One reason I so loved Murray Rothbard was his ability to pick out that which was blindly hailed by the mainstream, critically examine it, and produce unique and honest insight as to the real nature of such. In his Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, in an essay titled “Physiocracy in mid-eighteenth century France,” he presents some great insight on Francois Quesnay (1694-1774) and his famed Tableau economique.
Rothbard, always one to get in the sarcastic nod, takes a pop at Mirabeau for exalting the Tableau as one of the three greatest human inventions ever. About Quesnay’s Tableau, he says:
an incomprehensible, jargon-filled chart purporting to depict the flow of expenditures from one economic class to another. Generally dismissed as turgid and irrelevant in its day, it has been rediscovered by twentieth century economists, who are fascinated because of its very incomprehensibility. All the better to publish a journal article on!
Academics are forever fascinated with producing that which cannot be understood – not even by themselves or their colleagues – and it was Rothbard who always called such nonsense to the carpet.
Rothbard basically describes this contraption as producing unsound, unsubstantiated economic thinking, and laying the groundwork for Keynesian mischief. As a precursor of Keynes and the circular flow diagram, Quesnay’s Tableau – first published in 1758 – was inclusive of some of the worst concepts used, as Rothbard notes, in twentieth century economics: “aggregative concepts, input-output analysis, econometrics, depiction of the ‘circular flow’ of equilibrium, Keynesian stress on expenditure and consumer demand, and the Keynesian ‘multiplier.’”
Rothbard grants that the Tableau produced some legitimate insights – on goods exchange and money as the intermediary – but such insights were brought forth long before that (Cantillon), and Quesnay’s charts and lines only served to confuse and obscure otherwise basic facts. He calls the Tableau “holistic, aggregative, and macroeconomic, with no solid grounding in the methodological individualism of sound microeconomics.”
The Tableau, like the circular flow flapdoodle, hailed expenditures and referred to savings as a “leakage” from the circular flow of spending, which, of course, was detrimental when considering Quesnay’s emphasis on expenditures for agricultural products and, later, the Keynesian focus on consumer and government expenditures.
Rothbard has this to say about the Tableau and its value to scholarship:
At best, then, the Tableau was elaborate frippery; at worse, false, mischief-making, and deceptive. And in no sense did the Tableau do anything but detract and divert attention from genuine economic analysis and insight.
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This pushed me over the edge. I will soon have the pleasure of enjoying what I take will be a very enlightening read as I go through Rothbard’s History of Economic Thought. I also decided to splurge and pick up De Soto’s Banking Treatise as well. My summer reading is now in order!
Good choices, Matthew. I recently bought the same two works and absolutely loved Rothbard’s history. It is packed full of economic insight as well as history. So far, I am also enjoying De Soto’s book as well.
I remember when I decided to read the Tableau (I don’t believe that it has ever been translated into English) many years ago, and was surprised by how many economists (including several free-market economists) had recommended this work. At first, I thought it was because my French just wasn’t good enough to fully understand the Tableau’s subtleties. I carefully went over it several times and still came to the same conclusion: an accountant might like the Tableau, but its ramifications just weren’t all that significant! I found myself too embarrassed to ask what I so obviously missed in my study.
I will tell you that I was thoroughly relieved when I first heard Murray discuss the Tableau. I missed nothing! There’s nothing there to miss!
It was my first realization that prominent economists can bluster with the best of them. A lesson which I have valued ever since.
Just a thought.
Just Ken
kgregglv@cox.net
http://classicalliberalism.blogspot.com/
The “Tableau” may very well have been the foundational work of the “Polaroid School of Economics”
Isn’t this “undecipherable jargon filled mess” how people seem to be able to read pretty much everything that happens into Nostradamus and the Book of Revelations?
I read once that in the 1950s, someone in the British government constructed a gigantic hydraulic machine which purported to model the flow of money through the British economy. It sounds like it was Monsieur Quesnay’s tableau realized in rubber and metal.
I have no doubt that the government was represented at the top, as the fount of all goodness, and that savings were quite literally treated as “leakage”.
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