Sunday, March 26, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 26, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 26, 2023

by Tony Wikrent


“U.S. Announces Plans To Reclassify Everyone’s Race Based On Net Worth”

[The Onion, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-25-2023]

“‘It is resolved by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives that any American whose wealth exceeds $1 million shall be white,’ read the bipartisan legislation, which went on to state that citizens who were dissatisfied with the race they were assigned under the new criteria would be ‘free to pull themselves up by their bootstraps” in order to reach a racial category of greater privilege. ‘Now, regardless of the color of their skin, those who are rich will receive all the rights a wealthy person is entitled to in this country. Meanwhile, those with a net worth in the six figures, though they cannot be white, will still qualify as Asian, with the social scale moving downward from there to Latino and Black. This should go a long way toward making our racial stereotypes as accurate as possible.’ In an attempt to deal a final blow to the complications of intersectionality, Congress was reportedly taking up additional legislation to ensure everyone earning above the median income level was classified as a man, and everyone below it as a woman.”

Climate and environmental crises

Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change.

[Working Group III Contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, via Naked Capitalism 3-22-2023]

Twitter Thread

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 19, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 19, 2023

by Tony Wikrent


Global power shift

China Leads A Successful Middle East Summit

Ian Welsh, March 16, 2023

Something which has slipped past most people’s radar is that China recently acted as the intermediary for peace talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The two countries have been at each other’s throats for decades, funding and running operations and proxies against each other….

Now it’s obvious why the US couldn’t be involved: it hates Iran and doesn’t intend to change that any time soon. But that China was reached out to indicates that it has good relationships with Iran and Saudi Arabia and that it’s considered powerful and prestigious enough to be involved a region far from its core.

On the Saudi side this shows the continued movement away from being a US ally. It suggests continued movement towards China, and that the petro-dollar really is under significant threat.

For Iran, it suggests that the days of the US being able to coordinate sanctions over it are likely numbered. If the Sauds break out of the US bloc, one can expect the Gulf States to follow if Iran is also in the Chinese bloc: these are the regional and cultural great powers. As Chinese/Russian payments expand and with petrochemicals priced in Yuan or Rubles, and with the most important Middle Eastern powers friendly to China, the US is reduced to its core allies. 


The Key Factor in the Saudi-Iran Deal: Absolutely No U.S. Involvement 

Murtaza Hussain, March 15 2023 [The Intercept]

Ever since it pushed aside colonial Britain and France, the United States has prided itself on being the dominant outside power in the Middle East. That lofty image was shaken this past week by the surprise announcement that Saudi Arabia, a close U.S. partner, and Iran, a longtime enemy, had negotiated a normalization agreement on their own to restore diplomatic ties. The final meeting to conclude the agreement took place in the Chinese capital of Beijing.


Détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia raises hopes for steps towards peace in Yemen

[france24 3-16-2023]


China and Russia capitals connected on New Silk Road for first time

Chengfan Zhao [Rail Freight, via Mike Norman Economics 3-18-2023]

Linking Moscow and Beijing is of symbolic value, but the symbolism says a lot. The big news is that Sino-Russia trade is increasing and it is not just energy that formerly went to Europe heading East. China as "the factory of the world" is now supplying Russia directly with its output, further eroding the effect of sanctions. And the trade is being settled in RIB and CYN.

Henry C Carey: A Study in American Economic Thought (1931) Excerpts, Part 1

For about a century now, a faction of the USA elite -- which may be characterized as the financial rentier faction (or as Michael Hudson and Kevin Phillips have identified it, the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector -- has assiduously financed and promoted an academic falsification of USA economic history. This falsification insists on the primacy of British classical economists, and the marginalization and deliberate disregard for the "American School" alternative. The doctrine of the "American School"  calls for tariff protection of USA industries and workers; "internal improvements" infrastructure investment; a national bank able to hold speculation in check and stabilize the currency, while also democratizing finance by expanding access to credit; government programs to promote science and industrial and agricultural technology, such as the Coast and Geodetic Survey and metalworking technology sharing programs of the national armories; and a doctrine of high wages.  It was this "American School" not laissez faire or Adam Smith's "invisible hand" that actually guided USA's industrial development and struggle to suppress the legacies of slavery. In an October 2011 article, Hudson explained how this "American School" of political economy was targeted using the example of the fight between neoclassical economist John Bates Clark and "American School" progressive economist Simon Patten. The excerpts from 1931 presented here are intended to help revive the "American School" of political economy and liberate us from the shackles of classical / neoclassical economics which has sunk us deeper and deeper into the morass of deindustrialization, financial depredation, worsening inequality, and political instability. 


