Recently published: The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like An Economist Undermines Community |
 |
|
Contact information Address Phone +1 (617) 495 3759
Phone +1 (617) 496 0062 |
Stephen A. Marglin holds the Walter S Barker Chair in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He became a tenured professor at Harvard in 1968, one of the youngest in the history of that institution. Marglin has contributed to many aspects of economics over his long career: his published papers and books range over the foundations of cost:benefit analysis, the workings of the labor-surplus economy, the organization of production, the relationship between the growth of income and its distribution, and the process of macroeconomic adjustment. His work has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, French, German, and Japanese. (more...)
The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like An Economist Undermines Community
 |
|
Harvard University Press 376 pages |
Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half-truths: that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state. However, as Stephen Marglin argues, market relationships erode community. In the past, for example, when a farm family experienced a setback - say the barn burned down - neighbors pitched in. Now a farmer whose barn burns down turns, not to his neighbors, but to his insurance company. Insurance may be a more efficient way to organize resources than a community barn raising, but the deep social and human ties that are constitutive of community are weakened by the shift from reciprocity to market relations.
Marglin dissects the ways in which the foundational assumptions of economics justify a world in which individuals are isolated from one another and social connections are impoverished as people define themselves in terms of how much they can afford to consume. Over the last four centuries, this economic ideology has become the dominant ideology in much of the world. Marglin presents an account of how this happened and an argument for righting the imbalance in our lives that this ideology has fostered.
Reviews
- “Marglin is a professor of economics at Harvard, but The Dismal Science reads like the confession of an apostate from the guild. (One turns to it with relief after the stiflingly triumphalist atmosphere of The Logic of Life.) Marglin is a recovering economist, you might say, who sees in the behavioural approach a missed opportunity for a ‘trenchant critique’ of the ‘assumptions about people that form the core of economics’.”
Jonathan Derbyshire, The Guardian, 29 March 2008
- “[Marglin] explores in open-handed and often graceful prose ‘what is lost in…economic development…when markets become a sphere unto themselves’. One may dispute Marglin’s retailing of the Left’s economic history, from R. H. Tawney to Robert Allen (and indeed Marglin himself). But one can only applaud Marglin’s readable contribution to the undermining of Max U.”
Dierdre McCloskey, Times Higher Education Supplement, 27 March 2008
- “Marglin show convincingly that losing community means dissolving our identities. The scope of the analysis is very broad and deals with all the key issues related to the author’s topic. On the whole, Marglin’s demonstration of the relationship between mainstream economics and the destruction of communities is seductive, convincing, and well documented.”
Danny Lang, Irish Times, 24 March 2008
More books by Stephen A. Marglin...