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Amazon.com Books
Malvin, VINE VOICEReveals the intellectual foundations of the conservative movement, May 23, 2009Giordano Bruno"Invisible Hands" by Kim Phillips-Fein is an illuminating account of conservatism's rise from obscurity to become America's predominant ideology during the latter part of 20th century. Combining impressive scholarly research with profound insights into American culture, politics and history, Ms. Phillips-Fein's brilliant work reveals the intellectual foundations of the conservative movement as it has rarely been seen or understood before. The result is a fascinating and highly accessible book that should appeal to a wide audience of inquisitive readers.
Ms. Phillips-Fein recounts how America once perceived conservatism as a mere representation of the upper class' narrow self-interests. She recalls how the collapse of the economy during the Great Depression and its stabilization by the New Deal led to a widely-held consensus that the capitalist system required an interventionist government to function properly, if at all. In fact, the author recounts how some of the conservative-flavored political and public relations projects promoted at that time were rebuffed by a citizenry that was highly skeptical of businesspeople and valued the role of unions and government in securing their economic lives.
Interestingly, Ms. Phillips-Fein suggests that the presumption of an unassailable Keynesian worldview led to increasing levels of mathematical abstractionism in many university economics departments; whereas upstart conservative economists such as Ludwig Von Mises, Friederch Von Hayek and Milton Friedman could remain committed to an economics that retained a strong socio-political identity. Ms. Phillips-Fein shares how individuals such as Ayn Rand, William F Buckley and Billy Graham along with conservative think tanks including the American Enterprise Institute drew inspiration from the conservative economists and gained attention by defining the New Deal as a socialist threat to individual freedom. The author profiles the extraordinary carreer of Lem Boulware who is credited with architecting General Electric's effective and widely influential strategy of union busting and human resource management. While Ms. Phillips-Fein writes that the conservative political project remained unfulfilled as the voting public remained committed to the New Deal on account of its success in ensuring the nation's continued economic expansion and prosperity, she writes that the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign enabled an activist conservative constituency to make significant, long-lasting inroads into the Republican Party.
Ms. Phillips-Fein demonstrates that the convergence of social issues with conservative economics, along with the growing failures of New Deal liberalism to resolve the intractable economic crises of the 1970s, eventually led to the political ascendancy of conservatism starting with the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency in 1980. Among the influential persons who shaped events in this period -- including Arthur Laffer, George Gilder, Joseph Coors, Jack Kemp, Justin Dart, and many others -- Jesse Helms emerges as a pivotal figure for successfully fusing the rhetoric of free markets with the politics of racial segregation, thereby winning over large numbers of southern white voters to the conservative cause. A political realignment was ultimately achieved by gaining the support of religious organizations such as the Moral Majority who leveraged white working-class discomfort with public school integration, busing and other cultural issues into a more generalized hostility against big government. Ms. Phillips-Fein suggests that the Bush Sr., Clinton and Bush Jr. administrations subsequently affirmed the conservative consensus as unions found themselves steadily losing influence and with business lobbyists increasingly shaping the legislative agenda, think tanks defining major issues in the media, and the contributions of businesspeople valued and esteemed.
Today, as we find ourselves witness to yet another financial collapse of the capitalist system and evidence of an increasingly post-racial American society marked by the election of Barack Obama, it might seem that the era of conservative politics is over. But the perspective gained from Ms. Phillips-Fein's book suggests that conservatives will continue to find audiences to market their solutions as long as economic self-interest and social anxieties persist; in this light, to underestimate the appeal of conservative ideas might well be a perilous mistake.
I highly recommend this remarkably insightful, informative and entertaining book to everyone.
S Wood (Scotland) - See all my reviewsThat Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, July 7, 2009
...which our former First Lady so fatuously denounced in defense of her wandering spouse, wasn't really such a flight of fancy. After all, the entire history of partisan politics in America began with the conspiracy of Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin and others which came to be known as the Democratic Republican Party. Author Kim Phillips-Fein presents detailed and thoroughly convincing evidence, in this eye-opening book, that `conspiratorial' activities among a small group of American businessmen opposed to the goals and values of New Deal liberalism succeeded, over decades, in building a political movement and
"....changing the world. Long before the `culture wars' of the 1960s sparked the Republican backlash against cultural liberalism, these high-powered individuals actively resisted New Deal economics and sought to educate and organize their peers [i.e. wealthy businessmen] as a political force. They fundraised, held conferences, supported sympathetic scholars and media outlets, founded institutes, fought unions, and recruited candidates for high office -- all with the aim of rescuing America, and their profit margins...."
Author Phillips-Fein, please understand, does not mean to imply that such conspiracy is inherently malicious or misbehavior. Working for one's ideals behind the scenes is obviously a democratic right, indeed, the properest behavior of an individual in a political society. Nevertheless, a very disturbing tale is documented in this book: of deception and hypocricy; of corruption of the electoral, judicial, and legislative processes; of the ruthless use of power and money; of indifference to the welfare of ordinary people; of ideological fanaticism; of the exploitation of dangerous social divisions for political advantage; of skillfully camouflaged Class Warfare against the `lower' classes and their champions; of plutocracy in the saddle.
William Baroody? Lemuel Boulware? Ralph Cordiner, Pierre du Pont, Clarence Manion, Leonard Read, Richard Viguerie, F. Clinton White? How many of these names are familiar to most of us, and yet they were all movers and shakers of American politics without ever holding office or confronting an election.
ACU? American Conservative Union! AEA, later AEI? American Enterprise Institute! American Liberty League, Business Roundtable, Cato Institute, Committee for Economic Development, Foundation for Economic Education, Hoover Institution, J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust, Manion Forum of Opinion, Mont Pelerin Society, NAIB, NAM, NCAC, NICB, NRWC, Olin Foundation, Ripon Society, and oh yeah, the John Birch Society, let's not forget! These and many others, of transient or permanent influence, were the frontline agencies of the capitalists' crusade against New Deal liberalism. Often the directors and spokesmen they supported turned out to be the campaign managers, advisors, powers behind the thrones of elected "leaders."