Henry Charles Carey: A Study in American Economic Thought

by A.D.H. Kaplan, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1931


Introduction

...Professor Perry, writing in 1878, divided the economic treatises in America into two categories: those modelled after Adam Smith and those modelled after Carey. [1] Yet today it is difficult to find an American manual on economics containing a reference to Henry Charles Carey. Nor does the name of Carey, the outstanding advocate of the protective tariff when it had to fight for political recognition, come up in the debates of men who make the tariff acts in the United States in this day, when the protective tariff is taken for granted in national politics....


Chapter I. Life of Carey

Henry C. Carey's career as an economist began at the close of a successful career as a publisher; it is one of several respects in which the son followed the paths of his father, Mathew Carey.

The elder Carey, born in Ireland in 1760, came to the United States at the age of twenty-four as a political refugee. Mathew had in 1782 been banished from Ireland for his unbridled criticism of Britain's Irish policy; while in Paris the exile became interested in America through contact with Benjamin Franklin, whom he served as printer....

The literary record of the senior Carey is intimately associated with his patronage of domestic manufactures and championship of the "American System."  Mathew Carey founded the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry in 1819, and was an active leader of the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Useful Manufactures. [2] ....

His varied business and social contacts in themselves afforded Henry C. Carey a unique education. Carey has told how from the age of seven he would accompany his father on walks about Philadelphia, during which Mathew pointed out the local landmarks to his son and dwelt on their economic significance. The circle in which the elder Carey had moved included leading literary lights, captains of industry and statesmen of the city and nation. But the son far outdid the father in drawing about himself the outstanding citizens of his country and visitors from abroad. The gatherings at the Carey home in Philadelphia constituted what was considered to be the most distinguished salon in America....

The group which in this pleasant wise forwarded the education of Carey, and served as foils or adversaries in the process of crystallizing his thought, had variety as well as distinction. In his circle were orthodox free traders and teachers of classical economics, as well as good haters of Britain and cosmopolitan doctrine. Of the former school were C.C. Biddle, who had provided the introduction and notes for the American edition of J.B. Say in 1824; Condy Raquet, author-economist and editor of The Free Trade Advocate; Henry Vethake, professor of moral philosophy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania. Against these and others who adhered to the British school were devoted disciples of Carey in defence of the American System. There was, for example, Judge William D. Kelly, Carey's mouthpiece in Congress, whose consistent championship of protection for Pennsylvania's leading industry earned for him the sobriquet of "Pig Iron Kelly"; Joseph P. Wharton, an associate in the iron and steel business, whose school of commerce was founded at the University of Pennsylvania to teach the virtues of protection for home industries. To them may be added the Rev. William Elder, Carey's literary executor and a tactician on economics; Rufus Griswold, editor of the American Whig Review; Robert Ellis Thompson, protectionist and editor of the Carey-backed Penn Monthly, to whom we are indebted for some intimate sidelights on the personality of Carey. From Stephen Colwell, Carey received correction as well as occasional endorsement of his views on currency and finance. From Peshine Smith he obtained the “law of the perpetuity of matter," on which Carey predicated a demonstration of the providential oversight of human propagation.  Politicians who occasionally sat in on the Carey Vespers included James G. Blaine; Ulysses S. Grant (as ex-president); the colourful General Robert Patterson, who dabbled in political and economic theories when he was not discussing his part in the strategy of Bull Run.[3] Morton McMichael, editor of The North American Review, Saturday Evening Post and other Philadelphia periodicals, was one of several literary lights who regularly graced Carey's round table; and Ralph W. Emerson is mentioned among the men of the day who made it a point, when visiting Philadelphia, to be with Henry C. Carey.

Carey visited in Europe during 1857 and 1859, the second time to participate in economic conferences at the invitation of his ardent admirer Eugen Duehring, and other friendly German nationalists like Max Wirth and Schultze-Delitsch. These visits afforded the American valuable contacts with men like John Stuart Mill, Humboldt, Cavour, Liebig, Ferrara, Chevalier and equally brilliant intellectual figures of the continent. Elder refers to a correspondence remarkable for its extent and regularity, which Henry Carey carried on with his contemporaries in Europe. Carey seems to have acquired an early facility in the use of French, and to have mastered German after he attained middle age. By and large, it cannot be said that any provincialism in Carey is traceable to an ignorance of world affairs or men of affairs....

