Reviews for The possibility of progress

The average rating for The possibility of progress based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-12-16 00:00:00 Thomas Difilippo The history of economic thought told via chronological serial biography is a refreshing alternative to other more narrowly scoped economics books. After this book I feel like I have a more all-encompassing understanding of the major personalities and theories of the field, but the weakest aspect is the insistence on including all the tabloid details of the lives of the economists regardless of relevance to their public economic or political positions. The book is slightly more engaging for it but could have been a third shorter. The economic theory of each subject is rated against the author's conception of economic freedom. A numerical rating could have saved a lot of additional text, or little more credit could have been given to the reader who after being presented with one theory is capable of comparing it to another. Part of that rating is the use of the phrases 'universal affluence' and 'natural liberty' in nearly every biography. 'Universal affluence', the author says, will be achieved after society completely accomplishes the economic system of 'natural liberty' imagined by Adam Smith. This utopian outlook undermines the authors goals- I'd prefer more grounded visions of economic growth percentage points better than current if one or another policy change is accomplished. Although some of the policies the author prefers are clearly defined, tax policy is repeatedly mentioned but without any conceptual backing. I see two sometimes contradictory policy goals at work in any discussion of tax policy- the desire to raise directly funds to accomplish some goal, and the the desire to incentivize or penalize behaviour or accomplishments. Any solution that doesn't address both is going to be lacking. Arguments against dis-incentivizing income growth with progressive taxation have to recognize that there's more money to be had for aircraft carriers or your government spending program of choice with progressive taxation than without. Redistribution of wealth can go two ways (simplistically speaking), in a democracy the public is probably going to want to err on the side of redistribution towards themselves, which means progressive taxation. Problematic use of 'limited' or 'small' government. When it's qualified with the metric of comparing public to private spending I have less of a problem, and it's easy to say that a high public/private ratio is bad for multiple reasons. But here and (in many other places in economic theory) it's easy to mistake correlation for causation, or improperly compare a nation and government in a very mature stage of development to a very immature one. The 'small government' phrase at face value marginalizes all advancements in constitutional government, rule of law, and democracy that many countries today are yet to achieve. Quotes attributed to Adam Smith emphasize freedom of the individual as opposed to collectives- and I'd include corporations and other aggregations of people and capital as collectives. Why then is no attention paid to large capital collectives in the form of corporations or trusts but so much to governments? Within a corporation, how is the central planning exercised there preferable to central planning of a government at least accountable to voters? If every company was small would not personal freedom be greater than one where very small numbers of large employers might dominate the profession of your choosing? I'd much prefer instead of the somewhat arbitrary anti-trust laws we have today that only target the very largest of the large, to structure laws to increasingly disincentivize growth of collectivizes beyond certain numbers of people (say 500) or amount of money/property acquired. A collective that's bigger than the ability of any member to recognize every other member is too large, and there are some amusing laws I can imagine to enforce the restriction. Monopolies and problems associated aren't really discussed in this book. Property exists because of laws protecting it, but in the authors view the government has to 'get out of the way' of property and exchanges of property. The physical body of the individual, and the property the individual lives on, and artifacts carried with an individual outside of the property they live on can be viewed as natural, but the naturalness of extensions beyond that get less justifiable. Intellectual property is especially problematic as viewed as an unlimited license from the government to create monopoly rights over abstract property. The physical property the government has to protect in law internally and from external invaders is fixed and obvious to all, but why should the government subsidize abstract property? Why not de-regulate intellectual property, or at least only grant a limited number of licenses to be auctioned off periodically? And certainly no one should be deprived of real physical property because of violations of abstract property rights. Many socialist/communist communes are mentioned, mostly because they tend to fail quickly or after a generation. But where are the Adam Smith communities? Could it be that nation-building requires values and attitudes at odds with economy-building in an already built country? In other words the costs of establishing a country were socialized by the founding citizens, and the profits of living there later on are then privatized. Prison privatization mentioned is mentioned in passing. It seems bad to make a profit oriented business in the name of economic freedom where the point of the business is to deprive individuals of freedom. Private military contracting isn't mentioned. Freedom of immigration is also mentioned in a list of policy goals of one economist, but the author does not discuss it much less openly support it. I suppose this is what passes for political correctness among the likely receptive audience of other policy goals more enthusiastically promoted in the book. Free immigration is an obvious corollary to free trade, but the political party most strongly agitating for less regulation on business and small government wants to vastly increase regulation and the size of government where immigration is concerned. Immigration restrictions are a form of government intervention into labor markets, and are therefore socialist in intent- that's not an argument for or against, just a statement of fact. Inheritance/estate/death taxes are mentioned negatively several times, but I don't really see what they have to do with economic liberty. If I had to make a choice between paying a tax while I was alive or while I was dead, I'd much rather go with the latter. The historical reasons for inheritance are understandable, but in the modern world why should the government discriminate on behalf of biological or adopted off-spring? Why not get rid of inheritance taxes and instead apply gift taxes uniformly regardless of whether the giver is alive or dead, or related to the recipient? Also if we no longer pass on debts to progeny, why make a special case for passing on assets? There's a strange claim that the government should only exist to uphold law (and provide national defense which I suppose is upholding the law through means of last resort) but then simultaneously business should be regulated less. What's difference between a law and a regulation? There's a vagueness when it comes to the author choosing to be on the side of monetarists like Milton Friedman, or on the side of supply-side economists. Supply-side economics is still government intervention but through non-Keynesian means, only Friedman can claim to truly avoid fine-grained intervention (though intervention in the form of changing the money supply is still advocated). As I understand it Friedman has no problem with tax policy to achieve any goal except economic growth, I say solvency should be the main goal of tax policy.