This is a difficult book to review! I feel I'd need to transcribe half the text of it to do it justice. There's so much that I didn't know in it. So much that I suspected but couldn't prove! So many aha! moments of history revealed! Readers over thirty? You think you know what happened? This is a `story' you'd better read!
Let's spot a few key pages:
Page 10: In July 1934, the du Pont brothers organized the Liberty League, a "property-holders' association to disseminate information as to the dangers to investors posed by the New Deal...." which they hoped "would be able to make alliance with other organizations... that defended the Constitution, such as the American Legion and even the Ku Klux Klan."
Page 57: "The businessmen of the NAM, those who contributed to the Mont pelerin Society, the small manufacturers and retired executives and management men who resnted the power of unions -- all reacted to Eisenhower's endorsement of the basic principles and framework of the New Deal with shocked dismay. Few went as far as Robert Welch... founder of the John Birch Society, who suggested that Eisenhower was literally a communist agent..." [Sound familiar in 2009, when right wing voices are screaming that Barack Obama is another communist agent, i.e. another Eisenhower?] There is no question that a labor union is as much a `conspiracy' as the Chamber of Commerce. Blame isn't the issue here. Anti-union stances and actions have been one of the contants of the Conservative movement, and they have been painfully effective. From Eisenhower's blandly supportive stance toward unionism, to Reagan's vigorous anti-labor interventions, the Republican/conservative movement has used fair and unfair tactics, honest expression and dishonest media manipulation, to curtail the struggles of labor and the employees of America to improve their economic status.
Pages 72/73: The alignment of libertarian capitalist ideology with conservative Christian, and later fundamentalist Christian, beliefs has older, deeper roots than most people now suppose. The Mont Pelerin Society and "The Family" have interlocking visions... and donors. Here's Abraham Vereide: "There has always been one man or a small core who have caught the vision for their country and become aware of what `a leadership led by God' could mean spiritually to the nation and the world." the presidency of George W Bush would seem to have been exactly what Vereide had in mind.
Page 84/85: The author turns to the example of the Manion Forum to reveal how parallel capitalist/libertarian ideology has always run to racism, to the perverted social Darwinism that rages against "the descent of the Nation into the Marxist Welfare state." Funny isn't it, how libertarianism and eugenicism can blend in operation... Racist and rabid anti-communist Clarence Manion was one of the founders of William Buckley's National Review, while Buckley hismelf donated money to the manion Forum.
Some much material! Let's leap toward the present, to 1971:
Pages 156/165: Super-rich department store magnate Eugene Sydnor asked his lawyer friend Lewis Powell, his neighbor in Richmond VA, to write a "memorandum for the Chamber of Commerce, outlinig a thoroughgoing political strategy that the business community could use to confront" the threats of liberalism. Powell complied with a bold document titled The Attack on the Free Enterprise System, in which he denounced not only "extremists from the left [but also] perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." Among the measures Powell advocated was... JUDICIAL ACTIVISM: "The judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change." Two months after the confidential circulation of Powell's memorandum, Richard Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court; in the confirmation hearings, Powell was reticent -- read `hypocritical' -- about his ideological positions, making no mention of his Chamber of Commerce memorandum. In fact, that document was not made public until columnist Jack Anderson leaked portions of it in the Washington Post. Powell, the stealth candidate, was of course confirmed and played a major role in Court decisions thwarting campaign finance reform.The culmination of the movement Phillips-Fein chronicles was obviously the election of Ronald Reagan and the installation of anti-New Deal economic conservatism as the orthodoxy of American political thinking, a semi-consensus that lasted through the presidencies of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. That it finally collapsed under the second Bush is beyond the scope of this book.
This is the most enlightening study of American political history I've read in decades. Don't dismiss it on the basis of any established political alignments! It's not an attack on the right wing. It's not a doctrinaire manifesto of any faction. It's good, honest scholarship.
Todd Carlsen - See all my reviewsFifty Years of American "Conservatism", July 3, 2013
New York University professor, occasional contributor to the Baffler and The Nation, Kim Phillips-Fein takes as her subject in "Invisible Hands" the history of the modern Conservative movement in the United States from its origins in opposition to the New Deal to the inauguration of the Reagan administration.
While I'm pretty sure Phillips-Feins sympathies are to the left, she manages to deal with the motley crew of Conservative activists, politicians and businessmen who make up the Conservative movement during the half century she covers in an impartial manner. She details the movement from its roots in opposition to the New Deal: that particular change in the political environment after the inauguration of FDR in 1933 to one that was conducive to the growth in the influence of ordinary working people (in particular their Unions), and a growing trend for (some) politicians to recognise that the ordinary Americans interest was not always identical to that of American Businesses.
The story continues with the second world war (during which conservative/business interests regained a degree of power and influence), the gradual post-war roll back of Unions and Liberal politics during the oppressive years of McCarthyism, through to the Goldwater run for the presidency in 1964. Goldwater failed in his run, but the victor - Lyndon Johnson - failed to keep out of Vietnam: the growing involvement in that miserable War and the financial costs undermined his "Great Society" program, the last substantial attempt by an American President to govern with a relatively Liberal domestic policy (which in a European sense would be roughly equivalent to a diluted version of Social Democracy). Within fifteen years of the Goldwater failure, the movement is backed by serious money, has parlayed that money into substantially successful attempts to win the war of ideas (through well funded think tanks and foundations), turned the focus of popular politics away from socio-economic issues to those of the so-called "Culture Wars", and has a congenial figurehead for the 1980 election campaign: Ronald Reagan. The rest is another story. . .
"Invisible Hands" is also excellent on the individuals involved from the ostensibly cerebral Milton Friedman and the Mont-Pelerin Society of von Hayek and von Mises, to the more combative characters such as Jesse Helms and Barry Goldwater. But this is far more than a study of individuals: it tells the story of the movement as it grew, and how the connections between the disparate elements of the movement coalesced (she plausibly makes a case for the failed Goldwater run for president in 1964 being critically important to that process) eventually leading to the Reagan presidency.
