There’s been a recent fuss in various media arising from a tweet from economist Ben Golub regarding astonishment that economists haven’t “worked through” Smith and Marx. English professor Alex Moskowitz chimed in with a claim that economics can’t be a real discipline because economists don’t know the history of their own discipline. {long and somewhat wonkish response follows}
The claim that economists don’t read the classics is overstated as regards Smith. Every econ student gets the pin factory example of scale economies and the standard quote about the butcher, the baker and the Invisible Hand. And any moderately sophisticated economist knows that the Theory of Moral Sentiments refutes the vulgar self-interest theory of the kind of people who wear Adam Smith ties. There’s lots more interesting stuff on labour saving innovation, risk attitudes and other topics which still gets quoted.
As for Smith’s writing in support of free trade, it isn’t read much but not because economists now teach fancy mathematical models. Ricardo superseded him, not long afterwards, with the theory of comparative advantage. His example of Portugal, England, cloth and wine is still a standard illustration.
Then there are some things Smith wrote about that are just plain wrong, like the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. 19th century economists from Smith to Marx wasted a lot of time on this, but there’s no point in rereading it, except for the kind of history of economic thought rather brutally described as “the wrong ideas of dead men(sic)”.
So, it’s true that hardly anyone, except historians of thought, “works through” The Wealth of Nations, let alone Smith’s entire body of work. Like readers in many genres, economists reading Smith skip straight to the good bits.
Unlike with Smith, not many economists read Marx, or at least Capital, any more. That’s because not many economists do Marxist/Marxian economics any more, and the analysis in Capital has had almost no impact on mainstream economics.
Marx wrote lots that is still relevant, most obviously the Communist Manifesto, with which any educated person, and certainly any economist, should be familiar. The account of the rise of capitalism, the class struggle and the potential for crisis in capitalism was unequalled when it was written and still commands our attention. But it isn’t something that needs to be “worked through” to do economics.
The economic analysis in Capital is not part of the intellectual history of mainstream (neoclassical/Keynesian) economics. The micro-economic approach that stems from the marginalist revolution of the 1870s owes nothing to Marx, and was developed by economists who had probably never read him (the first published critique from a marginalist viewpoint was by Wicksteed in the 1880s).
Keynesian macroeconomics shares with Marx the recognition that capitalism is inherently prone to crisis, but doesn’t draw on his theoretical framework much.
Henry George, also little read today, is probably more relevant. His ideas on taxing appreciating land rents have been misappropriated by single-taxers but they remain valid and policy-relevant.
For a long time, Marxist economics was relevant as a rival to the dominant neoclassical/Keynesian program, but that is no longer true. There was still a moderately active literature on the “transformation problem” 50 years ago, but it seems to have died, or (according to Andrew Kliman) been resolved. Most leftwing critiques of the mainstream now draw more on Keynes and Minsky than on Capital.
Given that Marxist thought is still influential in lots of spheres, the decline of Marxist economics might well be a problem. But, if so, the answer is for Marxists to do more and better economics.
Coming back to mainstream economics, the lack of historical awareness is a real problem. But the problem isn’t a lack of appreciation of the classics of the long 19th century. It’s that the economics profession pays far too little attention to its relatively recent history, from the 1930s to the present.
Most glaringly, as Paul Krugman points out fairly regularly, there have been only the most cursory attempts to explain the success of Keynesian macroeconomic policies in the decades after 1945. The NAIRU model for short-term macro policy, followed by all central banks, rests almost entirely on the experience of stagflation in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
And the theoretical twists and turns that produced the currently dominant Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model (the Lucas critique, new classical macro, various versions of “New Keynesianism”) have largely been forgotten. The result is that a theoretical-policy framework, centred on inflation targeting is presented as an eternal truth, when it is only about 30 years old and has had very limited success either as an explanatory/predictive theory or as a guide to policy.
The situation is not quite as bad outside macro. But, to the extent that macro theories are wrong, the results of most micro analysis can only be regarded as partial and provisional. And an awareness of intellectual history would lead to a much more cautious view of our current theories and tools, notably with respect to game theory.
I’m going to end with a tu quoque which may perhaps backfire on me. English literary criticism and modern economics can both be traced to the 18th century (or maybe the late 17th). Adam Smith and Samuel Johnson were contemporaries well known to each other. But I don’t get the impression that students of English literature are expected to read Johnson’s theories of literary criticism, or those of his predecessors like Dryden (as opposed to their literary work, if even that is still read). Am I wrong about this?
{ 59 comments }
Sam B 01.17.25 at 12:42 am
This strikes me as equivalent to a claim that biologists don’t understand their discipline if they haven’t read the origin species or physicists don’t understand theirs if they haven’t read the principia. Which is absurd. If a field can build knowledge, the best way to learn it is textbooks and then current literature, not the history of thought in the field.
