Even a Worldly Philosopher Needs a Good Mechanic

Robert M. Solow Even a Worldly Philosopher Needs a Good Mechanic ANYONE WHO TEACHES ECONOMICS OWES A DEBT TO THE WORLDLYPHILOSOPHERS for having attracted so many bright and interested students to econom­ ics, much as Paul de K ruifs Microbe Hunters—a lesser book—recruited the young of my generation to the study of biology and medicine. Those same teachers are also aware that some of the same students felt let down by the texture of the discipline when they began to study it. Instead of debating big ideas about the nature of society, they found themselves drawing demand and supply curves and learning to set marginal this equal to marginal that. In the last chapter added to TheWorldlyPhilosophers, Heilbroner tries to diagnose the source of his own, more sophisticated version ofthis kind of disappointment. He locates it in the unwillingness of modem econo­ mists to focus on the essential characteristics of capitalism as a system of social relations. There and elsewhere he speaks of a failure of “vision” on the part of economists, and their misguided attempt to construct a Science—the capital S is essential—in the image of physics or astronomy. I have never been satisfied with that way of looking at the context and method of economics. Bob Heilbroner and I used to talk about this in the days when we saw more of each other. I take this opportunity to make one more statement of my view of the end of the worldly philosophy. From the start, I have to dissent from Heilbroner’s assertion that the disciplined study of economics (as we know it) is tied essentially social research Vol 71 : No 2 : Summer 2 004 203 to the capitalist system. His statement is: “The worldly philosophy is the child of capitalism and could not exist without it.” There is more in the same vein. I can think of at least two things wrong with this iden­ tification. One is that economics—and manifestly the economics we study and teach today—does have application outside of capitalism. A long line of economists, including Barone, Hayek, Lange, Meade, Dobb, Durbin, Crosland, and many others, has used standard tools to analyze how a socialist economy might operate. They cover a reasonably wide ideological spectrum—though there are no men from Mars among them, for good reason—but they are clearly doing economic analysis. To take a different kind of example, Vernon Smith has shown that econom­ ics has interesting things to say even about hunter-gatherer society; a slightly weaker point is illustrated by Radford’s famous article on “The Economic Organization of a POW [Prisoner-of-War] Camp” (1945). Sensible analysis of any economic system, capitalist or not, has to pay attention to the characteristic motivations and institutions of that society’s way of organizing production and consumption. You do not have to go all the way to Lionel Robbins’s famous characterization of economics as the study of scarce resources, and therefore presumably in some sense universally applicable, to see that some basic ideas can be adapted to a wide variety of institutional settings, some of them well outside capitalism. There is, after all, a well-recognized subdiscipline called “comparative economic systems,” whose practitioners believe that what they are practicing is economics. Which leads me to question Heilbroner’s formulation also from the opposite direction. Capitalist societies are not all alike, as he would have been the first to recognize. Even within the collection of histori­ cal and easily imaginable versions of the capitalist economy, there is enough variation to require nontrivial adaptation of basic economic principles to alternative institutional settings. From Irish peasants to post-Deng China, from the postwar United States to corporatist Austria, from French indicative planning to Erhard’s Germany, and from Thatcher’s England to Sweden’s Middle Way, there are enough similari­ ties and enough differences to require substantial tailoring to fit. I do 2 0 4 social research not think any purpose is served—not even Heilbroner’s own—by the suggestion that there is a clearly defined capitalism and therefore a unique vision for economic theoiy. There is a quite different, constructive way to visualize the...