This Week on Free Will: Stephen Marglin
In today’s Free Will at Bloggingheads TV, I talk with Stephen Marglin, the Walter S. Barker Professor of Economics at Harvard University, about his new book The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community.
I expected to hate this book, but I didn’t. Instead I found it thoughtful and stimulating, if ultimately flawed. I agreed with Marglin much more than I was expecting. It’s just that, unlike him, I don’t think the Amish are a very good moral model for anyone, and don’t think there is much worth lamenting when those kinds of communities are undermined by markets. I agree with Marglin that the transition from institutions of personal to impersonal exchange is radically transformative of community and personal identity. However, I’m willing to go to the mat for the idea that the gains in wealth, longevity, individual autonomy and creativity overwhelmingly swamps the loss of “thick” identities and tribal “meaning”. I think we’re “designed” to crave those things, however, so the cosmopolitan liberal utopia necessarily leaves us with a residue of regret. We will always be tempted to wreck Eden in a search of Eden. Thinking like an economist is inhuman and the bulwark against our ruin.
Also, Marglin’s left-communitarianism confused me. He was able to give no examples of the progressive, inclusive Gemeinschaft. I think there’s a good reason for that, and that’s reason enough not to try for it.
March 3rd, 2008 14:18
Well, I had an immediate positive communitarian glow from seeing the front cover of Marglin’s book, because I spent the summers of my childhood in the Cape Cod cottage depicted in the Edward Hopper painting featured on it. Hopper stayed in that Truro house, known as the “Jenness House”, for I think two or three years before building his own more spectacular house on top of the neighboring dunes. I remember it as a place of extraordinary communal and familial bliss, with much shucking of corn on the steps together with family friends.
Kind of confusing that Marglin seems to be using it to signal the disconnection and anomie of modern liberal capitalist society, though.
March 3rd, 2008 14:58
Really enjoyable episode, Will, and your confusion is understandable but not obvious.
Having not seen the book, I feel like much of Marglin’s argument begins, and perhaps ends, with a basic malaise about society–very much like Putnam’s “Bowling Alone.” I think it’s interesting that he casts this as an anti-economics argument but I doubt that will broaden its audience or appeal any.
March 3rd, 2008 15:52
Okay. This is actually really interesting and odd. But seeing that picture on the front of the book sent me off looking for nostalgic childhood references on the Web; and what I discovered is that that house — the “Jenness House” — is at the center of a massive Cape Cod real estate and conservation dispute between an ultrarich couple named the Klines, who want to build a 6500-square-foot beach mansion on the property, and the Cape Cod Commission, which has taken up other Truro residents’ concerns about the development. Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote a piece about the conflict last August.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/opinion/26weds4.html
More recently, the preservationists seem to have lost some ground.
http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080212/NEWS/802120307
The final issue will probably be decided on March 6.
This would seem to be a good laboratory for examining how “thinking like an economist” turns certain valuable things that don’t express themselves monetarily - notably the value of landscape and shared history - to crap.
March 3rd, 2008 16:14
brooksfoe,
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. I feel your nostalgia. But let me be an ass and wonder what was there before the Jenness House. Perhaps the 6500 sq ft monstrosity will be the site of EVEN MORE warm memories that are also inexpressible in monetary terms. Of course, we can’t ever know that, so we have to have some other way of adjudicating the dispute, and strikes me that this dispute is proceeding in about the right way, however it turns out.
March 3rd, 2008 16:19
Hi Will, I’ve written a blog post on Marglin’s book here http://oxonomics.typepad.com/oxonomics/2008/03/the-costs-of-co.html
March 4th, 2008 07:57
Kind of confusing that Marglin seems to be using it to signal the disconnection and anomie of modern liberal capitalist society, though.
How so? The house is located in modern liberal capitalist society, and the events you remember so fondly took place in modern liberal capitalist society. Perhaps the only source of confusion is your ideological ideas about disconnection and anomie?
March 4th, 2008 09:42
Title suggestion: The Marglinal Cost of Thinking Like an Economist
March 4th, 2008 20:31
Are we really ‘designed’ to lament the loss of community?
There are lots of people in the modern world who embrace individualism and cosmopolitanism without regrets.
This is the problem with biological (read reductive) accounts of human behaviour - they simply ignore the countervailing impact of our choices, which can change our beliefs and even our basic psychology.
March 6th, 2008 10:59
I wouldn’t say “designed to lament the loss of community” because that seems to misdiagnose the problem.
It does seem to be the case that humans enjoy what Will refers to as thick identities and tribal meaning, but humans also enjoy a host of other things, from consuming sweet fatty foods to having good health to spending lazy days on the beach to gossiping about mutual acquaintances, and many other things besides these.
Choice and cost is inherent in the human condition, and therefore inherent any system — liberal cosmopolitan utopia or otherwise. The “residue of regret” comes from awareness of choices and cost. Perhaps the only distinctive factor of a liberal cosmopolitan utopia in this regard is that the system is most likely to support a population with the wealth and education to contemplate these topics. (Which I take as a good thing.)