Word: marglin
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Stephen A. Marglin '59, professor of Economics, said yesterday he is unimpressed by the upturn. Seven per cent unemployment looks good only relative to 9 per cent, he said. "These aren't Harvard professors we're talking about who are out of work...
...neoclassical "capitalists" on the causes of the contemporary problems of inflation and recession. The debate was billed as a battle over the fundamental difference in economic thought: the Marxists vs. the conservatives. Nowhere was it mentioned that half the economic spectrum wasn't even represented. Duesenberry-Eckstein debating Marglin-MacEwan on the alleged shortcomings of capitalism is like Milton Friedman and Bill Buckley debating the Rev. Billy Graham and Brother John Birch on the alleged shortcomings of socialism. Unfortunately such stacked debates are all Harvard can offer with a stacked economics faculty...
...still offers qualified praise for radical economists like Stephen A. Marglin '59 or other members of the Union of Radical Political Economists--for aiming at a historical perspective on economic systems. "I think if they'd let me I'd be more of an ally than I am," he says. "I don't like a narrow concentration on Marx--I think it should also include Weber and people like that. I also and not a socialist, and URPE people generally are socialists--I firmly believe in the mixed economy." For his part, Marglin says he agrees with Smithies's stress...
Even setting aside Smithies's belief in a mixed economy, Marglin's criticism isn't too surprising--budgetary economics by definition focuses on evaluating means, not ends, which it takes more or less for granted. Smithies's book, The Budgetary Process in the United States, begins by calling a description of the ways the government sets its priorities "quite enough for one volume and one author," and it offers only one assumption about how the budgetary process should end up--that "government decision-making can be improved by the clear formulation of alternatives." Like his work on the budget, Smithies...
...Marglin, whose circle of friends waned with the student movement, will patiently wait for it to wax again. Until then, he will remain Harvard's only tenured radical economist--a mistake the faculty made when their guard was down, but the best evidence that alternative approaches cannot be easily silenced...