Stirrings from the New Left

The spirit of radical protest that has been sweeping the U.S. academic community has been late in showing itself among economists. Last week it finally surfaced at the Manhattan convention of the American Economic Association. As protests go, this one was rather decorous. A group of young dissenters pushed its way onto the speakers' platform at the A.E.A.'s full membership meeting despite efforts by outnumbered private guards to block the intrusion. Though ruled out of order by the meeting's chairman, the radicals denounced their more conservative colleagues as "sycophants of inequality, destruction of environment, imperialism, racism and the subjection of women."

Otherwise, the radicals did not disrupt the A.E.A. meetings. Instead, they concentrated on holding a "counterconvention"--in a room thoughtfully set aside for them at the New York Hilton by the A.E.A.--at which they explained their ideas to whomever they could persuade to attend.

Genteel as it was, the counterconvention did serve to introduce older members of the profession to the Union for Radical Political Economics, or URPE. It was formed in 1968 and now has 1,000 members, mostly university instructors in their late 20s or early 30s. They are difficult to classify according to political spectrum. They are not Marxists, although they accept Marx's idea that change can only be brought about through social conflict; they are not classical economists, although they use some methods of standard economic analysis. For example, Samuel Bowles, an assistant economics professor at Harvard and the son of Chester Bowles, the former U.S. Ambassador to India, has done what even conservative colleagues call a first-rate statistical analysis indicating that increased schooling helps the sons of the rich more than the sons of the poor.

Goods or Bads? The spirit of the radicals' dissent is New Left, in that they contend that the capitalist system is fundamentally bad and should be replaced by something else. "We would like to know if it is possible to run an economic system on something other than greed," says James Weaver, professor of economics at Washington's American University. But they readily admit that they do not have any clear idea of what the something else might be. For the moment, they are able only to question and criticize. Nevertheless, they try to make a virtue out of the fact that they have no program for reform. "Which do you care more about," asked Stephan Michelson, research fellow in economics at Harvard, at the A.E.A. meeting, "who is asking the right questions, or who has found answers to the wrong ones?"

URPE members' chief complaint against traditional economists is that they assume that acquisition of more products makes people happy, and therefore focus on how to achieve the highest possible production of goods. This view resembles the opinion of Harvard's John Kenneth Galbraith--who has promised to try to find the radicals more research money--but URPE members put it in more extreme form. Says Weaver: "I do not call them goods. I call them bads." Concentration on economic growth, the radicals contend, has led economists to ignore such problems as pollution, racial inequality and the growth of an education system that, in their view, serves mostly to turn out obedient employees for business. The radicals feel that these should be central concerns of economists, because they view social ills as the inescapable outcome of an economic system in which the individual's main role in life is as a producer or consumer of goods. Though their analyses are framed mostly as denunciations of "capitalism," some radicals like Herbert Gintis, Harvard lecturer in economics, are careful to state that some of the evils they attack can be expected to occur in any "bureaucratic" industrial society--specifically including the Soviet Union.

Samuelson Revised. Many economists over 30 feel that the radicals confuse the effects of dubious Government policies with the fundamentals of the U.S. economic system. There is, for example, no need to disrupt the U.S. commitment to competition in order to end pollution of the air, water and land. Government has simply failed to perform its most basic task: acting as referee between the conflicting interests of various groups. Still, the radicals have won respectful attention from some conventional economists.

"We have lost sight of values in economics," says Economist John Coleman, president of Haverford College. "They are bringing values into the classroom." One striking response to the radicals' demand for "relevance" involves M.I.T.'s Paul Samuelson. In the latest revision of his almost universally used college economics textbook, Samuelson is giving new emphasis to such problems as pollution, the military-industrial complex and racial discrimination.

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