Michael Perelman argues that economics is not an objective science, but an ideology, an apologia for capitalism promoted by the mercantile classes and their intellectual vanguard. Richard Vedder says “[a]s neo-Marxist accounts go, this one is far less polemical and hysterical than some, but it still simply does not accord with critical facts.”
Of Perelman’s previous book, Greg Clark says that “Perelman, like Marx, suffers from a wildly romantic vision of a pre-industrial England of laughter and leisure that accords little with reality. Marx had the excuse that he was writing at a time when little was known about that past. “
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According to Marx, everyone’s method of thinking is colored, biased if you will, by his or her economic class position. Taking Marx’s argument to its logical conclusion, no objectivity is possible in any scientific inquiry, including the physical and natural sciences. In addition, Marx and his intellectual followers somehow are exempt from the class bias that afflicts virtually all other human beings. The nihilistic nature and blatant intellectual inconsistency of this aspect of Marx’s thought speaks for itself.
Note the similarities between this belief in a supposedly unavoidable class bias and the post-modernist, deconstructionist view of language.
People who believe one tend to also believe the other. Hence the prevalence of po-mo Marxists in your average liberal arts faculty.
Who doesn’t know much about earlier periods in Britain? Marx at least had access to sources, the same sort that provided raw materials for novelists like Disraeli and Sir Walter Scott.
As it happens, the myth was fairly accurate, apart from a genuine marginalised group, between two major stages of enclosures that happened in the 16th and 18th centuries. Between those, population pressure wasn’t pushing too hard and Spamish bullion inflation had transferred wealth towards the subsistence group.
Even in the 18th century, there were still winners – those in cities and large towns who found that trade was increasing their incomes while sugar and new agricultural methods were keeping their subsistence cheaper (that didn’t help the tenant farmers, who risked destitution if a new crop failed).
Industrialisation didn’t help any of that either, since it only moved food from mouth to mouth. Admittedly, free trade measures like the Repeal of the Corn Laws allowed it to benefit British workers, but only at the expense of people on the continent. Only once waves of modernisation had swept through and new lands were providing food did matters improve overall.
1. Dear oh dear. Has there been _no_ historical research _at all_ since Das Kapital?? For some ?127 years or so?? Economic historians have discovered _nothing_ since the 1820s or earlier?? They’ve just been repeating what was written then?
2. Were Dickens & Disraeli historians, then? History requires no training? Anyone can become an historian?
3. There’s been a _vast_ amount of research, esp. in the last 45 years or so, esp. on the 16th-17th centuries. See (eg) Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain, 1470-1750 (2002); and specifically on consumer goods output, Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (1978); & also Neil McKendrick et al, The Birth of a Consumer Society, The Commercialisation of Eighteenth Century England (1982); Roy Porter, England in the Eighteenth Century (2nd ed 1990.)
_All_ show that _both_ population _and_ consumer outputs — living standards — rose in England over the periods covered. This includes foodstuffs of _all_ kinds (see esp. Joan Thirsk), & craft goods. All for _mass_ consumption.
Sugar & tobacco had become _mass_ consumption goods by the end of the _17th_ century: in 1619, the retail price of tobacco was 20-40sh a pound; by 1681, the wholesale price was 2d (2d) a pound. Sugar retailed at 1sh 3d to 1sh 6d a pound in 1634-35. In 1684-89, the retail price was 6d-7d a pound. And so on..
Anti-market bias has been more powerfull earlier in the profession of historians since new views have also emerged about study of history. Book edited by F.A. Haeyk still shows what kind of popular fallacies historians have committed.
When I studied history (before changing to economics)there was not so much state worshipping like in the earlier times. In the economic history course normal amount of interventionism was teached but its amount was not larger than you hear in ordinary mainstream econ course.
Historical School has been very influential in Finnish history and Finnish Economic Association (Kansantaloudellinen yhdistys) was founded based on similar ideology as AEA or Verein fur Sozialpolik.
Sudha,
Here’s where you repeatedly make a mistake:
“both_ population _and_ consumer outputs — living standards ”
Is that identity a historical fact that only a “trained” historian can promulgate and therefore is an unassailable truth for peons? Or is it perhaps a definitional assumption that you operate on without even acknowledging to yourself?
GDP is, apparently, an extremely accurate measure of the rise of living standards for such Gods as trained historians. Oh well, it’s not surprising, as academics generally impute far too much value on their own sunk costs as a justification for their distorted world-views.
Even if we are to believe that these statistics are accurate (ha – we can’t even guarantee that with current economic aggregates!), do they represent a complete picture? How well were records kept of those engaged in self-production? What were their living standards? What exactly is “living standards” for that matter? Is it an objective value that can be maximized along a single axis? Or is there subjectivity to determining whether a given gew-gaw, purchased on the market, is better than being engaged in self-production?
Who reported and investigated on those engaged in self-production? Did these reporters/investigators have their own biases?
I’m sure, as highly trained historians, all these questions are thoroughly addressed in this research, and noone would be so crass as to cite numbers without investigating all these factors, and acknowledge the problems of aggregating subjective values across large populations. I mean, these highly trained historians couldn’t possibly believe in such hogwash as objective value, could they?
