Larry Moss's learned review of Margaret Schabas's *Natural Origins of
Economics* is stimulating, and immensely instructive. I wish he had
nitpicked a bit more at some of her too-sweeping allegations.
1. To say that economics has become "steadily more secular" is to imply it
was not already so during The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. The
Physiocrats were not as militantly anti-clerical as their associate
Voltaire, but part of the same culture that finally spawned the American and
French Revolutions, and led to our First Amendment. Adam Smith dismissed
preachers as "ghostly practitioners" and would disestablish the Church.
2. Moss quotes Hume that reason is only the slave of passion. Pareto wrote
the same a century later. Some of Knight's sayings could be interpreted that
way; Samuelson was capable of dismissing certain good economic policy ideas
because the public would never accept them. Many economists have swung with
the passions of politics from Hooverites to Keynesians to neocons ... it's
on the record.
3. "Victorian" economists, including Mill, Wicksteed, Jevons and Marshall,
are said to have severed economics from nature. One could certainly say that
of the American J.B. Clark, but was it not Jevons who sounded an early alarm
about running out of coal; and who tied business cycles to sunspots?
Marshall's Principles contains a succinct explanation of how the scarcity of
urban sites leads to high buildings, and Marshall supported Lloyd George's
1909 Budget with its proposed tax on land values, complete with a strong
statement on how to separate land values from building values. Wicksteed's
work on distribution retains the 3 classical factors of production, although
it is true that in the interests of mathematical elegance he makes parcels
of land just as malleable as doses of labor, which calls for some suspension
of disbelief. As for Mill, his last cause was the Land Tenure Reform
Association, where he joined forces with Alfred Russel Wallace the pioneer
evolutionist who went on to publish *Land Nationalization* in 1882.
4. Moss corrects Schabas for apparently leaving the impression that modern
economics has entirely left out nature. He might have strengthened his point
by citing the growing literature on resource and environmental economics. If
he had, though, he might also have deplored the compartmentalization of such
studies from what specialists in "core" micro and macro economics modestly
call "mainstream" economics, which remains as abstracted from earthly
realities as the Laputans that Swift had Gulliver visit in his travels.
Respectfully,
Mason Gaffney
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