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[NOTE: Any responses or votes for others? One of the other major
newspapers/magazines named Karl Marx the thinker of the
millennium. -- RBE]
The following article on the greatest economist of the millennium was
published in the Canberra Times on January 4, 2000. It was a follow up to
the article on the ten most important economists of the century published
two weeks before.
The Greatest Economist of the Millennium
To choose the greatest economist of the past thousand years to some extent
invites the question whether the study of economics has even existed over
that span of time.
Economic questions have certainly been matters of the deepest consideration
for as long as humans have had commercial relations. Hammurabi's Code, the
first recorded attempt at a written system of law, sought to fix prices.
Aristotle's arguments against the charging of interest remained an obstacle
to economic development for more than fifteen hundred years.
But the actual attempt to isolate an economic system from within the
on-going blur of events, and then make judgements about what ought to be
done, is probably no older than the sixteenth century. It was not until
then
that the first pamphleteers attempted to understand the structure of the
economies in which they lived and to persuade governments about the
policies
they ought to adopt. These were the ancestors of the economists of today.
Who then was the greatest economist of the millennium? In my view it was
John Stuart Mill (1806-73) whose great work, his Principles of Political
Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, was first
published in 1848. There were to be seven editions during Mill's life and
it
was used as a text, with few concerns about its antiquity, well into the
twentieth century.
The year of publication of Mill's Principles is one of the most significant
in world history. It was the year of European revolution and in that year
and for that reason Karl Marx (who is definitely not the runner up)
published his Communist Manifesto. The contrasting visions of Marx and Mill
were to reverberate down the succeeding years in a battle for the
allegiance
of the whole of the human race, a battle which has not ended even to this
day.
To Marx the unit of analysis was the economic class to which one belonged.
To Mill, what mattered was the individual.
The world of Marx was a world of class conflict in which the capitalist
class, the owners of the means of production, exploited those who laboured
but earned barely enough to keep alive.
The world as seen by Mill was strangely similar to the one inhabited by
Marx, but with a recognition that an economic system based on personal
liberty was one in which even those ground down by the burdens of poverty
could have their material wellbeing vastly improved and their political
freedoms at the same time preserved.
In one of the most remarkable passages ever written, listen to Mill's
judgement on whether the world as he knew it, if it could not be made to
change, was preferable to a system in which all property was communally
held.
"If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism with all its
chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings and
injustices; if the institution of private property necessarily carried with
it as a consequence, that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we
now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labour ... if this or
Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of
Communism would be but as dust in the balance."
The twentieth century has been a war of ideologies in which the rights of
the individual have been crushed time and again by the dictates of the
state. Both the Nazis and the Communist dictatorships ruthlessly suppressed
human rights in the name of a higher truth.
The cold war was fought over little more than the structure of the economic
system. Massive damage was inflicted on large swaths of the world's
political landscape due to the attempts made to turn collectivist economic
theories into a living reality.
Indeed, much of what is now called the third world continues to live in
desperate poverty because of the introduction of central direction into
their economies, an approach to solving the economic problem which has
never
yet worked in practice and whose continuation will guarantee poverty for so
long as such attempts persist.
There is, of course, much we have learned since his time that makes Mill an
imperfect guide to the operation of the economic system, although there are
many worse being written even now. His theory of value, to which he
believed
nothing need ever be added, is the most famous instance of Mill having been
superseded by the subsequent work of a later generation of economists.
Yet at the start of the new millennium, we live in the world bequeathed to
us by Mill. The politics of On Liberty united with the basic propositions
of
his economics of limited government, free contract and individual
initiative
provide the blueprint for a future filled with hope and the promise of a
lasting prosperity.
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