Word: macewan
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...Yesterday's meeting of Soc Sci 134, a scheduled debate between John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics, and two assistant professors of economics, Samuel Bowles and Arthur MacEwan, turned into an unheated discussion on the role of capitalism and bureaucracy in American society...
Bowles and MacEwan tell us also, however, that per capita income "only has meaning in the context of a market economy." Defective as data on per capita income must be for a less developed economy. Bowles and MacEwan cannot really be urging here what they seem to be: that that index not be compiled and its increase not be sought. Moreover, as the primers teach, if income equality is stressed very much, incentives and bence output per capita may suffer. Just what is the trade off and where should a balance be struck between these two desiderata? These regrettably...
Bowles and MacEwan also tell us that the "human costs of rapid economic growth... the fracture of a community, for example-are seldom considered." Few Western economists need to be told of the "human costs of rapid economic growth," though more familiar examples are urban congestion and pollution, and many will join in regretting that such costs are not given more weight in actual development programs...
According to Webster's. however, a "bias" is a "prejudice," and if Bowles and MacEwan mean anything by their allegation it must be that the Western economist is not only predisposed against communist revolutions, but that the predisposition is indefensible. It should be observed, therefore, that such a predisposition might stem, among other things, from an awareness that communist societies too are, by all accounts, not especially attentive to "human costs of rapid growth" such as described. The predisposition might also reflect a concern for other "human costs" as well, human costs represented by, for example, the incarceration of millions...
...free speech and press are unhappily not unknown in non-communist countries either, and some thinking people still contend that Stalin was better than Hitler, though as more becomes known about Stalin the difference seems to become less and less clear. It may be hoped, however, that Bowles and MacEwan will themselves supply the "thorough elaboration" of their views that they allude to at the close of their letter, and in doing so will explain just how they have arrived at their own presumably unbiased view of communist revolution. Particularly, what weight do they give to the actual historical experience...