Kevin A. Carson 01.17.25 at 1:49 am
The primary reason for reading heterodox economists who aren’t direct intellectual ancestors of mainstream neoclassical economics, IMO, is the perspective they provide regarding the under-questioned assumptions of the latter. I especially recommend early institutionalists like Veblen and Commons, who critically examine the assumptions and power-blindness behind theories of factor productivity.
boba 01.17.25 at 1:58 am
This calls to mind a colleagues tale about interactions with his mentor, a Nobel Laureate. He said that after long periods of silence and brow furrowing, the mentor would recommend some obscure paper from the 1940’s. My colleague would read it and recognize that the problem he was concerned about was resolved over 70 years ago. So it’s isn’t so much that contemporary scientists fail to read the literature, it’s that there are many solutions that were forgotten and we reinvent the wheel.
LFC 01.17.25 at 2:53 am
There’s a difference between the claim (call it claim A) that X can’t be a real discipline if practitioners don’t know the history of that discipline and the claim (claim B) that scholars in general (there will always be some exceptions) do better and/or more interesting work if they know the history of their discipline. For the social sciences, claim B is almost certainly true.
Btw, Capital vol. 1, a new English translation of which has recently been published, is a powerful work of historical analysis and social theory, even if its economics are rejected. It’s worth reading for Marx’s turns of phrase alone (to take just one of many examples, his description of prices as “wooing glances cast at money by commodities…”).
Kevin 01.17.25 at 3:32 am
It is even worse, Sam! As John points out, economists don’t read Marx because Kapital plays effectively no role in modern economics – famously he was called a “minor post Ricardian” for his theory. But folks in other fields like the English professor who started this debate are under the impression that because Marx is famous, influential, and an economist that he therefore is influential as an economist, which is simply not the case. So it is like complaining that biologists don’t read some biologist in the 19th century who made a series of incorrect notes of Darwin but who went on to influence global history via his politics.
wetzel-rhymes-with 01.17.25 at 5:34 am
Thinking about whether economists should study Smith or Marx, the post seems to describe paradigm shifts, such as Thomas Kuhn described in Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn relates how the worlds of Newtonian mechanics and Einstein’s mechanics are not commensurable. The meaning of “mass” itself changes, so the two scientific theories can’t really be compared using their shared language, because they don’t really share the same language
I suspect Marxism, at least, must, fundamentally, may be compatible with today’s practice in economics because Marx’s philosophy of history is totalitarian, like Hegel’s. Marx’s work is like Sigmund Freud’s in that way, brimming with genius insights, but ultimately not consistent with the analytical tradition.
Thinking about ” the invisible hand” of Adam Smith, it occurs to one, well, that is a somewhat similar totalitarianism, in that one is given the idea that the providence of God and the workings of the invisible hand work together in favor of the achievement of happiness. However, if you “work through” you learn Adam Smith actually wrote “an invisible hand”.
It might be that Adam Smith, himself, is more consistent with the analytical tradition, in which claims must be a justified within empirical verifiability for meaningfulness than a much more modern economist, such as Paul Samuelson, who popularized the use of “the invisible hand” to refer to a general, abstract conclusion that truly free markets are self-regulating systems that always tend to create economically optimal outcomes, which can’t be improved upon by government intervention. Maybe it’s useful to have a historical perspective. Through the neoclassical idea of trade and market exchange perfectly channeling self-interest towards “the city on the hill” we have lost sight of that place.
Bob Golub may have a point. An entity through a paradigm in normal science is “present-at-hand”, in Heidegger’s way of saying, while the paradigm itself will be “ready-to-hand”, like the hammer of a master carpenter. Setting current practice within the context of the history of ideas within a profession, may help economists make current paradigms “present-at-hand” and lead to the next paradigm shift! Thanks for the interesting post!
Matt 01.17.25 at 6:59 am
I guess I don’t begrudge economists who don’t read much of the history of economics, for reasons similar to what Sam B mentions above – the opportunity cost is fairly high, it will likely be of limited practical importance for most of them, and so on. That said, the idea that it’s worth saying one has “read Smith” in any real way if they have read the pin factory bit (or, perhaps, a praphrase of it) and the “butcher, baker” line, is perhaps overly generous. It’s just the tiniest bit. And, the real value that can come from reading historical work won’t be gained by doing that much at all. The value, I think, comes from seeing how things were different – how what Smith was doing was actually pretty far and different from what modern economists do. Seeing that can help give depth to one’s knowlege of the sort that often lacking in the historically illiterate. Not everyone needs to do it, but there can be a pay-off, and it’s good that some people do do it.
As for the “wrong ideas by dead men” bit – it can often be worth it to think about why people who were smart – much smarter than the average person in the field, of course – thought things that we think of as wrong, often “clearly” so. Perhaps the most obvious advantage of this is that it can help us be a bit less certain that our own ideas are right, but beyond that, it can sometimes help open up new possibilities, and help us be less hemmed in by orthodoxy.
Alex SL 01.17.25 at 7:39 am
I am not an economist, nor can I judge how well they know the history of their field. But as a biologist I can say that I do not believe anybody needs to ‘work through’ On the Origin of Species, The Theory of Island Biogeography, and the original publication revealing the structure of DNA to become a good biologist. You can learn everything that is important from text books, lectures, current literature, and collaborating with more experienced scientists. We all have an institutional knowledge so that everybody doesn’t have to start with Adam and Eve. I assume the same is the case in every other field except biblical exegesis.
(That being said, it was still interesting and rewarding to read Darwin. Just shouldn’t be a requirement.)