In essence, you constantly engage in counter-factuals without ever acknowledging it. You consistently claim that all this increase in economic aggregates occured because of certain factors, and despite certain others. But you can’t prove your assertions. How can you possibly know what would have happened absent enclosures? Absent other state interventions? How do you know that technological advances occured in a vacuum that was immune from state interference?
You don’t, which makes you feel somewhat insecure, so you parade out your professional credentials in an attempt to cow those who disagree with your suppositions.
It gets old fairly quickly. You clearly have more historical facts than the average peon. When you stick to facts, you are quite informative, and your arrogance is justified. It’s just as clear, however, you possess less economic insight than many you spar with. Perhaps a dose of humility when you venture beyond facts into the realm of theory (as a “trained” historian, I hope you can differentiate between the scientific concepts of “fact” and “deduced theory”) would serve you well, and perhaps you could learn a thing or two as well.
thinking is also colored by moral positions. i don’t think marx fared very well there. and science is not ‘objective’ by any stretch either. science can’t self-define nor can it self-verify, so it relies on an axiomatic base of thinking — which in fact contradicts the scientific claims of authority.
austrian economics is interesting because it really does start with an axiomatic base of subjective valuation – in fact, philosophy could take a few lessons there, as most of what i’ve read divorces subjectivism from the its axiomatic foothold, as if ‘consciousness’ can be divorced from ‘reality’ — it cannot, they are inseperable; as we cannot ever observe without being conscious…
SS, taking your points in order:-
1. The point at issue isn’t whether we have access to more materials, but whether people in the early 19th century had access to adequate materials. They did, and what is more, they had a more active discussion of the areas in that time and place.
2. Nobody asserted that those individuals I mentioned were historians. I was very careful not to assert that. The reason for mentioning them was to show that non-historians then had access to materials which they could use for their purposes – which was all Marx needed in his turn. You can dispute his reasoning but not his materials.
3. I know that we now know more about availability of various goods in England in the periods in question (you don’t think I was getting my facts from nowhere, I hope). But it is irrelevant; even if true and relevant, it would only tend to reinforce my own point, that things were quite good for most people between two periods of damage. But my own reasoning goes to the point of total food resources. Certainly, sugar was available earlier – but it was more important as a food supplement once production rose. Likewise, the 19th century availability of food in England did not increase from industrialisation as such, but from industrial goods being traded
(and so moving food away from places like France in the Les Miserables period). Your points here are all at cross purposes.
Bah humbug! History is bunk. Why is it there’ll always at least two versions of history? One saying it was the best of times and another saying it was the worst of times. It seems there’ll always be a apologia for any situation. Maybe worrying about whats going on in the modern world is better.
1. Have a look at the books cited: they are by proper historians, not economists. Only the latter can think only in terms of GDP or whatever & nothing else. Have a look at the wealth & range of _original_ sources used in these texts: i.e., materials that arose out of what people did. Inventories are one instance, but there are plenty of other types of materials (again, vide the books themselves & the books & articles they cite.)
PMLaurance:
2. Compare Toynbee’s 1884 ‘Lectures on the Industrial Revolution’, or Cunningham’s book (1903) on English economic history, with the works cited above. The work done by historians, & the wealth of materials studied & uncovered since the turn of the 20th century, has fundamentally & profoundly altered our knowledge & understandins of _all_ periods in British (& other) history. This includes esp. the early modern period in England.
For food outputs, see esp. Joan Thirsk’s book mentioned & the Agrarian Hist of England & Wales Vols 4 & 5, on the early modern period & the 18th century. All demonstrate the vast increases in both quantities _&_ range of food outputs.
In the early modern period the chief foodgrain was barley. In the 18th century, wheat, once a luxury, had become the most commonly consumed grain. In addition, the mass of the population also had a variety of fruits & vegetables, meat, salt fish, etc. Also see J A Chartres, Internal Trade in England (1977) for the wide range of foodstuffs traded internally.
In the 18th century, the main _imports_ were raw materials (cotton, wool, silk, flax, hemp, timber, hides & skins, iron, etc.); & ‘groceries’(sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco, etc.) Grains & flour were only the minor part. See eg, P Mathias, The First Industrial Nation (1983 ed.) After the mid-19th century, transport services increased & improved, so foodgrains could be imported from overseas, at far lower costs. Until then domestic production _had_ to be virtually the only source.
SS, why do you persist in missing the point?
As far as historical resources go, the point at issue is whether Marx had access to adequate resources, not to whether he had access to better ones that we have. (And, in fact, he probably had better access to materials of his recent past than we do now, perhaps 200 years after those events.)
On the other hand, if you are suggesting that I am getting my background from what Marx used, that is not so. For what it’s worth, a few years ago I helped an Australian historian with some fact checking for a book and was mentioned in his acknowledgments; I do know my stuff. (Geoffrey Blainey’s History of the World, if you must know.)
As for improvements in food production in the 18th century, yes, of course. Also on food imports. The only point I was bringing out was that none of that was a result of industrialisation, except to the extent that industrial exports brought in imports from a nearly fixed base in other countries.
The thing is, agricultural improvements in the UK did not get driven by the Industrial Revolution – they preceded it, and in large part enabled it. And sugar imports contributed to food adequacy too, but that had nothing to do with industrialisation either. And, as I pointed out, the real improvements in standard of living support the point I was making, that there was a phase when life got better.
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