Editorial comment on the passing of Henry Charles Carey, in the newspapers of the day, commonly referred to him as "America's most widely known private citizen."

Chapter II: Economics in Carey’s Day

Henry Carey entered the lists of economic authorship a year after the death of Malthus, twelve years after the passing of Ricardo. James Mill, then in his sixty-second year, shared with [John Ramsay] McCulloch - six years his junior - the acknowledged leadership of the British school. [Nassau William] Senior had just completed his celebrated Report of the Royal Commission on the poor laws, and was engaged in the preparation of his general treatise on political economy. The law of diminishing returns from land, the pressure of population on subsistence, the wages fund theory and Ricardian rent - these bulwarks of the classical structure had been effectively fixed into the framework of the science. Against the expositions of the elder Mill and of McCulloch neither [Thomas] Chalmer's refutation of the Malthusian "law" nor Richard Jones's vigorous criticism of Ricardian rent could command attention. Senior was content with a refinement of details in the orthodox synthesis. The Maltho-Ricardian system, credited with steering contemporary politics in the "right" direction, rested easy in respected authority.

In America, formal political economy maintained its respectability in the halls of learning by keeping close to the traditions of its European ancestry. In the Harvard (1825) and Yale (1827) catalogs, the treatise of J.B. Say [Traité d'économie politique (1803); in English, A Treatise on Political Economy; or The Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth] was listed as the prescribed text. [4] Professor McVickar's Outlines of Political Economy (1825), which he used with his students at Columbia, was admittedly a reprint of McCulloch's article in the Britannica, supplemented by McVickar's notes and comments. Dr. Thomas Cooper, who as president of the South Carolina College had published Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy (1826), departed from the old world texts only in the greater emphasis that he placed on laissez faire and the evils of a protective tariff. In line with Dr. Cooper, Thomas R. Dew emphasized free trade in his lectures at William and Mary, his fame resting on the fact that as a southerner he attempted the economic defence of slavery in connection with an attack on the Tariff of 1828. By 1835 there had also been published the substance of Newman's lectures at Bowdoin (Elements of Political Economy, 1835) and Vethake's at the University of Pennsylvania (Introductory Lectures on Political Economy, 1831); neither of these is found, however, to be more than a restatement of McCulloch, supplemented by an occasional reference to American conditions. Indeed, little is to be found in the work of the professional academicians to have inspired the seeker after a key to the economic forces that were so swiftly driving the young republic toward a commanding position.

If one is to find forerunners of Henry Charles Carey among the Americans, he must look elsewhere than among the formal centres of learning, or the orthodox followers of the Smith-Malthus-Ricardo tradition.

Closer to the common experiences of American life, and more potent in steering contemporary American thought, were the pamphleteers who aired their reactions to immediate questions of public policy. Among these Benjamin Franklin was a pioneer. As early as 1729 he voiced the colonists' protest against the curtailment of their paper currency. He advocated expansion of the currency as a prerequisite for lower interest rates, higher wages and increased production, and as a means for the encouragement of immigration to the colonies.[5]  Taking a leaf from the book of the Physiocrats, he considered land a desirable collateral for the paper currency that he advocated. Against the British strictures on colonial manufactures, Franklin originally contended that the abundance of cheap land, permitting the average man to set up for himself as a farmer, prevented wages in America from falling to a level that would permit successful competition with English manufactures. Though the colonial population was being doubled every twenty years, he could see no prospect of rendering hired labor cheap or plentiful in so vast an area.[6]  After the Revolutionary War, Franklin subscribed to the now vaunted American position on the economy of high wages, asserting that well paid labor made for a higher level of skill, intelligence and alertness, paving the way to the use of more efficient methods and the employment of modern machinery.

Like his French contemporaries, Franklin espoused laissez-faire, and appears to have had little sympathy with tariffs for the protection or manufactures,[7] though he did question the validity of a prosperity that was based on foreign trade gained through the payment or low wages, wherein "half the nation must languish in misery."[8]  For the shifting of emphasis to American manufactures a more significant influence is that of Alexander Hamilton and his able assistant, Tench Coxe.