Francis Spufford 01.17.25 at 8:50 am
Actually, reading past criticism is a thing when studying literature — or at least it used to be, before the current funding crisis engulfed the humanities. I was set to reading both Johnson and Dryden when doing an English degree in the 1980s, as part of looking at evolving understandings of how tragedy works, and the turn towards literary theory only intensified the need to read prior critical art, especially in grad school. But then, if the object of your study is (basically) human responsiveness to written art, past stuff goes in and out of fashion, and can look shocking by contemporary standards, but remains relevant.
The criticism of economists I see is the one you point out in the OP: not that they don’t interact with past texts in the discipline, but that they don’t engage enough with economic history. In the choice between the elegance and neatness of models, and the data-rich bit causally challenging mess of real-world examples, the models keep winning. For reasons which, maybe, have to do with the self-image of economics as an exact science?
Francis Spufford 01.17.25 at 8:52 am
But causally challenging, dammit.
Lisa H 01.17.25 at 10:04 am
Knowing the history (not just a few famous pages from the classic texts, but also the broader intellectual and historical context) would probably allow for more reflection about the assumptions that go into the models that have been built on their basis. Often, these assumptions no longer hold today, but the models continue to be taught. So apart from a genuine non-instrumental interest in how this discipline arose, one might make the case for its instrumental value in sharpening economists’ awareness about what goes into modeling assumptions.
Matt 01.17.25 at 10:55 am
It’s worth reading for Marx’s turns of phrase alone
I’ve read a fair amount of Marx – much more than just the Manifesto, but certainly not enough to be a scholar. But I’ll admit that Marx’s over-blown rhetoric has always seemed to me to be one of the worst things about him – often stepping in when the argument is the weakest, and, to me at least, annoying in almost all cases. I think it best serves as a negative example.
I will add something to the more general claim here. One of my main areas of work is the philosophy of law. These days, very few people who work on philosophy of law read much of people like John Austin. That’s understandable – Austin’s view is certainly not acceptable, and he’s also really pretty dull. But, when I read Austin, I found out that a lot of the standard criticisms of him were, at least, too fast – that his view, while wrong, was more interesting and more subtle than the standard criticism of him. And, there are parts in him – about the connection between law and force, for example – that have more insight than lots of later work. So, to me at least, it was worth “working through” The Providence of Jurisprudence Determined, and I’ve found some similar value in reading people like Bodin or Vattel. Even though they are wrong, they often saw things that later writers didn’t, or forgot. Is that likely to be so in Economics? I’m not confident enough to have a strong opinion, but it would be surprising to me if it wasn’t valuable for at least some people, even if not for all, and even if it’s completely possible to be a competent economist without ever reading a word of Smith or Marx or Ricardo or Mill or Marshall or Keynes.
MisterMr 01.17.25 at 11:09 am
So there are two kind of disciplines: on the one hand there are hard science, where like Sam B. says at 1 scientists are not required to know ancient now discarded wrong theories.
On the other hand there are literary/humanistic disciplines like literatuere or philosophy, where literates might still know something about Aristoteles’ poetics, and philosophers know about Plato.
Some human sciences, like economics, psychology or sociology are somehow in the middle.
This can be explained with Kuhn’s theory of “mature science”, where a mature science has a distinct “paradigm” and stuff that falls outside of that “paradigm” is discarded.
The “paradigm” is a set of basic approaches and believes that unify the field.
Natural sciences are mature sciences.
Otoh social sciences often do not have a well defined paradigm, but many competing paradigms that are more or less on the same level: those are not (yet) mature sciences, although perhaps in the future some “unified” winning paradigm might appear.
In this situation, one has to understand the limits and the history of the verious “schools” to use them well.
On the third hand, stuff like literature or philosophy don’t even try to have an unified paradigm, so a large part of the study is the history of the field (even though some “schools” might be predominant on others, such as e.g. analytical philosophy today in the USA, structuralism 30 years ago in France etc.).
Economics tries to fashion itself as an hard, natural science, but IMO is not there yet, there are still too many ambiguities, so at least the understanding that some things are axioms rather than scientific truths would be welcome IMHO (and might be related to the study of other older paradigms), but this would be the same of admitting that economics isn’t really fully “scientific” yet.
It would be better to compare it to social sciences like psychology or sociology.
On a completely different note: booh to Andrew Kliman, the “transformation problem” such as it is was alrerady “resolved” by Sraffa, the problem is just if the Labor Theory of Value is to be interpreted as an equilibrium theory of prices (at which point it can have whatever deviations explained mathematically) or if there is something like a metaphisical “labor value”, and in that case the trasformation problem becomes something vaguely mystical and strange. But if we stay on the non-metaphisical interpretation of things, the mathematical specs of the trasformation problem aren’t really that important, and the LTV becomes similar tho orthodox equilibrium theory, but with a wage share that is undetermined by the price structure of other stuff.
Yes I know this is OT but I like this stuff, I spent valuable time of my life reading Kliman and silently disagreeing with him, and therefore I have to write it down.
Rapier 01.17.25 at 11:21 am
Should Economists be Experts in Markets or Experts in “Human Nature”?