Kim Phillips-Fein has written a fine and scholarly work, which contains a substantial amount of research, is written in a clear and comprehensible manner, and it's her first book length publication. It is one I'd thoroughly recommend to anyone who has an interest in how Politics actually functions as opposed to the simplified storytelling which by and large passes for news.
Another excellent book on American Conservatism I'd recommend, though it leaps forward to the post-Reagan era, would be Thomas Franks account of Conservatives in power: The Wrecking Crew.
Outstanding Book on the Laissez-Faire Conservative Movement Culminating in Ronald Reagan,November 6, 2011 This is an excellent and unbiased history from the 1930s onward of the efforts by a group of laissez-faire business leaders, such as the du Ponts and Lemuel Boulware, to react against the New Deal (some would say overreacting), promote a new vision of anti-government and pro-business ideas, and build a broader coalition beyond them that could win elections. It explains their activities, such as the Liberty League and conservative think tanks, and the economic philosophies they espoused, such as the respected Nobel Prize winning economist F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, the Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, and the more extreme philosophy (some would call it extreme selfishness) of Ayn Rand called objectivism. It explains the electoral coalitions with religious groups and other social conservatives, which turned the southern states from Democrat to Republican. This culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan. This is an exceptional history of the conservative movement in America in the second half of the 20th Century to roll-back unions, promote free exercise of business competition, and what Nobel Prize Winning economist Paul Krugman called "the great compression" in The Conscience of a Liberal. It also is an essential history of Ronald Reagan. Highly recommended! My only quibble is that it could have said more about the Great Society. This book received starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.
Kirkus Reviews called this book "The riveting story of how economic conservatism became one of the leading strands in American political thought... from its birth as a big-business reaction to the New Deal to its zenith as a key element of the Reagan Revolution in the early '80s... focusing instead on the unique individuals behind the movement... the wealthy du Pont family... Friedrich von Hayek... big-business associations as the Liberty League and the National Association of Manufacturers... the colorful characters who brought conservatism into mainstream popular culture during the '50s, including National Review editor William F. Buckley and novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand... General Electric executive Lemuel Ricketts Boulware... GE employee Ronald Reagan... the merging of economic conservatism, anticommunism and religious and moral thought... evangelists like Jerry Falwell... Barry Goldwater... Reagan... Engaging history."
Publisher Weekly said, "Looking beyond the usual roster of right-wing Christians, anticommunist neo-cons and disgruntled working-class whites, this incisive study examines the unsung role of "a political movement of businessmen" in leading America's post-1960s rightward turn. Historian Phillips-Fein traces the hidden history of the Reagan revolution to a coterie of business executives, including General Electric official and Reagan mentor Lemuel Boulware, who saw labor unions, government regulation, high taxes and welfare spending as dire threats to their profits and power. From the 1930s onward, the author argues, they provided the money, organization and fervor for a decades-long war against New Deal liberalism--funding campaigns, think tanks, magazines and lobbying groups, and indoctrinating employees in the virtues of unfettered capitalism. Theirs was also a battle of ideas, she contends; the business vanguard nurtured conservative thinkers like economist Friedrich von Hayek and his secretive Mont Pellerin Society associates, who developed a populist free-market ideology that persuaded workers to side with their bosses against the liberal state. Combining piquant profiles of corporate firebrands with a trenchant historical analysis that puts economic conflict at the heart of political change, Phillips-Fein makes an important contribution to our understanding of American conservatism."
Booklist (Gilbert Taylor) said, "Although many books have been written about American conservatism, most concern its cultural or political manifestations, and almost all bring bias to the subject. The contribution of Phillips-Fein to this literature is distinctive in two respects: she maintains neutrality and produces original research on American business executives and public-relations specialists who created conservative organizations from 1933 to 1980. Although scholarly in tone (her work originated as a dissertation), the book is highly readable for its absorbing historical background about contemporary conservative advocacy outfits, such as the American Enterprise Institute. In their variety of characters and degrees of indignation about the iniquities of the New Deal and its descendants, the individuals introduced range from the reasonable to the strange, which enlivens a narrative of free-market conservatism's incubation in the 1940s and 1950s. Detecting a union-busting agenda behind the liberty-proclaiming rhetoric of business leaders, Phillips-Fein nevertheless allows them a fair hearing about their roles in, ultimately, the electoral victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980. A valuable addition to the history of conservatism."
I also highly recommend the related The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism for another perspective of this same history, except it is centered on Ronald Reagan. That unbiased book was written by a Republican attorney who worked in the Reagan administration. Also read Ronald Reagan's autobiography An American Life to learn a more nuanced interpretation of his views than you would think. He says he was not trying to undo the New Deal and he idolized FDR. He said government went beyond what FDR had intended and Reagan's main quibble was with 1960 liberalism. To learn how free markets are best most of the time in a way that anyone can understand, read Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science.
Also read The Conscience of a Liberal by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman with an alternative interpretation of why Reagan Democrats switched to voting Republican (namely a reaction to 1960s and 1970s liberalism and civil rights).
For context, read a reputable biography of FDR or a reputable history of the New Deal, warts and all, (not one of the smear books of the New Deal) to learn more about the periods preceding this economic conservative movement to know how it came about. Learn the real mistakes and enduring achievements of the New Deal. Also read a good biography of Dwight Eisenhower to learn about a more moderate and mainstream Republican view from that era.
As a contrast, an interesting book from the Eisenhower era is How to Be Rich, written by the richest business man in the world at the time, J. Paul Getty. It accepts the more moderate view of mainstream Republicans and makes an interesting contrast to the views of the du Ponts and Boulware. Also, The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie and The Gospel of Wealth by Carnegie is strikingly different. The conservative movement described in the book was definitely a departure from that thinking.
William R. Neil (Rockville, MD United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
Where Fundamentalist Religion Meets Fundamentalist Economics, January 12, 2010
No deep appreciation of the dynamics of the American political economy in 2009-2010 is possible without understanding the importance of economists Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, as well as religious fundamentalists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Throw in some fascinating background on George Gilder, and the politics of the past two years begin to make much more sense, and we have Kim Phillips-Fein to thank for that. And for pointing out what American Progressives probably don't want to hear, but need to: that "the most striking and lasting victories of the right have come in the realm of political economy rather than that of culture."
