I’ve finished Hazlitt and Heilbroner & Thurow, and am about 100 pages into Mankiw’s intro to econ textbook. The difficulty I’m feeling tonight as I write this, and as I imagine I’ll continue to feel, is that this foundational reading doesn’t (and won’t) always have a directly apparent connection to writing instruction. So I’m not sure whether I should keep trying to make the connection, or just tell myself to relax because it’s foundational work and so it doesn’t necessarily have to connect in obvious ways.
Still, for what it’s worth, I’ll try to keep at least a tenuous connection tonight. Mankiw argues that high living standards are a result of high productivity; that high productivity causes high living standards. I would argue, rather, that high productivity is a component of a high living standard: one does not cause the other, but is a part of the same life-environment as the other.
Consider, say, the writing classroom at an expensive private college, as opposed to the writing classroom at an inexpensive community college. Expensive private college has a computer lab with new machines, maybe wireless computing, fancy applications for document production and circulation. Inexpensive community college has a classroom with desks. In terms of the “work” of writing instruction, which classroom will be more productive? Documents will circulate more easily and in less time in the expensive private college: the students there will have what Mankiw terms high productivity. I certainly won’t argue with Mankiw that they will probably enjoy a higher standard of living later in life than most students who graduate from the community college — but it isn’t because of their zeal and industriousness.
Couple this to Mankiw’s assertion that “When the government redistributes income from the rich to the poor, it reduces the reward for working hard.” The tacit assumption is that the continuum between wealth and poverty is congruent with the continuum between industriousness and laziness. Certainly a pleasant and comfortable assumption for a Harvard economist to make. My question for Mankiw would be: if high living standards are a result of high productivity, what is high productivity a result of?
I figure it’s no big revelation that the self-justifying logic of privilege gets slippery at times. Mankiw sets up the same sets of spurious binaries that Hazlitt does, one case in point being his tactic of portraying conservative economists as “realists” and people who make economic policy recommendations to combat societal ills as dreamy pie-in-the-sky liberals. Mankiw, in an example of “how economists think,” compares two statements: “minimum wage laws cause unemployment” and “we should raise the minimum wage.” The first statement is positive or descriptive; the second, normative. Mankiw uses the example to suggest that economists look at the world in terms of how it is, and not how it should be, and that this is right and proper. Of course, by privileging the first statement over the second, Mankiw makes it seem as if it’s quite scientific to suggest that minimum wage laws are a bad thing (which is precisely what Hazlitt does), and it’s dreamy and unscientific to advocate raising them (which is also precisely the position Hazlitt takes).
Which is complete nonsense. Mankiw and Hazlitt are making policy recommendations; they just don’t spell them out. It’s quite clear that Mankiw and Hazlitt would both agree with the statement, “We should eliminate the minimum wage,” without any caviling about normative or descriptive qualities. Behind the normative statement “we should raise the minimum wage” are all sorts of descriptive statements in the history of union relations in this country about how being exploited for pennies really, really sucks in many, many different ways, many of them far more permanent and concrete than monthly unemployment figures, although perhaps more difficult to put in a pretty graph.
Basically, Mankiw and Hazlitt are taking the rhetorical privilege of calling themselves “realists” by pointing to the appearance that they do not make policy recommendations, but only make observations about “how the world is,” and they then use that rhetorical privilege as a basis for making policy recommendations. They ignore the fact that those who advocate raising the minimum wage make those normative statements on the basis of other descriptive statements about the world.
What’s the rhetorical term for comparing apples and oranges?
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