Adam Roberts 01.17.25 at 11:58 am
Seconding Francis S.: students on English lit degrees are expected to read quite deep into the history of literary criticism: we set Plato, Aristotle, Sidney’s “Defence of Poetry” (Sam Johnson only for students who opt for 18th-century options I’d say, but) Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot, Wilde and others. This is pretty standard, I think, across Eng Lit degrees. Of course, science degrees don’t expect their students to study, as it might be, phlogiston or theories of spatial ether, since these have been debunked: the post here seems reluctant to go so far as to say “we don’t expect econ students to study Marxian economics because, as an economist, he has been thoroughly debunked” but perhaps that’s the burden of the piece.
Adam Kotsko 01.17.25 at 12:03 pm
Yes, your final claim is incorrect. Past theories of criticism are still relevant. Even as an undergrad English major, I was assigned that kind of material.
LFC 01.17.25 at 2:13 pm
Kevin @5 implies that Marx is significant only because he “influenced global history.” But Marx was a great social theorist, which is why people studying sociology or related fields still have to read the trio of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim (or at any rate they should). Marx is and has been also of interest to some philosophers, of course. (And see, e.g., the “analytical” Marxists as they called themselves whose names are known to quite a few CT readers so I won’t list them.)
Btw, the non-Marxist economist Robert Heilbroner, who wrote a widely read “popular” history of economic thought (The Worldly Philosophers), also wrote an accessible book on Marx (Marxism: For and Against).
Mr_Spoon 01.17.25 at 8:05 pm
For my sins I am slowly wading through Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Despite it still being widely known as a thing, it is not good history (any more). However, I have come to better appreciate his turn of phrase and how this has affected not only English-language histories since, but also science fiction (e.g. Foundation, First and Last Men) and out of that, computer and tabletop games (the so-called 4X games especially, such as Civilisation). Could there be a similar reach for Smith and Marx? That although their direct penetration as economics texts nowadays is limited, their previous regard has shaped the more general discourse or folk-understanding of economics goings-on? And that that still might be a useful thing to factor into contemporary analyses?
John Q 01.17.25 at 9:29 pm
I stand corrected on studying the history of criticism.
As regards Marx, my point isn’t that he has been debunked (Keynes was widely seen as debunked, then revived, then attacked again). It’s that never had any influence on mainstream economics.
engels 01.17.25 at 11:42 pm
I think this just shows how self-absorbed mainstream economics has become.
Adam Tooze (hardly a wanderer in the intellectual wilderness) just published a podcast series discussing Joan Robinson among other “heterodox” economists. FT economics commentator Martin Sandbu recently advised its readership to turn to Kalecki.
https://www.ft.com/content/a91aa7dc-ac9f-4811-82e7-ce96bd2af99d
Thomas Piketty has been clearly influenced by Marx (despite his occasional disavowals and those of the orthodox) and was even in the 90s briefly a member of the September Group (of analytic Marxists that included Cohen and Roemer).
That’s leaving aside excellent avowedly Marxist economists with large left-wing and sometimes wider influence, like Robert Brenner or Yannis Varoufakis, and Marxists in closely related fields, eg economic geography (David Harvey, Brett Christophers).
engels 01.17.25 at 11:49 pm
My Oxford World Classics paperback edition of Johnson’s “major works” includes a lot of his criticism iirc; I’m sure it’s still widely read and studied (at least in so far as anyone reads anything other than tweets now).
John Q 01.18.25 at 1:26 am
Engels, you can point closer to home. I cited Kalecki on class struggle and full employment in a paper published last year
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/E883E5C4EAC8FEDE86B895F658B34594/S1035304624000085a.pdf/full-employment-and-working-future.pdf
and (briefly) reviewed Brett Christophers on this very blog https://crookedtimber.org/2016/08/07/book-report/
as well as discussing Piketty and Cohen in various places.
I’m familiar with the other names you cite (except Brenner). They’re all influenced by Marx, as I am, but I’ve never read anything from them that drew significantly on Capital.
LFC 01.18.25 at 2:27 am
Matt @12
On Marx’s rhetoric etc. — this subject is perhaps best pursued via a (brief) backchannel (i.e., email) conversation, so as not to send this thread off onto too many tangents. We may end up having to agree to disagree to some extent, which is fine.
J-D 01.18.25 at 2:36 am
No, Last And First Men.
MisterMr 01.18.25 at 9:39 am
My understanding is that Varoufakis, while being very leftish, is not really a “marxian” economist, but a keynesian one (the difference being if he is closer to be a neoricardian or an orthodox).
However, on this logic, there is the question of what exactly is the specificity of Capital vs. orthodox economic. In my view the differences are not that many:
The idea that the economy is driven by the accumulation of wealth M->M’
The fact that Marx uses the LTV, which in modern day corresponds to neoricardian economics. But what is the difference between neoricardian and orthodox economics? Basically only the idea that the wage share is undetermined, that in other words means that there is no tendence to full employment, just a boom and bust cycle
The fact that Marx is generally pissed at capitalists.
Now, the first difference is important, but exists in many post keynesians, whereas the last is basically political opinion rather than theory.
So the only distinguishing becomes the second, that however wasn’t really Marx’ main point, so it is a bit difficult to say what exactly counts as “Marx inspired”.