Phillips-Fein also makes two fascinating observations about these Austrian economists in Invisible Hands, important for the major concerns of this essay: how The Market has assumed religious dimensions and attributes, especially here in the United States, and how it "assumes" different "moods" or attributes - projections if you would prefer - of its human inventors, recalling our wonderment at the anthropomorphic projections upon the Greek or Roman deities, or the Calvinist constructions of the 16th century. The first is Hayek's admission, in his famous Road To Serfdom, that "at times modern man would feel subordinated to the market and would chafe against economic forces that he could not control. But he argued that submission to the marketplace was infinitely preferable to deference to a ruler. `Unless this complex society is to be destroyed, the only alternative to submission to the impersonal and seemingly irrational forces of the market is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men.'"(Page 37.) Now that's what I call "market fundamentalism," with not much room left for the politics of democracy (freedom in his view, comes from The Market), much less Social Democracy with its mixed economy and deep and open involvement in a fully recognized "political economy." The other stunning comment here, on what I will call the "brittle Prometheanism" of The Market, is the attribute that insists upon "hands off!" from government interventions. It has two features: that the market is spontaneous, "a complex system that came into existence without forethought or planning...the robust force that generated all of life and human production and a terribly fragile entity, threatened on all sides...in desperate need of protection..."(Ibid.)
Although there is a great deal else that happens to build conservative momentum inside the economics profession, especially the development of the rational expectations school and the efficient market hypothesis, readers wondering about our nation's strange 40 years' wanderings towards the edge of the economic cliff won't stray far from the path if they will remember these key features bequeathed by the Austrians. Yet as important as they for our understanding, they nonetheless don't tell the full story. For that, we must turn to the nature of the response from the religious fundamentalists to what is going on in the turbulent world of the 1970's - economic events, certainly, but also cultural ones as well.
Building the Conservative Coalition
As Kim Phillips-Fein lays out for us in Invisible Hands, political conservatives, especially business conservatives, were lamenting their lack of a grass-roots movement to counteract the power of labor which grew out of the organizing successes of the 1930's and the legal sanction bestowed by the New Deal. Protestant churches were the logical place to turn, but the climate in their pulpits, in the wake of the New Deal, and indeed, ever since the rise of the Social Gospel in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Progressive Era, was not very receptive. "The basic argument was that Christianity had too long been associated with altruism, selflessness, and a devotion to helping the poor - principles that might lead good Christians to advocate government intervention in the economy. To counter this idea, Spiritual Mobilization insisted that Christianity was rightly associated with shrinking the welfare state." (Page 74). Spiritual Mobilization was, among other things, an attempted collaboration between J.Howard Pew's Sun Oil-generated money and the religious organizing genius of James Fifield, a dynamic Congregational minister with a huge parish in Los Angles, who had originally founded Mobilization in the 1930's. And one of the first outreach efforts is to mail out free copies of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in an attempt to gauge the mood amongst the ministers. Although it faltered in the 1950's, Spiritual Mobilization foreshadowed the framework for the conservative alliance in the 1980's.Although most of my readers will be familiar with religious fundamentalism's focus on personal morality - crime, sexual transgressions, gender roles and abortion - much less attention has been paid to its attitudes towards economic questions and the role of the federal government. Because they have been part of powerful national political coalition, the Republican Right, since the late 1970's, and one where it is not clear that the leadership positions on economic questions fit comfortably with the economic needs of many in their congregations, nor where the steady green light given to rapid economic changes fits logically with the biblical and theological inflexibility, it behooves Progressives to take a closer look at how this coalition handles these tensions. All the more so during times when core portions of the national identity - the American Way of Life - Economic Abundance and Leadership, Moral Leadership, Success in War - seemed to be in decline. Indeed, as we will see, the relation of alleged moral decline linked to various forms of real or perceived national decline, is a theme that runs right back to the nation's Puritan roots in 17th century New England, and is in turn, closely linked to the Protestant Ethic and the earliest capitalist traditions of the nation.
We have stressed the importance of the various national shocks of the 1970's; so how did two of the most important fundamentalist religious leaders react to them, since both Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell would play key roles in putting together the Republican Right coalition? First, we have to note, in partial answer to the seeming incongruity of fixed-theology fundamentalists advocating a permanent green light for the creative destruction of restless capitalism, that these religious leaders were businessmen as well as evangelists, familiar with the cutting edge technologies they utilized to spread their message by print, radio, and especially, television. It may have been for Falwell the nostalgia dripping title of the "Old-Time Gospel Hour," but it was also an example of electronic savvy and a cash-cow. In 1978, he began publishing a newspaper called the Journal-Champion which went heavily political, with a surprising dose of economic issues. Of course it had the standard pleas to "cleanse America of sexual sin," but it also took positions against federal bureaucratic interventions (OSHA), in favor of the California property tax revolt (Proposition 13), and against a federal bail-out of NY City. On the alarming national inflation of the 1970's, Falwell wrote that "God is bringing the entire nation to its financial knees. If we want to control inflation, we should set our spiritual house in order." (Phillips-Klein, Pages 228-230.) (Contrast that to Galbraith's remedy, never applied, of complex wage and prices controls, structured to account for the large firm/small business dichotomies in the US economy, and biographer Parker's call for - and the implied military threat - to force a roll-back of the OPEC oil price shocks - something he said Kissinger and Nixon wouldn't countenance for fear of roiling the tinderbox of the Middle-East).