Hamilton, like Franklin, was exposed to the contemporary physiocratic doctrines; he also revealed a wide reading of Adam Smith and the more prominent members of the early British school. But the stress of practical problems to be faced called for an American departure. Britain had refused to make a commercial treaty with the United States, while France and Spain had set up a barrier of contempt for "the lowest and most obscure or the whole diplomatic tribe," as Jefferson complained. Hamilton's celebrated Report was thus in part a defensive proposal against the unfriendliness of nations from whom the new republic might otherwise have been content to obtain manufactured goods. Two considerations of parallel importance were the necessity for immediate revenue and the strengthening of the still soft bond or union among the states. These factors are all evident in the arguments advanced by Hamilton in the Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the Subject of Manufactures, which he submitted to Congress in December, 1791. There he called attention to the damage inflicted upon the American manufactures fostered during the Revolutionary War, by the deluge of foreign goods upon the resumption of peace; and therefore urged the desirability of an economic policy designed to free the new republic from dependence on foreign powers for its essential supplies.

Following Adam Smith, Hamilton pointed to the possibilities of the new industrial era, with its marked efficiencies in the division of labor and wider use of machinery; like Smith, he denied to agriculture the exclusive role in the creation of national wealth. But Hamilton went further in suggesting peculiar advantages for the United States in the promotion of manufactures. Manufactures would provide employment for elements of the population not ordinarily engaged in production - women and children; the new employment opportunities would encourage immigration; the young nation would climb out of its primitive stage limited by agriculture, as it afforded greater scope for diverse talents and additional capital through the promotion of manufactures. Bounties and tariff protection would help new American industries through their infancy, until they were strong enough to meet foreign competition - after which time the ideal of unhampered international trade could be resumed. Finally, the establishment of manufactures would create a home market for the consumption of agricultural produce, thus contributing to the economic as well as political stability of the Union.[9]

Congress, while largely rejecting the suggestion of bounties, and to some extent frowning upon the violation of laissez faire traditions which was implicit in tariff legislation, nevertheless did impose import duties in aid of the national revenue. With that precedent Congress paved the way for a national system of protective tariffs. Little of the theory of the protective tariff in America has gone very far beyond the principles laid down by Hamilton in his Report. (Carey's attempted departures are reserved for later consideration.)

In fathering the national debt, and even identifying the public debt with productive capital, Hamilton gave effect to his desire to enlist support for the Union.[10]  Like Franklin, he advocated alleviation of the shortage of currency in the States: his program embraced a bi-metallic currency supplemented by note issues of the United States bank, not to mention the government bonds that he hoped might serve as an auxiliary medium of circulation.[11]

Mathew Carey frankly acknowledged the inspiration of Hamilton by copious quotations from the Report in his Essays on Political Economy (1822) and other tracts in which Carey served as crusader for the American System.

Closely allied with Hamilton in fostering a nationalistic economy was Tench Coxe. As assistant secretary of the treasury and commissioner of the revenue (1790-97) Coxe furnished the factual props for Hamilton's recommendations. The data which Coxe prepared on the commerce and manufactures of the country, though crude by present statistical standards, constituted the major survey of the American economic situation of the time. Economists of the succeeding generations, including the Careys, found them highly useful. [12]

In an earlier work, entitled An Inquiry into the Principles on Which a Commercial System for the United States of America should be Founded, etc. (1787), Coxe presented the neo-mercantilist view that the coasting trade of the United States be restricted to American vessels. His literary support to American manufactures was supplemented by vigorous activity in the founding of the Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures, which Hamilton sponsored, and the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Manufactures, with which Mathew Carey and Friedrich List were both identified at a later date.

Thomas Jefferson during his ministry at Paris had become thoroughly imbued with Physiocratic views; in his campaign for the presidency he championed the agricultural frontier and the South against the capitalist interest in the North. But he, too, became a staunch friend of American manufacturers. As president he urged Congress to give protection to home industries, and even drew comfort from the Embargo Acts, in so far as they tended to stimulate the revival of American manufactures.[13]  The Embargo and the Non-Intercourse Acts did in fact precede a marked advancement of domestic crafts.

In Albert Gallatin, as secretary of the treasury, manufacturers who sought protective tariffs found a determined opponent. Not only did he thwart any increase in the tariff rates, while in Jefferson's and Madison's cabinets, but twenty years later we find him a leader in the opposition to the Tariff of Abominations.[14]  Yet he took evident satisfaction in reporting to the President, in 1809, that "the injurious violations of the neutral commerce of the United States, by forcing industry and capital into other channels, have broken inveterate habits, and given a general impulse, to which must be ascribed the great increase of manufactures during the last two years."[15]  Gallatin's deep interest in strengthening the economic fabric of the federal system was further exhibited when he formulated his celebrated scheme of internal improvements to be undertaken by the national government, including transcontinental highways, canals, and the improvement of inland waterways and harbors.