OTOH a lot of economic thinking was developed against Marx, so in some sense Marx did impact orthodox economics but indirectly (e.g. Keynes is indirectly an answer to Marx in that he is trying to avoid the collapse of the capitalist system).
wacko 01.18.25 at 10:32 am
I know that it’s good to know the basics.
Take computers, for example. That technology has developed from the basics — using assembly language, direct CPU and I/O channel instructions — to automatically maintained complicated networking protocols, to high-level programming languages, and now to what they call “artificial intelligence”, all in the span of one human lifetime. And I always felt that those who started from the basics have a much better understanding of all things computers. That they usually are much better professionals. …needless to say: YMMV.
dilbert dogbert 01.18.25 at 4:06 pm
Spufford at 9
Delong seems to be flogging economic history.
https://braddelong.substack.com/p/why-i-think-alexander-hamiltons-big
engels 01.18.25 at 5:24 pm
If you want value theory you could try Michael Roberts (the second post contains further suggestions, from Brazil, Turkey and Greece, alongside UK’s own Grace Blakeley):
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2023/11/19/hm-2023-value-profit-technology-and-value-again/
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/12/27/books-of-the-year-2024/
engels 01.18.25 at 8:56 pm
I actually don’t think Marx can be said to be basic to economics (as he could perhaps be said to be to sociology). Capital was a critique of political economy, one that economists, in their infinite wisdom, largely ignored. Which is one reason why economics today (with some valiant exceptions noted above) is mostly still an ideological pro-capitalist pseudo-science which, among other disastrous failings, couldn’t foresee the biggest economic story of the 21st century so far: the global financial crisis of 2008 which very nearly wiped us all out and whose tragic consequences are still unfolding. I mean, if the Earth got hit by an asteroid and no one at NASA warned about the risk—indeed confidently declared it to be impossible shortly beforehand—it might cause some soul-searching among astronomers (and possibly even a few prison sentences…?) Never mind.
Alex SL 01.18.25 at 10:11 pm
MisterMr,
I think ‘maturity’ makes less sense than something like the hard/soft distinction, because the maturity model implies that there is a directionality where every field of research will eventually end up mature, which further implies that every field could and that every community of researchers tries to do so, both of which are questionable assumptions.
It seems useful to think in terms of two axes: (1) empirical facts about the world around us versus human creations in the broadest sense, where our subjective feelings and values matter more, and (2) the degree to which people have an interest in rejecting a correct answer in favour of a wrong one for religious, ideological, or identity reasons. That gives us a 2×2 square on which to plot various fields.
Civil engineering is the prime example of sitting at the far end of the empirical x non-ideological corner, because nobody can deny when a bridge collapses, and nobody has an interest in being the designer of a bridge that collapses. (Whether corners get cut by the company building it is a different question.) Theology sits at the far end of the humanities x ideological corner, because everything it studies is completely made up, with no basis in reality, as demonstrated amply by the fact that every religion has its own theology completely at odds with those of the others, and it would clearly be unacceptable for a, say, Catholic theologian to arrive at that correct conclusion. As for humanities x non-ideological, that corner is comparatively emptier, but here we find anything that has a strong element of aesthetics and values but is less politicised than economics, like some fields of philosophy or the study of music and arts.
Most interesting is the fourth corner. Economics is, as best as I can tell, an empirical science. In principle, there must always be a correct answer to any given question, be it whether or not humans are rational economic actors in the first place or what happens if under circumstances x, y, and z if you raise top marginal tax rates to 70% and increase the minimum wage. The methodological problem is that it is much more difficult, not to say unethical, to run experiments, so they have to rely on drawing conclusions from events that happened to take place without careful a-priori experimental design to isolate the parameter of interest.
The much larger problem, however, is that there are gigantic amounts of money with an interest in arguing that high top marginal tax rates, an increased minimum wage, or strong financial regulations will destroy the economy, and no gigantic amounts of money with an interest in pointing out that they won’t. Sitting in the empirical x ideological corner is what distorts that field, not a lack of maturity in the sense of, “we just need to do a few more decades of research”. The same goes for history, where ideology and national pride interfere with admitting to conclusions that are obviously correct on the evidence, like “our nation was founded on genocide” or “that civil war was started to defend slavery”.
engels 01.19.25 at 1:42 am
Needless to say I include Prof Q among the exceptions.
Timothy Sommers 01.19.25 at 2:14 am
Wait.
You’re saying that there are people who teach Philosophy of Law, but don’t have their students read “The Providence of Jurisprudence Determined”?
Really?
I teach Philosophy of Law and that sounds like malpractice to me.
I am not being facetious. Next you will tell me they don’t assign Hart or Dworkin.
Who are these savages?
David in Tokyo 01.19.25 at 4:01 am
From the OP
“The claim that economists don’t read the classics is overstated as regards Smith.”
I’d guess it’s probably overstated with regards Marx as well. Maybe they don’t take multiple courses on and read every word Marx wrote, but I’d bet that most economists have a better idea of what Marx was about than most of the rest of us.