And 30 years ago, in 1979, Pat Robertson issued his "Christian Action Plan to Heal Our Land in the 1980's." In one respect, it seems like it was a reversal of Falwell's diagnosis of cause-and-effect: "Robertson indicated that the moral illness threatening the United States in the late 1970's had its roots in the nation's political economy." It's timing was 50 years after the onset of the Great Depression, and it's pretty clear that Robertson blamed the liberal tools set in motion by the New Deal for the ills of the 1970's: "`a powerful central government...an anti-business bias in the country...powerful unions' and most important of all, `the belief in the economic policy of British scholar John Maynard Keynes...'" He conceded some positive good to them in curing the Great Depression, but "fifty years later they were responsible for the `sickness of the `70's - the devaluation of the dollar, inflation, the decline in productivity." The remedy? A "`profound moral revival'" and the election of those who would "`reduce the size of government, eliminate federal deficits, free our productive capacity, ensure sound currency.'" (Phillips-Fein, Page 225).
As noted, the cause and effect between economic decline and moral failings may get switched with less than airtight rigor within the worldview of even these two major fundamentalist leaders, but if we recall that in the 1970's and 1980's the charge was often made by conservatives that the liberal welfare state, especially its Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program (AFDC), aka as "welfare," was undermining both morals and marriage, then the seeming inconsistency here can be clarified. And who better to further shine a light on these matters of the moral economy, than the fascinating figure of George Gilder.
George Gilder and a Morality Enforced by The Market
This writer didn't know, until reading Invisible Hands, that Mr. Gilder was raised, after the death of his father, with the help of the Rockefeller family, especially David, who was a roommate of his father's at Harvard, nor was I aware of his two books published before the famous Wealth and Poverty of 1981. Wikipedia also notes that he attended a private school in NY City, Hamilton, then Phillips Exeter Academy and finally Harvard. I note these biographical features with interest because, as Thomas Frank tells us in One Market Under God (2000), Gilder was a proponent, among many notions, of the idea of class warfare "between righteous new money, the entrepreneurs who created wealth, and bitter frustrated old money..." The new entrepreneurs "were both society's `greatest benefactors' and yet also the `victims of some of society's greatest brutalities'" at the hands of "`the mob'" which turns out to be incited by... "...the very rich, the people of inherited but declining wealth whom, Gilder imagined, controlled `the media and the foundations, the universities and the government.'" (Page 35). Gilder's background is also ironic in light of his high flights into the realm of market populism, especially with the rise of the Internet and its entrepreneurs. But that's a digression from Invisible Hand's reminder of his earlier works.The language Phillips-Fein uses to describe the early Gilder is revealing for the purposes of this essay. Gilder "wrote passionate jeremiads against modern liberalism's effect not only on the economy but on culture, sexual relationships, and morality...His first book, Sexual Suicide (1973), was a harsh critique of the women's movement; his second, Naked Nomads (1974), catalogued the hazard that single, unattached men posed to social order."(Page 177, My Emphasis.) In Wealth and Poverty, however, Gilder was trying "to demonstrate that capitalism was an inherently moral economic order." These were not entrepreneurs driven by greed; "they wanted merely to have the `freedom to consummate their entrepreneurial ideas,'" driven by "a spirit closely akin to altruism...'" (Ibid.) But then, like a turn in Zeus's mood, the market shows us another face, and becomes "a measuring stick for morality that meted out rewards to people who lived virtuous lives while punishing those who violated codes of decency. `Work, family, and faith' were the only solutions to poverty." And now for Gilder's main thrust:
that "the real danger of the welfare state was that it created a mode of subsistence and survival free of the morality enforced by the market." (Page 178. My Emphasis.)Readers who would like to read more about the importance of Invisible Hands can find it as part of a longer essay, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Market" [...]
William Neil
Rockville, MD
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Dec 02, 2014 | Crooked Timber
One especially unfortunate aspect of economics is that its penchant for just-so stories can reinforce its imperialist blindnesses.
If you've been trained systematically to look for examples of market efficiency winning out, you'll likely be inclined to treat your own, and your discipline's success as examples of market efficiency in action.
George Mason University law school's Moneybollocks mythology provides one cautionary tale as to how this can lead one to systematically overlook the role of politics in determining who wins and who loses.
The underlying point of the Fourcade et al. article is that politics and power play a far larger role in determining both the success of economics and the success of economics than economists are prepared to admit in public. Or, more succinctly, sociology provides a much better account of economics' success than economics itself does. Obviously, that's a claim that's going to be uncongenial to economists, as well as one that many economists will have difficulty in absorbing (they usually aren't trained to think in that way). If they were better versed in sociology, and also somewhat paranoid, they might want to treat the piece as a meta-Bourdieuian Trojan horse, that inherently elevates sociology at the expense of economics (although these imaginary well-read paranoid economists would still somehow have to deal with Fourcade's previous work, which has tacitly rebuked economic sociology for its obsession with disproving economics). But the point would still remain – that the internal structures of economics, as well as its external influence, are very far indeed from a free market.
Ben 12.02.14 at 9:24 pm
In other word, economics has done a better job of cozying up to power.
Which is not entirely the discipline's own fault, given that the powerful have always seen it as an important tool for their legitimation. (e.g. see here)
js 12.02.14 at 10:40 pm
It's a great paper. And man, further confirmation-if any were needed-that business schools majorly suck!
Sasha Clarkson 12.02.14 at 11:13 pm
"… It's probably because…drumroll…economics is the discipline that studies the economy. "
Economics is not the discipline: it is a set of disciplines which share a name, some jargon and common ideas: not unlike, say, evolutionary biology and "intelligent" design creationism. Except that in economics there is more than one form of creationism: Marxism and Austrianism come to mind. Creationist economics studies the world(s) some people believe ought to exist. Austrianists even define "inflation" in their own unique way, but then try to coerce everyone else's reality to match their theology.
The economics of the real world has evolved since Keynes, just as biology has changed since Darwin and cosmology since Kepler. But the key thing about non-creationist economics is that evidence matters and will lead to the model being modified accordingly. After Tycho Brahe died, in 1601, Johannes Kepler tried to develop a new cosmological theory based on circular orbits around an off-centre sun. After years of work, he rejected his beloved theory because it was incorrect about Mars' position by 8 minutes of arc: 2/15 of a degree. Kepler wrote: "Because these 8′ could not be ignored, they alone have led to a total reformation of astronomy."* He then spent several more years developing his theory of elliptical orbits which made predictions accurate enough to satisfy him.