In the field of finance, Gallatin's chief contribution was the enforcement of thrift and careful budgetary control in the conduct of the treasury. Rigorously holding down the federal budget, even to the virtual elimination of a national army and navy, Gallatin kept expenditures below revenues and effected a substantial reduction of the public debt established by Hamilton. This he accomplished in spite of the Louisiana purchase in 1803 and the curtailment of customs revenue during the Embargo and Non-Intercourse periods, not to mention the expenditures under Madison in preparation for the war against Britain. His reports concerning the public revenues were models of clearness and accuracy. Gallatin's one point of agreement with Hamilton was in his appreciation of the value of the national bank to the government, "for the safe keeping of the public moneys, transmission of public moneys, collection of revenue, and loans." Taking issue with Madison and the Jeffersonian party, Gallatin favored the renewal of the bank charter, and regarded the failure to renew as a national calamity.[16]

The War' of 1812 was accompanied by the spread of a belligerent nationalism in the United States. Under the flood of European goods that followed the Peace of Vienna, defence of the domestic economy against foreign invasion became a burning issue, at times taking on a decidedly anti-British tinge. The 1820's are noteworthy in American economics for the appearance in rapid succession of several extended treatises on political economy. Written by laymen, they dwelt on the practical politico-economic questions of the day and in common they essayed a revolt against the cosmopolitanism of  the classical British school. The earliest of these [17] was written by Daniel Raymond, a Connecticut lawyer who settled in Baltimore. His book was conceived, the preface tells us, as "an humble effort to break loose from the fetters of foreign authority; from foreign theories and systems of political economy, which from dissimilarity in the nature of their governments, render them altogether unsuited to our country." Along with Raymond, two other natives of New England  - Alexander Everett [18] and Willard Phillips [19] - compose a triumvirate of lawyers who stand out in the pre-Carey decade as leaders of a literary revolt against the classical synthesis. Like John Rae [20] in Canada, and Friedrich List, who was then resident in the United States, [21] they distinguish between private riches and national wealth; and they share the view that the productive capacity of the nation is the true measure of its wealth.[22]  The national wealth is not confined to the physical productions of man that are privately owned and exchanged. It includes the character and skill of the population, the natural resources, and even the cooperation of government in stimulating high productive capacity and fostering an equable distribution of the national income.[23]  Since it is a function of government to encourage the harmonious development of agriculture with manufacture, tariff protection is favored as a means for that end.

In Raymond there is special emphasis on the moral considerations believed to affect the national economy, notably on the evils of slavery.[24]  Paper money, banks, and banking he regarded with the utmost suspicion, as mysterious instruments of the rich for the economic enslavement of the masses.

(This sentiment was not uncommon, of course, in an age of peasant proprietorship and small-scale enterprise; it was to such suspicion of bankers, one might recall, that Andrew Jackson appealed in his veto of a re-charter for the United States Bank.) Phillips, however, presenting by far the best balanced treatise of the three, gave a clear analysis of the banking function and of credit paper.[25]  In his treatment of value, Phillips foreshadows the view later emphasized by the psychological school: "The desire to obtain any particular thing gives it its value. As value is created by this desire, so it is limited by its intensity." Neither Raymond, who evinced a distaste for theoretical analysis, nor Everett, whose prime concern was population, devoted any appreciable attention to a theory of value.

Land was treated characteristically as a form of capital, subject to earnings like interest and profits. Raymond says: "Some writers, and especially Mr. Malthus, have taken great pains to establish a distinction in principle between rent paid for the use of land and the price paid for the use of commodities or personal property. . . when in fact no such distinction exists, except in name."[26]  Phillips denies the existence of no-rent land, referring to the "somewhat metaphysical and now almost-exploded theory which has a temporary popularity in Great Britain" that rent arises from the necessity of cultivating inferior soi1.[27]  Characteristic of his dynamic view of economic progress is the observation that "nothing is more erroneous than this supposition, so frequently made, of a stationary amount of capital and industry." [28]

Though these national economists occasionally parted company on other aspects of economic thought, they were one in their vigorous opposition to the Malthusian view of population - the subject to which Everett's work was largely confined, and to which they all gave special consideration. In that respect there may be joined with them the name of Jacob Newton Cardozo, [29] a Charleston editor whose southern patriotism did not permit him to look with favor upon the protective tariff. Aside from their abhorrence for a doctrine which, according to Phillips, would "hail famine as a deliverer and pestilence as a subject of thanksgiving," they laid stress on the increase of skill and productive ability that accompanied the increase of numbers.[30]  Everett went so far as to insist that while population increased in geometric figures, the increased productivity made possible by the increase of manpower was of logarithmic proportions (1,10,100, etc.).[31]  The law of diminishing returns was tacitly discounted. In line with Franklin's view, they urged that the rapidity with which population increased was regulated by the economic environment, and adjusted itself thereto. In a new country the doubling of the population every twenty-five years was hardly sufficient for a rapid development of its untapped resources. In an older country in which social organization has already reached a high state of development, the increase of population is correspondingly less. The increase of population, according to Cardozo, " depends on the extent of the improvements in agriculture, and the inferior land is laid down in tillage exactly in proportion as these improvements extend. This is the reverse of the new theory which connects the augmentation of population and produce with the increased difficulty, instead of the increased facility of production."[32]

