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jasonfurman 's review for:
The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers
by Robert L. Heilbroner
The Worldly Philosopher should be required reading for all economists and is also a book I would highly recommend to all non economists as well. I last read it about 30 years ago and although I have learned a lot in the interim, and economics has advanced some as well, it has actually aged reasonably well. Moreover, much of the writing is genuinely beautiful and makes you want to read it aloud to various people you come across, a feeling one rarely if ever gets with an economics book.
The Wordly Philosophers presents a series of great men (yes, they’re all men) from Adam Smith through Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen to John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpter. Most of these men get a chapter with a thumbnail biography, a description of their major intellectual arguments, and a critical appraisal of them. In few cases he does a combination portrait (e.g., David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus share a chapter which nicely uses them as counterpoints to each other) or more of a group picture (a number of Victorian classical economists share a chapter, with more focus on Alfred Marshall but also Jevons and many others as well).
The biographies are interesting and fun, although they generally cover the familiar stories and well trod ground that a number of readers will already be familiar with. More important, Robert Heilbroner does an excellent job of providing historical context and, sometimes, consequences for that authors he writes about. In his interpretation, as long as the economy was run by a combination of tradition and authority there was no need for economics. But as the market and division of labor grew up it needed someone to explain/rationalize it. And that someone was Adam Smith. Smith’s strength, however, was a static and harmonious picture and he missed the dynamics and their consequences that Malthus wrote about or the class conflicts that Ricardo and, more famously, Marx addressed. Keynes writing in the middle of the Depression was focused on the permanence of bad equilibria and Schumpeter writing following an era of increased industrial concentration chose to lionize it etc.
While Heilbroner emphasizes the historical roots of the different ideas, he also includes a slightly history of ideas that is less of a Whig history of progression and more a complicated story of accretion of knowledge but also accretion of flawed ways of thinking as well as alternation between all of the above. For example, Heilbroner describes the ways that the presentation of ideas alternates, from the vivid, lifelike descriptions of Smith and Marx to the bloodless abstractions of Ricardo, Malthus and Keynes. From the treating everyone as similar types of agents (Marshall) to thinking of them in classes (Ricard and Marx). For a focus on statics (Smith, Ricardo and Marshall) to dynamics (Malthus, Marx, and Schumpeter). And many other different approaches that appear, disappear and reappear over time.
The book is most decidedly not Whig history in that it ends on a critical note, lamenting the increased aspirations to “science” by the economics profession, pointing out that words like capitalism barely appear in the leading introductory textbooks. He argues that economics should be about understanding comparative systems and institutions, like the US vs. Scandinivaian model.
I agree that more comparative institutional analysis would be welcome in economics but strongly disagree with his characterization and dismissal of much of the field. The aspirations of economics to a more scientific basis are just that, aspirations, but mostly it is a health aspiration that has produced internally coherent theories and, more importantly, convincing causal empirical evidence on a wide range of really important questions. Moreover, while there are fewer explicitly “Worldly Philosophers” today, Heilbroner does point out that most of the ones he writes about were actually completely wrong (e.g., Hobson built an entire theory on capitalism on underconsumption by rich countries that would force them to export capital, but the United States at least overconsumes and imports capital, in many cases from poorer countries). And I think there is a little more Worldly Philosophy than meets the eye in economics even today, like behavioral economics or liberal/libertarian approaches or various writings on inequality and bargaining power. Not that everything is perfect, but with some exceptions I think a Whig history would be closer to right when it comes to the last 50 or even 250 years of economics.
The Wordly Philosophers presents a series of great men (yes, they’re all men) from Adam Smith through Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen to John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpter. Most of these men get a chapter with a thumbnail biography, a description of their major intellectual arguments, and a critical appraisal of them. In few cases he does a combination portrait (e.g., David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus share a chapter which nicely uses them as counterpoints to each other) or more of a group picture (a number of Victorian classical economists share a chapter, with more focus on Alfred Marshall but also Jevons and many others as well).
The biographies are interesting and fun, although they generally cover the familiar stories and well trod ground that a number of readers will already be familiar with. More important, Robert Heilbroner does an excellent job of providing historical context and, sometimes, consequences for that authors he writes about. In his interpretation, as long as the economy was run by a combination of tradition and authority there was no need for economics. But as the market and division of labor grew up it needed someone to explain/rationalize it. And that someone was Adam Smith. Smith’s strength, however, was a static and harmonious picture and he missed the dynamics and their consequences that Malthus wrote about or the class conflicts that Ricardo and, more famously, Marx addressed. Keynes writing in the middle of the Depression was focused on the permanence of bad equilibria and Schumpeter writing following an era of increased industrial concentration chose to lionize it etc.
While Heilbroner emphasizes the historical roots of the different ideas, he also includes a slightly history of ideas that is less of a Whig history of progression and more a complicated story of accretion of knowledge but also accretion of flawed ways of thinking as well as alternation between all of the above. For example, Heilbroner describes the ways that the presentation of ideas alternates, from the vivid, lifelike descriptions of Smith and Marx to the bloodless abstractions of Ricardo, Malthus and Keynes. From the treating everyone as similar types of agents (Marshall) to thinking of them in classes (Ricard and Marx). For a focus on statics (Smith, Ricardo and Marshall) to dynamics (Malthus, Marx, and Schumpeter). And many other different approaches that appear, disappear and reappear over time.
The book is most decidedly not Whig history in that it ends on a critical note, lamenting the increased aspirations to “science” by the economics profession, pointing out that words like capitalism barely appear in the leading introductory textbooks. He argues that economics should be about understanding comparative systems and institutions, like the US vs. Scandinivaian model.
I agree that more comparative institutional analysis would be welcome in economics but strongly disagree with his characterization and dismissal of much of the field. The aspirations of economics to a more scientific basis are just that, aspirations, but mostly it is a health aspiration that has produced internally coherent theories and, more importantly, convincing causal empirical evidence on a wide range of really important questions. Moreover, while there are fewer explicitly “Worldly Philosophers” today, Heilbroner does point out that most of the ones he writes about were actually completely wrong (e.g., Hobson built an entire theory on capitalism on underconsumption by rich countries that would force them to export capital, but the United States at least overconsumes and imports capital, in many cases from poorer countries). And I think there is a little more Worldly Philosophy than meets the eye in economics even today, like behavioral economics or liberal/libertarian approaches or various writings on inequality and bargaining power. Not that everything is perfect, but with some exceptions I think a Whig history would be closer to right when it comes to the last 50 or even 250 years of economics.