Some "economists" have been predicting US hyperinflation for years: it's failure to materialise is a vast error compared with Kepler's 8 minutes of arc: but there has been no urge to modify the theory.
*Translated by Arthur Koestler in The Sleepwalkers.
door 12.02.14 at 11:21 pm
The root problem is that economists, and economics, frequently make policy prescriptions - normative judgments - even though they have very little knowledge of or training in normative ethics and moral philosophical argumentation. The real normative action is instead often concealed under technical phrases and axioms and simplifications that when scrutinized lack convincing justification and tend to be biased towards right-wing policies and the status quo distribution of power and wealth.
Rakesh 12.03.14 at 12:59 am
Another great thing is the comfort economics gives me that amidst all the chaos of unemployment, bankruptcies, and cycles there is an equilibrium that markets are just about to achieve, perhaps with just a little expert guidance and the right human sacrifices at the right time.
JanieM 12.03.14 at 4:38 am
"The economy" has become like this mythical, but nonetheless terribly important and pitifully fragile, little flower, that we can't ever actually see or touch, but all have to look after and think about and be terrifically careful of, otherwise it will just suddenly die and take us all with it. It's nonsense. We should be thinking about how we, as human beings, look after each other and the earth that sustains us.
Well said.
John Emerson 12.03.14 at 5:11 am
Suppose a Pol Pot came to power and all economists were liquidated. How much would the economy suffer? Would the economics profession be revived in its present form, or would something strikingly different be developed which did all the jobs economics does, but without the arrogance and the ideological and methodological dead weight?
This is a THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, not a suggestion. Like a trolley car problem. There are no actual trolley cars with fat men being pushed in front of them, and there is no actual Pol Pot in the offing. Perhaps I should have hypothesized that The Rapture carried off every economist in the world, but no one else, but that's even less realistic. Let's just assume that all economists were pensioned off at twice their present salary on the condition that they quit doing economics. That would be both humane and practical.
Bruce Wilder 12.03.14 at 6:02 am
Rakesh @ 19 - I admit it: I got that far before catching on.Tom @ 16:
Economists have quant skills (as Smith says) and also their skills can be used in sectors where there is a lot of money. Finance, first of all. . . . That is why they make more than statisticians and that is why actuaries make more than economists. And that is why math and engineering people who study finance end up making a fair amount of money. . . . Obviously expertise is a matter of legitimation . . .Economists have legitimated making a lot of money in finance, even though making a lot of money in finance is pretty obviously deleterious for society, aka the vast majority of people. It is kind of circular: bad economics opens opportunities for bad economists to make a lot of money doing bad economic things.
Commenter @ 13: All the evidence it contains is consistent with economics being a hierarchy-obsessed cargo cult. But all its evidence is also consistent with economists having better and more consistent quality criteria, better sorting, and larger grad programs at the top.
Two mints in one! Policy macroeconomics pretty much is a cargo cult, as far as its content is concerned. This is widely acknowledged in Naked Emperor remarks and so on, but it doesn't seem to matter. Which, I suppose figures in the motivations for the research of Fourcade et alia. It is the contrast between outside political critiques and "derision" directed at economics and the arrogant confidence of its inside practitioners about which the authors are most curious.
Tabasco @ 9
You don't need to know anything about the economy to be a highly successful economist, in the sense of the getting papers published in the best journals. And knowing a lot about the economy not only is no guarantee of career success, it invites condescension from economists who wear the ignorance about the economy as a badge of honor and sneer openly that economists who study the economy are just journalists.Said as plainly and bluntly as that, it can seem like superficial sarcasm, but it is so accurate a description. The emphasis on "rigor" and the pride in irrelevant maths becomes a remarkable absence of curiosity and a doctrinal rigidity in a sizeable and highly influential minority of economists. And, all that is compounded by the rank corruption afforded by those fabled consulting opportunities.
A H 12.03.14 at 7:05 am
The market is for private sector PhD economists is not that large, so I don't think there is a direct outside demand pulling up econ wages. If anything, PhDs have a reputation for being awful at making money in finance.* Though it is pretty easy for a new PhD to jump into a consulting career.I would guess is that where wages are getting driven up is in the demand for business school teachers. As inequality increases, MBAs become a path to the 1% and B schools become profit centers. They need lots of econ profs hence wages go up in Econ.
*Here is a fun recent example http://thereformedbroker.com/2014/05/28/brokers-liquid-alts-and-the-fund-that-never-goes-up/
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Sep 27, 2014 | Economist's View
Paul Krugman reviews Jeff Madrick's book "Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World":
Seven Bad Ideas: The economics profession has not, to say the least, covered itself in glory these past six years. Hardly any economists predicted the 2008 crisis - and the handful who did tended to be people who also predicted crises that didn't happen. More significant, many and arguably most economists were claiming, right up to the moment of collapse, that nothing like this could even happen.Furthermore, once crisis struck economists seemed unable to agree on a response. They'd had 75 years since the Great Depression to figure out what to do if something similar happened again, but the profession was utterly divided when the moment of truth arrived.In "Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World," Jeff Madrick - a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and a frequent writer on matters economic - argues that the professional failures since 2008 didn't come out of the blue but were rooted in decades of intellectual malfeasance. ...Jesse:This is what happens when professionals become addicted to the pursuit of money and personal power. Granted it was the prevailing compulsion of the age of greed, and economists were hardly the worst, being more enablers than perpetrators.
So what ought professional thought leaders do next?
-examine past errors with the help of an objective advisor;
-make amends for these errors;
-learn to live a new life with a new code of behavior;
-help others who suffer from the same compulsions especially in the area of finance and politics, and from the damages that have been inflicted on them.pgl:
This is a book we all need to read.
ilsm -> pgl:
Historical context:
Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick (Author) (C) 2011.
anne :
September 26, 2014
Europe's Austerity Zombies
By Joseph E. StiglitzNEW YORK – "If the facts don't fit the theory, change the theory," goes the old adage. But too often it is easier to keep the theory and change the facts – or so German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other pro-austerity European leaders appear to believe. Though facts keep staring them in the face, they continue to deny reality.