In summarizing the literary contribution of America to economic science, as of 1835, we may say that the work of the academicians in the new country added nothing to the economic doctrines of the British classical school. The budding American school of public-minded laymen, reflecting the optimism of a new, growing country, produced no work to command general attention, either in America or in the old world; but at least it expressed a virile reaction to the contemporary economic environment. It is to the latter company of literary pioneers that Henry C. Carey belongs. It was his function to synthesize the various phases of the American outlook into a system of political economy.


Chapter III. Development of Carey's Economic Thought.

The Carey who entered upon a career of economic literature at the age of forty-two displayed little of the diffidence of the novice. When he wrote the Essay on Wages (1835) he had acquired an evident familiarity with the work of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, James Mill, and McCulloch, and had done some critical reading of Senior, Richard Jones, and Jacob.

In Adam Smith's emphasis on improving production as the key to economic betterment, Carey readily acquiesced. But though he retained a special reverence for Smith, he found it difficult to reconcile the dismal, post-Napoleonic outlook of the Classical school with the facts of the life about him. The economy of Malthus and Ricardo suggested that population, driven by biologic forces, must press against a diminishing supply of natural resources, even as man's efforts to make nature yield her produce were meeting with increased resistance. But Carey's United States was at the very time engrossed in the conquest of her untapped resources, the development of which would tax the energies and ingenuity of an increasing population for an indefinite period. Land was plentiful; labor was scarce. The wages of the American worker increased as population increased; indeed immigration was actively encouraged, to speed up the process. To give universality to the system of Malthus and Ricardo, in the face of American experience - when every addition to the family was hailed as a victory for the homestead in the battle against the labor shortage - was seemingly to build economic doctrine upon myth.

The Neo-classicists noted the tendency to increasing returns with the extension of manufactures; but why, an American would ask, reserve a special law of diminishing returns for land? Land carried no halo in the United States when squatters were pouring into the Ohio-Mississippi valleys and land sold for the labor of clearing them to receive a new wave of settlement. The disposition of land was as readily effected as that of personal property. The hired farmer of yesterday was the tenant of today and the proprietor of tomorrow - and perhaps again the hired worker of the day after. Land was treated like any other form of capital, and the economic implications of its earnings suggested little distinction from the economics of capital in general.

The British school assumed a fixation of the classes, landlords, capitalists, laborers, with interests mutually opposed. In American experience the barriers of caste were commonly trespassed; there was no strongly intrenched tradition of aristocracy, nor of inherited occupation. The rise from humble beginning to high estate was an accepted phenomenon. Limitations on individual freedom and individual enterprise were sharply resented. Landlords exchanged manual labor with each other, as they participated in the construction of each other's buildings and in the harvesting of each other's crops.

The United States, in a period of rapid growth and exuberant national consciousness, coloured the economic outlook of Americans even as the conditions faced by the England of 1800 accounted for the pessimistic economics of Malthus or Ricardo. This was strikingly illustrated by Friedrich List. When he came to the United States in 1823, he had been steeped in the classical economics taught in his native Germany. Of the revolutionizing effect of the new land on his outlook he could say:

. . . .when afterwards I visited the United States I cast all books aside - they would only have tended to mislead one. The best work on Political Economy which one can read in that modern land is actual life. There one may see wilderness grow into rich and mighty states; progress which requires centuries in Europe goes on there before one's eyes. That book of actual life I have earnestly and diligently studied and compared with the results of my previous studies, experience, and reflections. . . and the result has been (as I hope) the preparing of a system which. . . is not founded on bottomless  cosmopolitanism but on the nature of things, the lessons of history, and on the requirements of the nations. [33]

The revolution in List's outlook, it will be recalled, was measurably inspired by his association with that very circle of Philadelphians of which Mathew Carey was a centre. It was under the patronage of the Philadelphia Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures that List had published his Outlines in support of a national economy and tariff protection. It were strange if Henry Carey, born into and a part of the very environment that so deeply moved List, did not prove equally reluctant to accept the pessimistic teachings of the British school.

