I wish Tom Humphrey had taken a critical view of J.S. Mill's less than
helpful or consistent assertions about the desirability of the
stationary state. I do ask my students to examine Mill's claims
critically when I teach Mill's writings on distribution. We always end
up rating him rather poorly. Indeed, Mill deserves Marx's criticism of
him as having engaged in "syncretistic compendia" when he veers off the
Smith-Ricardo principles, talking about the laws of distribution being
malleable.
This is how we go about the evaluation: What level of material
well-being would be judged "optimal" beyond which no more may be
acquired? Who decides that level? It's been more than a century when
Mill declared his views on the stationary state. Are we there yet?
Regarding the feeling of "happiness": Under which policy regime are
people more likely to feel "happy"; one in which the state dictates what
level of material well-being is the maximum for everybody or one in
which the state leaves people alone to pursue their own levels of
satiety? The 20th century gave us some good illustrations, where some
people even risked death to escape living under one regime for another.
The examples include former East Germany and West Germany, North vs
South Korea, China vs Hong Kong, Cuba vs neighboring islands, etc. Some
of these examples still persist!
J.S. Mill surely was afflicted by his socialist feelings when he wrote
on distribution. We do better to recognize the conflicts or
inconsistencies in his thought regarding those issues. Given that
incomes are earning from the production of goods and services that go
into defining people's well-being, how can we have equality of income
distribution if we all don't produce the same level of output? Are
people going to be happier if some of what they produce get taken from
them forcibly through taxation or otherwise to "share" with others so we
have equality in consumption?
James Ahiakpor
On 12/9/2014 7:40 AM, Thomas Humphrey wrote:
> John Stuart Mill, in Book 4, Chapter 6 of his Principles of Political
> Economy evidently sides with E. F. Schumacher's view that economic
> growth per se doesn't necessarily contribute to happiness or well
> being. Says Mill: "I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by
> those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of
> struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and
> treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social
> life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the
> disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress."
>
> Mill questioned "why it should be a matter of congratulations that
> persons who are already richer than one needs to be, should have
> doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no
> pleasure except as representative of wealth; or that numbers of
> individuals should pass over, every year, from the middle classes into
> a richer class. " On the contrary, Mill argues that "the best state
> for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one
> desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by
> the efforts of others to push themselves forward."
>
> Unlike Smith and Ricardo, Mill welcomed the advent of the classical
> stationary state where growth ceases. Mill states that after the
> zero-growth stationary state is reached what "is economically needed"
> to further boost aggregate well being is not "increased production"
> but rather "a better distribution."
--
James C.W. Ahiakpor, Ph.D.
Professor
California State University, East Bay
Hayward, CA 94542
(510) 885-3137
(510) 885-7175 (Fax: Not Private)
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