Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 402

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?" by Tyler Cowen.

If you listen to Jimmy Wales talk about where the inspiration for Wikipedia came from, he is quite clear that Hayek was a prominent influence. Of course Wikipedia is directly based on the idea of mobilizing decentralized bits of information. Individuals know many different pieces of information, they are free to add that information to Wikipedia, but Wikipedia has rules governing the acceptance of that information, with those rules themselves enforced in decentralized fashion. The result is the greatest encyclopedia ever built and one of the world’s most popular and most useful web sites, all based on Hayekian ideas.

 

I cannot in good conscience put Samuelson on the short list for GOAT. His main problem is that, while he was a great economist of high import, he did not in fact understand economics . I am sorry to report that, but yes it is true and it is also a deal-breaker.

Mill in fact became obsessed with Goethe’s concept of Vielseitigkeit , which can be translated as “many-sidedness.” As Laura J. Snyder has explained: “For a time, he admitted, this notion “possessed” him. Mill took “many-sidedness” to mean seeing all points of view in order to find the portions of truth residing in different, even contrary, systems of thought.” 

Malthus was strongly opposed to slavery and spoke out as such. As you might expect for an author so famous, the participants in the slavery debates both cited Malthusian doctrine as being on their side. For instance, it was argued that taking Africans away as slaves actually helped Africans by alleviating Malthusian pressures and thus allowing additional Africans to be born. Malthus, in the third edition of his Essay in 1806, wrote an appendix that responded to those arguments and made his opposition to slavery clear. Most of all he stressed the wretched condition of the slaves in the New World, and he gave a copy of his appendix to abolitionist William Wilberforce to use in the slavery debates. So on the number one issue of his time, Malthus made a concerted public attempt to be on the correct side. 

For instance, on slavery Smith actively opposed the institution and furthermore he had an influential legacy on the economics of slavery. First, he argued that free labor was more productive and more efficient than slave labor, due to better incentives. Second, he unambiguously identified the falling away of slavery with the onset of progress and the arrival of a better world. Third, Smith attempted to construct principles of justice under which involuntary slavery always was bad. If you wanted to cite an Enlightenment thinker on why slavery was bad, Smith was tailor-made for that purpose.