Indeed we shall find that in the course of his progress as an economist, Carey's views, likewise, undergo a noteworthy transition. Entering as a comparatively respectful student of classical theory, and an admirer of Adam Smith, he passes through a period of doubt and emerges as an iconoclast among his contemporaries. He abandons laissez-faire as too cosmopolitan (if not too British), and pins his faith on a national economy. The crusader spirit of the elder Carey crops out in the writing of his son, who evolves an American System in protest against the gloomy economists of the Old World. He discards the brazen law of wages, diminishing returns, Malthusian principle of population, and Ricardian distribution. In Carey's social philosophy man and nature are part of a divine Harmony of Interest - a system in which man gains progressively by association with other men, increasing his power over nature as he learns to acquire with diminishing sacrifice the generous bounties of nature. Carey strove for a teleological economics in which land, like other forms of capital, yields to the growing effectiveness of labor; in which labor acquires an increasing share of an increasing total product, while all elements in the economy share together in the rewards of economic improvement.


Footnotes

[1] Perry, A.H., Elements of Political Economy, p. 52.

[2] The Pennsylvania Society was organized through the efforts of Tench Coxe and Alexander Hamilton in 1791, as the Society to Establish Useful Manufactures; it was under the patronage of this Society that List published his "Outlines" in 1825.

[3] Though Carey did not seek political office, he was high in the councils of the Republican party from its inception, until he joined the Greenback Party.

[4] Seligman, E.R.A. - Early Teaching of Economics in the U. S., in Economic Essays in Honor of John Bates Clark (J.H. Hollander, Ed.) pp. 307 and 315.

[5] "Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency" (1729). Cf. Wetzel, Benjamin Franklin as an Economist, p. 9 (J.H.U. Studies in Historical and Political Science, Series 13, ix).

[6] "Observation concerning the Increase of Mankind" (1751). Franklin's figures on population in America were utilized by Adam Smith, Godwin and Malthus (Wetzel, op. cit., p. 12).

[7] Wail of a Protected Manufacturer (1789).

[8]  Reflection on the Augmentation of Wages, etc. See Wetzel, p. 23.

[9] Report on Manufactures; American State Papers, I, 124-127.

[10] As early as 1781 Hamilton wrote: "A national debt, if not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. It will be a powerful cement to our Union" (Quoted in Rabbeno, p. 295).

[11] A pet argument of Hamilton's in support of encouraging manufactures, was that manufactures and plentiful currency went hand in hand. Thus: "the uniform appearance of an abundance of specie as the concomitant of a flourishing state of manufactures, and of the reverse where they do not prevail, afford a strong presumption of their favourable operation upon the wealth of a country." (From the Report on Manufactures, p. 284, in A.H. Cole, "Industrial and Commercial Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton.")

[12] Coxe's principal contributions to the economic literature of his time were (I) "A View of the United States of America, in a series of papers, written at various times between the years 1787 and 1794." (2) "Examination of Lord Sheffield's Observation on the Commerce of the United States," (3) "A Statement of the Arts and Manufactures of the United States of America, far the year 1810."

[13] See Jefferson's Message to Congress, November 8, 1808.

[14] Gallatin prepared the memorial to Congress from the Free Trade Convention held in Philadelphia in September and October, 1831, which proved influential in the repeal of the Tariff of 1828.

[15] American State Papers, Finance II, 430.x

[16] Charles A. Conant, History of Modern Banks of Issue, 19,27, p.340.

[17] Thoughts on Political Economy, Baltimore, 1820.

[18] New Ideas on Population: with remarks on the theories of Malthus and Godwin (Boston, 1823).

[19] A Manual of Political Economy, with particular reference to the Institutions, Resources, and Condition of the United States, Boston, 1828, available at University of Pennsylvania, Online Books by Willard Phillips.

[20] Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy, Exposing the Fallacies of the System of Free Trade, and of some Other Doctrines maintained in the Wealth of Nations, Boston, 1834. [Rae "identified technological innovation (rather than sheer capital accumulation) as the key to economic development," according to the brief biography of him on The History of Economic Thought website.]

[21] List's Outlines of American Political Economy was written and published in Philadelphia, 1827.

[22] Charles P. Neill, "Daniel Raymond: An Early Chapter in the History of Economic Theory in the United States," Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, XV, 239.

[23] Turner, op. cit., pp. 23, 24, 32, 36, 37.

