Some more really basic assumptions. I’m most of the way through Heilbroner and Thurow’s Economics Explained, and less than halfway through Hazlitt’s very slim 1946 Economics in One Lesson. The reason Hazlitt is taking me so long, as I noted before, is that his writing combines the commonsense rhetoric often associated with conservative ideologues with a snarling contempt for the underprivileged worthy of a robber baron. He despises labor unions, government-assisted mortgages, aid to farmers, and any sort of public spending: blasting the Tennesee Valley Authority, he writes that “we must make an effort of the imagination to see the private power plants, the private homes, the typewriters and radios that were never allowed to come into existence because of the money that was taken from people all over the country to build the photogenic Norris Dam” (25).
While it may be in large part because I’m much more liberal in outlook than Hazlitt, I also found many of his arguments frustratingly illogical, or relying on a double standard or bait-and-switch tactics. On page 43, he refers to a fallacious (according to him) “belief that there is just a fixed amount of work to be done in the world,” and yet all of his earlier arguments (including the one he mounts against the TVA, as seen above) rely on the assumption that there is just a finite amoung of capital in the world. According to Hazlitt, if one person has money, that money has to have come out of someone else’s pocket; enriching one person makes another person poorer. Economics as a zero-sum game.
I might suggest contra Hazlitt that in today’s society, work is capital in many ways. (Is that a Marxist comment?) People spend time to produce culture, and culture (I think) is becoming a much larger industry than manufacturing. (Think about art, about movies, about writing, et cetera.) And yet, as soon as I write that, I look at it and think it looks way too facile; I’m doing some sort of harmful and foolish oversimplification, and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is right now. (Part of the problem may be that I’m really sleepy.) Just another indication that I need to learn more about labor economics.
Anyway. So the question Hazlitt raises for me is this: Are either capital or labor finite? What are the results of thinking of them as finite or not finite? What does it mean for the economy in general and for individuals in particular? How do labor and capital move today, in our post-Fordist economy? What do those movements look like in a computer-enabled writing classroom?
The split between looking at the economy in general and individuals in particulars seems like a key difference between Hazlitt and Heilbroner & Thurow. Hazlitt seems consistently concerned with the general welfare, while Heilbroner & Thurow seem to show a more local concern for the individual. Is this just the economic version of the old, simplistic distinction drawn between conservatives and liberals; concern for the republic versus concern for the individual? Sounds like it.
In any case: at least I’m starting to get at an awareness of the ideological underpinnings of two (somewhat) contemporary strands of economic thought. I’ll have to watch for the same thing when I’m reading Marxist economists, and maybe I can apply any distinctions I can make in the economic context to the ideologies associated with composition and computers.
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