proponents. Something is screwy with the notion that all history is predictable. Partly it may be, but there will be periods of individual creativity on which history will often turn.
Fogel's book makes us face up to the chaos without abandoning the gains from systematic modeling and measurement. Little things may indeed matter, and did in the fall of American slavery. It seems a paradox. Left-leaning students of slavery, hostile to quantification, end by reducing history to a formula and making blacks the serfs of their past. A quantitative economist, who has learned that religion matters to American history, ends by emphasizing the complexities of politics and the saliency of moral freedom.
Donald McCloskey is John F. Murray Professor of Economics and History at the University of Iowa. His book If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise will be published by the University of Chicago Press in September.
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