[24] Neill, op. cit., p. 225.

[25] Phillips, Manual, chs. x and xi. Phillips even takes occasion to say: "In a comparison of government paper and bank paper as currency, there can hardly be a doubt that the bank paper is preferable." P. 261.

[26] Raymond, Thoughts, Second Edition, I, 184; quoted in Turner, p.28.

[27] Phillips, op. cit., p. 108.

[28] Ibid., p. 171.

[29] Notes on Political Economy (1826).

[30] Phillips, p. 106.

[31] New Ideas on Population, Second Edition, p. 26.

[32] Cardozo, Notes on Political Economy, p. 35. Quoted in Turner, p.77.

[33] Quoted in Gide and Rist, History of Economic Doctrines, pp. 96. 97.


Sunday, March 12, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 12, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 12, 2023

by Tony Wikrent


Strategic Political Economy

“Marianne Williamson: ‘Anything Is Possible'” (interview) 

[The Nation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-10-2023]

Your background is different from the typical presidential candidate. You’ve run for office before, but you’ve gained notoriety as someone who helps people explore their experiences, often from a spiritual perspective. Do you see that as a challenge or an advantage?

[WILLIAMSON]: It is key to my strength here and I’ll tell you why: I have dealt in my 40-year career with helping people both endure crises, and transform them. That is exactly what this country needs now: someone who can help us both endure and transform the trauma of these times. The chaos is external, but the trauma created by the chaos is internal. Secondly, because of my experience with all kinds of personality types and all kinds of people, I have a deep understanding of what a sociopath is. A sociopath is someone who simply doesn’t care.… It is because of that that I recognize as deeply as I do that an economic system—namely hyper-capitalism, namely neoliberalism—has at its root a deep spiritual darkness. It does not care. It is a sociopathic economic system that prioritizes short-term profit maximization for these huge corporate entities. It is a destructive force. And the political establishment, at its best right now, only tries to stave off its worst aspects. That’s what corporatist Democrats do. They recognize the disease to some extent, and they try to help people survive it. But they refuse to challenge the underlying corporate forces that make the return of all that pain and all that trauma inevitable.


The permanent recession that never arrives

[Axios, via The Big Picture 3-7-2023]

According to public opinion, the U.S. is seemingly in a semi-permanent recession, and the Fed has failed to improve matters….

  • In reality, the economy is hot, unemployment is at record lows, and there's no sign of a downturn any time soon.

[TW: Not sure if it’s stupidity or cupidity, but it remains astonishing how many journalists, academicians, politicians, and other elites continue to cling to national income accounting that clearly no longer captures what is actually happening in the economy. There can’t be a stronger signal that our economic statistical tools are misleading at best, useless at worst, than collapsing life expectancy.

Furthermore, if you reject the doctrine of mainstream classical neoliberal economics that there is no place for normative judgement and policy preferences in economics, you can easily see that world industrial productions needs to be vastly increased if we are to meet the challenges of climate change and environmental destruction. The rub, of course, is that this increase in industrial production must not occur under the reigning doctrine of “economic efficiency” as measured by lowest “price,” but by full and unhesitating investment in complete environmental protection and remediation, including, for example, designing for disassembly and recycling. [See Jon Larson’s Elegant Technology: Economic Prosperity from and Environmental Blueprint.]

From this perspective, we need at least an order of magnitude increase in electric vehicle sales and manufacturing, while ceasing entirely manufacture of internal combustion engine vehicles.  

Graph: New vehicle sales, by type ]

Sunday, March 5, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 5, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 5, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

[TW: Sorry this week’s wrap is light. I was in the hospital overnight for a medical procedure and my energy has been sapped. I’m tired and sore, but otherwise fine.]


Living on a Deadline in the Nuclear Age. Some Personal News From Daniel Ellsberg 

[Antiwar.com, via Naked Capitalism 3-31-2023]


War

Transcript: CIA director William Burns on “Face the Nation,” Feb. 26, 2023 

[CBS, via Naked Capitalism 2-27-2023]


The Reckoning That Wasn’t: Why America Remains Trapped by False Dreams of Hegemony

Andrew J. Bacevich, February 28, 2023 [Foreign Affairs, March/April 2023, via Naked Capitalism 3-31-2023]


House panel lays out ‘existential struggle’ with China in primetime debut 

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 3-1-2023]


US Dollar Primacy in an Age of Economic Warfare 

Michael St-Pierre and Michael Kao [Kaoboy Musings, via Naked Capitalism 2-27-2023]

Part one of four. Parts twothree, and four.