Marx and Keynes on Unemployment

[John Gelles <jjgelles@xxxxxxxx>]

                 Economics, Morality and Progress

             The New York Review of Books, May 11, 1995, has
        Alan Ryan reviewing "An Inquiry into Well-Being and
        Destitution" By Partha Dasgupta. The title is meant to
        recall "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
        Wealth of Nations". The review is pertinent to Jim
        Devine's comment that history of economic thought can
        help find answers to current economic questions, and
        my earnest request that explicit inclusion of current
        questions would add power to messages arguing history
        of Marxist and Keynsian ideas on unemployment.

             Alan Ryan writes:

             a. Economists and the lay public have lost touch
        with each other.

             b. Keynes remained a skeptic about the role of
        mathematics in economic analysis.

             c. The contemporary divorce between economics and
        ethics is particularly unfortunate.

             d. Oxford has never thought it right to allow
        undergraduates to study economics divorced from
        philosophy and politics.

             e. The domination of Hayek and Friedman in the
        place where once the mordantly skeptical social
        commentary of Thorstein Veblen was rooted, speaks to
        the issue of what is wrong.

             f. Economists who study rational action must
        account for moral issues or deny that such issues are
        rational.

             g. Does economics as a social science foster a
        passive consumerist moral vision?

             h. Does economic man want only continuous nice
        sensation -- or does he include engagement with the
        world and freedom as components of his wants?

        (Specialists in reading Marx take note of the above.
        It may be that circumscribed private ownership of the
        means of production invites more freedom than ownership
        in common -- at least that appears to have been proved
        where socialism has failed.  Specialists in Hayek, who
        would remove "circumscribed" as a restraint on actions
        of private owners, give up tenure if you have it.)

             Now to be fair to PKTers, there was an underlying
        theme of rejection of "an army of unemployed people" as
        prerequisite to the wealth of nations.  Certainly the
        readers of Marx recognized zero-involuntary unemploy-
        ment as a moral requirement in a just society. The same
        can be said for readers of Keynes.

             At the end of his review, Ryan hints at my case
        for wanting PKT writers to include "the question" along
        with the trivial in logical disputation. He wrote,

             "I wish that Dasgupta would now bend his talents
        to the politically much needed task of giving the non-
        specialist reader an idea of why the path of economic
        development has been so painfully slow for so much of
        the world, and why there is reason to think we can do
        better."

             I say "hints" because the path of economic pro-
        gress in developed nations needs even more talented
        inquiry.  Why would a nation that can react so profi-
        ciently and selflessly, to disaster brought about by
        nature or political terrorists, be so incompetent in
        addressing its flaws in employment; production; public
        spending, debt and money; law; accounting; and taxes?

             John Gelles