There was a similar brouhaha in physics a while ago. A bunch of old geezers with axes to grind went around screaming “most physicists nowadays don’t care about fundamentals.” By which they meant particular issues in foundations that said geezers wanted given more attention. They rallying cry was “All they are taught is “shut up and calculate.””. But the idea that anyone gets an undergrad, let alone graduate degree in physics without being really really really interested in what it all means is seriously insane: that’s why they went through the pain of learning all that obnoxious obtuse math. (Says someone who actually passed 3rd term physics, and actually read some Weber (but not Marx).)
Anyway, these things smell similar; reactionary geezers with axes to grind who have found a catchphrase that resonates with folks outside the field. (Although I’d guess the folks squawking for Marks won’t like being called reactionary geezers.)
John Q 01.19.25 at 4:16 am
“I actually don’t think Marx can be said to be basic to economics (as he could perhaps be said to be to sociology).”
Engels, we are in furious agreement here, and on the fact that mainstream economics has big problems some of which you mentiond. Thanks also for the link to Grace Blakely.
I’m still going to take a pass on value theory.
LFC 01.19.25 at 5:15 am
I haven’t read John Austin (except for very brief snippets), and I apologize for being somewhat nitpicky, but I believe the title in question is The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, not The Providence of Jurisprudence Determined. (Which I think makes sense, though it’s too late in the evening for a resort to the dictionary.)
engels 01.19.25 at 12:23 pm
we are in furious agreement
Yes (if I sounded furious, the fury was directed elsewhere).
steven t johnson 01.19.25 at 4:09 pm
The irrelevance of Marx to economics is demonstrated by the economic literature on all manner of phenomena. This literature aims to enlighten us on such things as the forces that determine changes in the rate of profit; the level of employment and wages; the causes of economic crises or stagnation; development of poor countries; changes in the workplace relationships between employers and employees; changes in overall price level; the economic forces changing the numbers of people engaged in different fields of work; the distribution of income and wealth.
It is the success of the robust economics literature that refutes Marx and his value theory.
I fear I do not hesitate to ask, value in studying the history of modern economics after Smith, Ricardo and Malthus, such as Jevons, von Menger, von Boehm-Bawerk, Carey, Patten, J.B. Clark.
Some contemporaries (more or less) like Walras, Pareto, Mosca, Michels, von Mises and von Hayek are still influential, if not revered. Their achievements also provide the refutation of the relevance of Marx.
It is very confusing why, say, a J.M. Clark is still influential but a Wesley Clair Mitchell is not.
steven t johnson 01.19.25 at 4:11 pm
Yes, forgot the question mark at the end of the third paragraph-sentence.
Aardvark Cheeselog 01.19.25 at 9:10 pm
Wow, such a busy thread!
I’m a bit surprised to see so little mention of Darwin and Origin. I have no institutional exposure to economics as such, but am not surprised that modern economists can go their whole careers without engaging with Smith, even with his one most famous contribution.
I’m with Sam B @1 about Darwin and biologists, myself. I expect relatively few biologists read any Darwin, and that’s a shame but it doesn’t make them worse biologists. But I bet a larger fraction of biologists do read Origin than the fraction of economists who read Wealth of Nations. And that is because Darwin is mostly not obsolete. There were some key things he did not know about the mechanics of heredity, and probably some places is later works where he went out somehat on some limbs that haven’t held up. But the key insight of Origin, that all life’s diversity is the result of descent with modification acted upon by natural selection, that remains the central organizing concept in biology. Smith did not approach anything so generally revolutionary.
Speaking as one who was trained as both chemist and life scientist, I think economics is not at all unique in this respect. With chemistry in particular, once you get past the 100-level courses there is not much about the experiments that confirmed the phenomenological models you are shown. Chemists learn very little of their field’s history, by comparison to biologists, and I think chemists are more typical of STEM generally.
Richard 01.20.25 at 12:13 am
You hit upon what I think is the most practical takeaway from this “should economists read he classics?” debate – that the recent history of economic thought is more important than the distant past.
Starting at the present day and working backwards allows the far more useful question of “why do we do things this way, and what are the alternatives?” instead of “and then what happened next?”. As a practising economist, I’ve often found it useful to be able point to the debates of 20 or 30 years ago that led to a certain consensus, whereas a lot more leaps are needed to make something useful of 19th century ideas, especially when they’re often consumed as monolithic “classic texts” rather than understood in the context of their times.
LFC 01.20.25 at 2:02 am
I quote parts of a passage from the opening chapter of a book by Charles E. Lindblom, who was at the time of its publication Sterling Professor of Economics and Political Science at Yale. The book is Politics and Markets (Basic Books, Inc., 1977):
This was written some decades ago, but I thought it nonetheless might be worth quoting. I’m not sure I would have put everything exactly the way he did, but that’s not terribly relevant.
Kurt Schuler 01.20.25 at 2:08 am
Among the marginalists, Carl Menger read Marx, though it is unclear just when he did so. He had the 1867 first printing of Das Kapital in his library and he was at the very least familiar with socialist thought through his brother Ant0n, a somewhat prominent socialist who was critical of Marx. Both Mengers were unusually bookish, though, amassing private libraries of thousands of volumes. As other commenters have noted, the norm in many fields is not to know much about your predecessors. In the social sciences it is a disadvantage because human action allows for more free play than the laws of nature, so existing institutions and practices do not embody advanced principles of social science in the same way that a cell phone or a vaccine involves advanced principles of the natural sciences.