Austerity has failed. But its defenders are willing to claim victory on the basis of the weakest possible evidence: the economy is no longer collapsing, so austerity must be working! But if that is the benchmark, we could say that jumping off a cliff is the best way to get down from a mountain; after all, the descent has been stopped.
But every downturn comes to an end. Success should not be measured by the fact that recovery eventually occurs, but by how quickly it takes hold and how extensive the damage caused by the slump.
Viewed in these terms, austerity has been an utter and unmitigated disaster, which has become increasingly apparent as European Union economies once again face stagnation, if not a triple-dip recession, with unemployment persisting at record highs and per capita real (inflation-adjusted) GDP in many countries remaining below pre-recession levels. In even the best-performing economies, such as Germany, growth since the 2008 crisis has been so slow that, in any other circumstance, it would be rated as dismal.
The most afflicted countries are in a depression. There is no other word to describe an economy like that of Spain or Greece, where nearly one in four people – and more than 50% of young people – cannot find work. To say that the medicine is working because the unemployment rate has decreased by a couple of percentage points, or because one can see a glimmer of meager growth, is akin to a medieval barber saying that a bloodletting is working, because the patient has not died yet.
Extrapolating Europe's modest growth from 1980 onwards, my calculations show that output in the eurozone today is more than 15% below where it would have been had the 2008 financial crisis not occurred, implying a loss of some $1.6 trillion this year alone, and a cumulative loss of more than $6.5 trillion. Even more disturbing, the gap is widening, not closing (as one would expect following a downturn, when growth is typically faster than normal as the economy makes up lost ground).
Simply put, the long recession is lowering Europe's potential growth. Young people who should be accumulating skills are not. There is overwhelming evidence that they face the prospect of significantly lower lifetime income than if they had come of age in a period of full employment.
Meanwhile, Germany is forcing other countries to follow policies that are weakening their economies – and their democracies. When citizens repeatedly vote for a change of policy – and few policies matter more to citizens than those that affect their standard of living – but are told that these matters are determined elsewhere or that they have no choice, both democracy and faith in the European project suffer.
France voted to change course three years ago. Instead, voters have been given another dose of pro-business austerity. One of the longest-standing propositions in economics is the balanced-budget multiplier – increasing taxes and expenditures in tandem stimulates the economy. And if taxes target the rich, and spending targets the poor, the multiplier can be especially high. But France's so-called socialist government is lowering corporate taxes and cutting expenditures – a recipe almost guaranteed to weaken the economy, but one that wins accolades from Germany.
The hope is that lower corporate taxes will stimulate investment. This is sheer nonsense. What is holding back investment (both in the United States and Europe) is lack of demand, not high taxes. Indeed, given that most investment is financed by debt, and that interest payments are tax-deductible, the level of corporate taxation has little effect on investment.
Likewise, Italy is being encouraged to accelerate privatization. But Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has the good sense to recognize that selling national assets at fire-sale prices makes little sense. Long-run considerations, not short-run financial exigencies, should determine which activities occur in the private sector. The decision should be based on where activities are carried out most efficiently, serving the interests of most citizens the best.
Privatization of pensions, for example, has proved costly in those countries that have tried the experiment. America's mostly private health-care system is the least efficient in the world. These are hard questions, but it is easy to show that selling state-owned assets at low prices is not a good way to improve long-run financial strength.
All of the suffering in Europe – inflicted in the service of a man-made artifice, the euro – is even more tragic for being unnecessary. Though the evidence that austerity is not working continues to mount, Germany and the other hawks have doubled down on it, betting Europe's future on a long-discredited theory. Why provide economists with more facts to prove the point?
Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University.Sandwichman :
According to Krugman "Madrick is able to claim that Say's Law is pervasive in mainstream economics only by lumping it together with a number of other concepts that, correct or not, are actually quite different." Krugman asks: "But is this 'mainstream economics'?"
Well, yes and no. Not literally or in Keynes's "supply creates its own demand" caricature. But Nassau W. Senior reformulated Say's argument (which wasn't presented by Say as a law) in terms of a "first fundamental proposition" that he described as a law with the same universality and certainty as the law of gravity in physics.
It might not sound like "supply creates its own demand" on first hearing but Senior deduces the same conclusion of an impossibility of a general glut from it. Senior's proposition IS widely taken for granted or propounded in mainstream economics. It states :
"That every man is desirous to obtain, with as little sacrifice as possible, as much as possible of the articles of wealth."
One might even detect an affinity with Lionel Robbins's definition of economics as "the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." In a word, it's the maximization principle.
In "Expectation and Rational Conduct" (1937) Terence Hutchison argued that Senior's first fundamental proposition shared "one remarkable characteristic" with "almost all" formulations of the utilitarian maximization doctrine: "they appear further to postulate, and only are applicable if the further postulate is made, that all expectations are perfectly correct." In these formulations, uncertainty is relegated to an ambiguous ceteris paribus alibi which makes the utilitarian calculus immune from criticism.
anne -> Sandwichman:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/books/review/seven-bad-ideas-by-jeff-madrick.html
September 27, 2014
No. 2 on Madrick's bad idea list is Say's Law, which states that savings are automatically invested, so that there cannot be an overall shortfall in demand. A further implication of Say's Law is that government stimulus can never do any good, because deficit spending by the public sector will always crowd out an equal amount of private spending.
But is this "mainstream economics"? Madrick cites two University of Chicago professors, Casey Mulligan and John Cochrane, who did indeed echo Say's Law when arguing against the Obama stimulus. But these economists were outliers within the profession. Chicago's own business school regularly polls a representative sample of influential economists for their views on policy issues; when it asked whether the Obama stimulus had reduced the unemployment rate, 92 percent of the respondents said that it had. Madrick is able to claim that Say's Law is pervasive in mainstream economics only by lumping it together with a number of other concepts that, correct or not, are actually quite different....