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-05-16 00:00:00 Mark Craft As a reference, this book has its good points and bad. It is broad, managing at least to touch on nearly every important theorist of the last 200+ years. But in some cases this completist approach produces a shallowness of treatment (particularly with Pareto, Clark, Edgeworth, Knight, and others from that time) that calls into question the value of the breadth. Another point of weakness is that Skousen either cannot or will not provide the strongest and most plausible exposition of theories to which he's hostile. Skousen's rigidity is such that even Ricardo, author of the Comparative Advantage argument for trade, appears to him to have been insufficiently enamored of free markets. Hence the work is only fully reliable on those theorists who have Skousen's full approval (broadly speaking, the Chicago and Austrian schools). The preface of the book contains Skousen's touching and humorous account of how he unintentionally killed Murray Rothbard. It goes downhill from there. Skousen's work continues in the long tradition of unjustly setting up Adam Smith as the first economist, and proceeds to engage in a sustained act of necrophilia with the famous Scotsman, carrying his corpse through the succeeding two-hundred years and comparing it favorably to every subsequent thinker who was less optimistic on free markets, while also claiming that the Austrian and Chicago schools advanced the true Adam Smith tradition. Skouson never settles on a single metaphor to pin this conceit to, and so sometimes he tells us we are hearing the story of "Adam Smith" himself, while at other times economic thought is Adam Smith's "house". This framing device is well beyond asinine, and one wonders how the editors allowed it to remain. Skousen acknowledges early on that the historical Adam Smith was no libertarian, in that he espoused a labor theory of value, opposed monopolies, wrote in favor both of land taxes and of progressive income taxes, and made the case for public schools and public works projects, but somehow this isn't the Smith that Skousen takes with him through the remainder of the text. Smith lived long ago so of course he didn't quite get his theory to be the way Skousen wants it. The chapter on John Stuart Mill is called "Milling Around." The chapter on Alfred Marshall is called "Marshaling the Troops." These are representative examples of Skousen's quick wit and devilish way with words. Skousen also thinks he can get us to put on a piece of classical music, chosen by him, whilst we read each chapter. Being a libertarian does not preclude being plenty meddlesome. In the chapter on Max Weber, whom he somewhat implausibly counts among the economists, Skousen asserts the real value of Weber's work to have been that theory must be based on empirical evidence. No theory that shirks this test is worthwhile, Skousen avers. He repeats this a bunch of times since there's not a lot else to say, which is one of the downsides of putting a non-economist in a book on economics. In the chapter on Ludwig von Mises, however, in which Skousen becomes ostentatiously unfaithful to the Smithian corpse, Skousen approvingly repeats Mises's opinion that empirical evidence merely tells us what happened one time in the past, and that the only reliable economic theory is one that builds from first principles and rejects empiricism altogether. Empirical evidence, in short, is for losers (the chapter is devilishly titled "The Missing Mises"). Between Weber's view and Mises' there is a certain tension, but in Skousen's way of seeing things this is apparently no problem. It is really only the ideological end point that matters, and the route to get there is chosen for convenience's sake. Two contradictory stories is not a big deal. Psychologists call this phenomenon "cognitive dissonance." Skousen is no psychologist, so you can't blame him for not recognizing it. Having been written and released at the high point of the "endless privitization and deregulation of everything!!" tendency that culminated ten years ago in rolling blackouts and the presidency of George Bush, this book has an unreal, triumphalist tone. Skousen assumes that his side has won and will continue winning, so he has the smugness of all who have succumbed to hubris. In attributing this tone to the era, I am perhaps being too generous, as I have checked Skousen's present output and he still sounds this way. Skousen has striven to provide a work accessible to the public, so he has larded it liberally with gossip. I trust that some of this is true, but Skousen seems excessively credulous -- his depiction of Pigou as a Soviet spy seemed to me at first to have been pulled directly from his nether regions, but when I researched the claim, I found that it stemmed from a single unreliable source in the mid-70s (and so far totally unsupported by information from the Russian vaults). We also get to see Skousen bombastically reporting on tepid episodes, such as Menger's affair... with a woman to whom he was not married! Skousen acts as though such banalities were quite scandalous indeed, much like a bored tween. We also get to see him musing about the causes of Keynes's homosexuality (he thinks it may have resulted from Keynes's estrangement from his father). Ten years ago it was all good fun to ponder this sort of thing, even for a lover of liberty. The book's treatment of Milton Friedman is of historical interest, given the rift that has since opened between the monetarists and the Austrians. Skousen presents Friedman simply as the knight in shining armor, who burst forth unexpectedly and saved "Adam Smith" (or is it Smith's house?) from the interventionist barbarians of Cambridge, MA and Cambridge, UK. One wonders how much more measured Skousen's assessment might be in future editions, given how much of a flashpoint central bank policy has become between the two schools, now that the business cycle has shown that it still can muster a vicious downside. Skousen says that Joan Robinson's left-wing comments on current events in the late 60s and early 70s were why the Nobel committee snubbed her (this much is certainly true), and that the comments were an embarrassment to her friends and foes alike. I do not see why her foes should have been at all embarrassed. Shouldn't they have been glad that Robinson was giving them fodder for criticism? I could really go on and on saying unfavorable things about this book, but I must acknowledge, again, that as a general survey it is not without utility. It cannot be recommended as a final authority, however.