You (John Q) state that “capitalism is inherently prone to crisis.” I think of it differently. All large-scale economic activity seems prone to crisis because coordination at that level is hard. Among premodern economies, the crisis often took the form of a famine. In modern capitalist economies, there are of course financial crises. Centrally planned economies don’t have financial crises, but as substitutes they have persistent shortages of basic goods and sometimes famines that would have been avoidable under capitalism. The Great Depression was bad, but it was not as dire as the Ukrainian and Kazakh famines of the time resulting from Soviet agricultural policies. Mao’s Great Famine and the famines the Kims caused in North Korea had no counterparts in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or South Korea.
Fergus 01.20.25 at 2:30 am
A few people have cited philosophy as a discipline where people definitely ‘know the history’. I think that is pretty exaggerated. You will definitely end up knowing a bit about Plato, Kant etc by the end of a full academic training in philosophy. And there are plenty of academics who specialise in historical work on a particular figure or period. But my experience is that if you aren’t a specialist, you will mostly know history from a handful of specific ‘history of philosophy’ classes with almost nonexistent integration into the modern fields of study. If you go to a grad seminar in metaphysics, in my experience, you have roughly zero chance of encountering any discussion of Plato or Leibniz. Equally, if you go to an ancient philosophy or early modern philosophy seminar, you’ll learn about the debates of the period and read some modern scholars going over them, but without any connection to current debates, even on apparently very similar issues. Some sub-fields are probably worse than others on this (eg. ethics/political theory tend to have more integration with historical work, while I’d hazard more formal areas have almost none.) But I think it’s fair to say that while philosophy as a whole “knows its history” that knowledge is largely concentrated in people who specialise in it & doesn’t feature very consciously in contemporary debates.
So it sounds quite close to how economics is being described by most people in this thread. Interestingly it seems like English literature might almost be the worst example JQ could have picked, maybe next to sociology.
M Caswell 01.20.25 at 2:52 am
In originary works, the radical questions– which tend to transcend the discipline– are more apparent. A work need not be first in time to be orgininary, but it can help.
Tm 01.20.25 at 9:11 am
As several commenters lready pointed out, a biologist doesn’t have to have read Darwin in the original to be a good biologist. I would add that next to no Mathematician nowadays reads original papers by Euler or Gauss. They would be difficult to understand and there are plenty of textbooks that lay out the ideas and results in systematic fashion and much easier to understand for a modern reader. When I studied Mathematics, there was no mandatory class about the history of the field, which I think is regrettable. But knowing the history isn’t a requirement to do Mathematics. In the case of social sciences, I think learning about the history of the field should absolutely be a requirement. Which is not the same as having to read the original literature.
A genuine science doesn’t rely on origin texts. It permanently supersedes and corrects earlier ideas. That’s why Marxists mostly put me off. If Marxism is a genuine science (as Marxists used to claim), there has to be a literature superseding the origin texts, applying the ideas and methods and also refining them, updatuing them, adding to them, correcting them. But studying Marxism always requires reading the origin.
Tm 01.20.25 at 9:35 am
engels 29: I won’t go out on a limb defending mainstream economists but I distinctly remember Paul Krugman warning of the real estate bubble which triggered the crisis around the year 2007. How well he “predicted” what exactly would happen I cannot say and it’s probably not fair to expect precise predictions in any case (not least because economic outcomes are affected by politics). But there certainly were warnings.
Limited predictive power seems a weak objection against mainstream economics. I find more damning the fact that there is huge disagreement between establishment econonists regarding basic questions of economic policy. That shouldn’t be the case in a field that claims scientific validity.
engels 01.20.25 at 1:40 pm
Grace Blakeley here is to the point
https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2021/02/22/conversations-with-alumni-grace-blakeley/
engels 01.20.25 at 2:03 pm
But I think it’s fair to say that while philosophy as a whole “knows its history” that knowledge is largely concentrated in people who specialise in it & doesn’t feature very consciously in contemporary debates. So it sounds quite close to how economics is being described by most people in this thread.
This only applies to analytic philosophy though.
Seekonk 01.20.25 at 4:14 pm
I think mainstream economic analysis tends to be abstract, and often obscurantist. I credit Marx for focusing on
1) the means of production – who controls them and what are they used for; and
2) the relations of production – which are primarily experienced as wages, benefits, and working conditions.
And I think old Karl was a pretty fair wordsmith, e.g.:
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
engels 01.20.25 at 8:31 pm
there certainly were warnings
Well ok (it’s a pretty big field) but here’s Robert Lucas’s presidential address to the American Economics Association from 2003: “[Macroeconomics’] central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.”
https://www.princeton.edu/~markus/misc/Lucas2003.pdf
D’OH!
engels 01.20.25 at 8:49 pm
If Marxism is a genuine science (as Marxists used to claim), there has to be a literature superseding the origin texts, applying the ideas and methods and also refining them, updatuing them, adding to them, correcting them.
Ya think?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/index-mobiles.htm
CJColucci 01.21.25 at 5:23 pm
Can anyone recommend something that is a step up from Heilbroner’s Worldly Philosophers?
