Progressive Jonathan Lipow Defends Economics

This is the second of my series of posts on Jonathan Lipow’s 2023 book, Pubic Policy for Progressives.

In “Economics without Apology,” a subsection of Chapter 1, Jonathan addresses his concern about progressives rejecting economics, writing:

Now, lamentably, many progressives regard economics with great suspicion.  Indeed, instinctual hostility towards economics is a textbook example of the Left’s tendency to take automatic positions without reference to either basic moral principles or scientific evidence.  For example, many progressives believe that Adam Smith, the founder of the field that later came to be known as economics, invented capitalism or justified its excesses.  This is simply untrue.  Smith’s seminal contribution, The Wealth of Nations, described the systemic features of the capitalist institutions that were already emerging a hundred years earlier to replace the feudal order in Europe, and analyzed both their virtues and vices.  And far from preaching that greed is “good,” Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments – the book that laid the intellectual foundation upon which Wealth of Nations was built – strongly associated “good” with social solidarity and concern for the plight of others.

He then follows with one of my favorite quotes from The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous or the humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility.

He also gets the origin of the term “Dismal Science” right:

The early economists pressed for freedom of religion and conscience, argued for women’s rights, and, above all, took an uncompromising stand hostile to the institution of slavery.  All this long before any of it was fashionable with the cool kids.  In fact, the reason why economics is often called “the Dismal Science” is that early economists had a bad habit of ruining dinner parties by lecturing the other guests about the profound evil of forced servitude. The nickname was actually coined by Thomas Carlyle, who was trying to delegitimize economists opposed to his “visionary” proposal to reintroduce slavery to the United Kingdom.

I’m not sure about the “dinner parties” part but he correctly identifies the originator of the term and Carlyle’s reason for coining the term.

 

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