-- Paul Krugman
Sandwichman -> anne:
Say's Law DOESN'T state that savings are automatically invested. It both assumes it and implies it, though -- because it is a tautology it implies what it assumes. Say stated that every product brought to the market opens up a market for (other) goods to the full extent of its value.
anne -> Sandwichman:
"A further implication of Say's Law is that government stimulus can never do any good, because deficit spending by the public sector will always crowd out an equal amount of private spending."
-- Paul Krugman
[ This is the passage that I mean to argue against. ]
Main Street Muse :
The devotion some economists have for idealistic visions like "the invisible hand," etc. is appalling.
And some still trot out that failed BS called "trickle down" - despite the fact that evidence has never supported the trickle down theory.
But who needs facts when ideology trumps all? At least that's how it seems when looking at practitioners of that dismal science.
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Economist's View
Paul Krugman continues the conversation on New Classical economics::
The New Classical Clique: Simon Wren-Lewis thinks some more about macroeconomics gone astray; Robert J. Waldmann weighs in. For those new to this conversation, the question is why starting in the 1970s much of academic macroeconomics was taken over by a school of thought that began by denying any useful role for policies to raise demand in a slump, and eventually coalesced around denial that the demand side of the economy has any role in causing slumps.I was a grad student and then an assistant professor as this was happening, albeit doing international economics – and international macro went in a different direction, for reasons I'll get to in a bit. So I have some sense of what was really going on. And while both Wren-Lewis and Waldmann hit on most of the main points, neither I think gets at the important role of personal self-interest. New classical macro was and still is many things – an ideological bludgeon against liberals, a showcase for fancy math, a haven for people who want some kind of intellectual purity in a messy world. But it's also a self-promoting clique. ...MaxSpeak:Regarding Waldmann's remark about the ideological proclivities of, among others, Martin Feldstein, at the recent NBER meetings in D.C. he presented a paper on reducing tax expenditures to lower the deficit, wherein no tax expenditure favoring saving or investment fell to his axe. When someone in the audience mentioned that tax expenditures for saving probably reduced saving more than increased it (since the cost to the Gov exceeds the marginal effect on saving), he professed ignorance of whether or not that is true. (It is.)
bakho :
In the 70s models were started in a lot of fields in addition to economics including biology, environmental science, ecology. In part it looks to have been physics envy. But the physicists made models of systems that were far more simple than economics. Modelers in the 70s went to work using computers that filled whole rooms but had less computing power than my laptop. By necessity they had to make assumptions that made the models crude predictors. But computing power was increasing and the optimists believed that eventually it would be possible to model such complex systems as economics using micro foundations, a lifetimes work.............. Not. Micro founded models make about as much sense as building a weather model based on individual atoms. Computers still are not there yet and may never be. The modelers of the 70s were overoptimistic about what they could deliver and buffaloed many people into thinking they were hot stuff. It was an exclusive club with higher math skills required as a ticket to admission. It is most difficult to cut losses on sunk costs, but that is their legacy.
Rather than detailed models that provide insights to the minutiae of economies, models have many short cuts and assumptions that assume as givens what might be important insights. They assumed the economy of the time: Full employment and supply limited. The models of the 70s fell apart with the 80s recession but regained their footing after the recovery and great moderation when the economy was in a sweet spot that required little action for the Fed. Thus the models had several decades to coast along without major fail. We hit an economy that was demand limited and high unemployment. The things many models simply assumed away were the very problems that needed addressing.
The 70s models belong on the dust heap of history in the company of many failed models in other disciplines that have long since been abandoned. As the Nobel Laureate Max Planck noted, "Science advances one funeral at a time."
bakho -> bakho...
SWL wonders why Keynes was dismissed in the 70s.
Very wealthy special interests disliked Keynes, disliked the New Deal and spent some of their money to support academics and intellectuals that could dismiss Keynes or show that his policies were in error. They funded people to work on the project of undermining Keynes and still do. Wealthy elites were eager to support economists to work on economics projects that denounced Keynes. Researchers of all striped try to keep their patrons happy. If refutation of Keynes was the price demanded in order to build up a computer based economics from micro foundations so be it. Keynes wasn't needed for micro foundations. Keynes was an impediment to funding. It is not surprising that Keynes was jettisoned. When micro foundations sputtered, there was too much crow to be eaten. Better to double down than die of embarrassment.
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September 30, 2013 | Independent Australia
...The truth is that the Neoclassical paradigm is a fraud. The Neoclassical paradigm's dominance of the tertiary Economics syllabus is a monumental scandal. Perennial dissent in the discipline has perennially been marginalised, crushed or colonised. Ergas here is merely embodying a long tradition of the Inquisition against heresy. Neoclassical economics is not the Queen of the Social Sciences, but a religion.
Ironically, the hegemony of Neoclassical economics is not primarily for ideological reasons. Neoclassical economic theory has a loose relationship with but is distinct from the politically influential neoliberal ideology. Both are rooted in a priori axioms, for which evidence is irrelevant. The latter, self-sufficient, appeals to vested interests and those seeking simple catechisms for a complex world.
Neoclassical economics is hegemonic predominantly for reasons of attractive analytical technique - grownups playing games with each other. Another school of thought, Austrian economics, is more transparently aligned to a pro-unrestrained capitalist ideology, but it remains marginalised or non-existent in the conventional syllabus.
Neoclassical economics is centred on a pure theory (or theories) of the market mechanism. But the theories do not explicate real-world markets. Bizarrely, a tertiary economics education serves not to explicitly articulate (and possibly defend) the character of the capitalist system but to obfuscate its character by ignoring it.
The vacuum that is created in terms of understanding wage labour and the labour 'market' is particularly pernicious. It is for this reason that distinct Departments of Industrial Relations were gradually established in universities after World War II, only to now have the vacuum recreated as those Departments are refashioned under the rubric of 'Human Relations Management'.
Thus economics graduates (save for exposure to optional and disappearing courses in history/institutions/empirics) come out professionally ill-equipped to work in fields which presume substantive training under the label. Learning on the job and self-education have to fill the cavernous hole, but perennially a socialised ignorance remains.
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