Matt 01.21.25 at 10:17 pm
“Can anyone recommend something that is a step up from Heilbroner’s Worldly Philosophers?”
It covers a large amount of ground, so is brief on lots of things, but I got a lot out of Roger Backhouse’s The Ordinary Business of Life: A History of Economics from the Ancient World to the Twenty-First Century. (I think it might have been published under a different title in the UK, so depending on where you’re coming from, you might see soemthing different.)
They are much more focused and specialized, but I also really enjoyed and learned a lot from M.I. Finley’s The Ancient Economy, and Alec Nove’s An Economic History of the USSR and The Soviet Economic System. (The last one is more of a textbook, but still extremely interesting.)
LFC 01.22.25 at 7:19 am
@CJColucci
I don’t have a great answer to that, but there are histories of economic thought that are less popular and more academic. I believe Eric Roll wrote one, though it’s probably quite old. Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition, is a book from the 1940s, fairly hostile to Marx, more favorable to the (so-called) utopian socialists, but it might be worth a look. There’s some good work by historians on Keynes, Hayek, and M. Friedman. Q. Slobodian’s Globalists is good on the origins of an important strand of neoliberal economic thought. And, while it’s not exactly what you’re asking for, Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests is definitely worth reading.
Tm 01.22.25 at 7:31 am
engels 51 links to an interesting archive. Most of the entries however do not seem to be refer to Marxist authors. So?
In any case, I’m not disputing that there are authors who were inspired by Marx, some of whom even adopted the label Marxist. That’s not the point.
MisterMr 01.22.25 at 9:11 am
My two cents:
When Marx spoke of “scientific socialism”, he meant basically that it was materialist and evidence-based.
This is more or less the same concept of “science” taht we can see in Freud and up to the first half of the 20st century, and we could call it the “old positivism” definition of science.
During the second half of the 20st century, due to the “linguistic turn” and neopositivism, the definition of “science” became stricter, and therefore “marxism” as a whole is just too generic to fit in the definition of “science”.
This or that subpart of marxism, like the Labor theory of value (that actually was older than Marx, M. just used the concept that was perceived as scientific in his times), the theory of economic crises, the theory of ideologies etc. can be more or less scientific (that is, more or less in tune with modern scientific knowledge).
Most of thois stuff, though, is pretti basic, so for example if we speak of the theory of ideology or class consciousness Marx only gave a generic idea and the defitintion of what counts as “ideology”, “class consciousness”, or truth as opposed to ideology is very ambiguous, so that many marxist thinkers used methods and theories borrowed from elsewhere to explain things better (e.g. french structuralism used to explain the concept of ideology).
So “Marxism” would be more like a direction of research than a “science”.
steven t johnson 01.22.25 at 5:01 pm
In addition to non-reliance on origin texts, the science of economics is marked by its connections to other sciences, where its scientific contributions to and from other fields are incorporated in the overall human scientific project of understanding and changing the world. Economics as a science must obviously be deeply conversant with economic history, taking it as an extensively used data base for its own activities and must be essential to the economic historian in a different way as well. The same applies to political science and sociology and psychology and geography and demography and, insofar as economics as a science is about economizing on nature, even with the natural sciences. Again, the robustness of the economics literature demonstrates irrefutably its scientific nature, no?
KT2 01.23.25 at 11:32 pm
History, Bernoulli, Econ & Stats.
John Quiggin
5d
Liked by R Meager
“Someone clever enough could have inferred most of chaos theory from the fact that coin flips are deterministic”
Comment in:
“Taking Our Chances
This one’s for the academy, I guess”
R Meager
Jan 18, 2025
…
“It’s not just that this reasoning is difficult. It is painful. Does anyone really want to know that there is no such rigorous thing as a “long run frequency”?4 That the randomness in gambling comes from you, not some apparently- or seemingly- or feelingly-inscrutable mechanics of the coin flip or the dice roll? Who wants to be left with subjective guesses, judgments, and weights? Nobody. Not even Bayesians! Even Bayesians go to sleep at night soothed with the complete class theorems, under the fluffy quilt of the Bernstein-von Mises theorem.
“It’s better than Bernoulli’s swindle (Diaconis and Skyrms, P67 and again P195). Tedious, repeated frequentist attempts to prepare the Bayesian omelette without breaking Bayesian eggs.They do love their repeated attempts.
“I do not mean to say all glory to statistics and no glory at all to economics. I am not saying what we’ve done does not have any value. (It’s also not necessarily the case that having value will save us; nor the case that becoming more inclusive, or better at statistics, will make us well remunerated or safe. Probably it does not do nothing. But this, all of this, too, is more than amply subject to the vagaries of chance.)
“Those people inclined to dismiss econ might think that statisticians have little to learn from us; that is wrong.”
…
https://rottenandgood.substack.com/p/taking-our-chances
Via (for me)…
“Science and the malleability of the self”
January 23, 2025
by Jessica Hullman
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/01/23/science-and-the-malleability-of-the-self/
LFC 01.24.25 at 11:04 pm
CJColucci @52
I’ve got another title to suggest for you — haven’t read this, but heard the author talk about it a while back:
Alan Bollard, Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas (2023)
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