By Steve Rhodes
June 23-24.
Publication: Tribune
Cover: Artwork depicting a businessman tearing open his white shirt and tie to reveal the $ on his chest. Text: “Economic Superheroes: A look at the free marketers from the University of Chicago.”
For a Kim Phillips-Fein review of The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who Revolutionized Economics and Business, by Johan Van Overtveldt.
Phillips-Fein’s effort starts out weakly, stating, for example, that the Chicago School of economic thinking dismissed arguments in favor of the minimum wage and against school vouchers – hardly the success stories they are purported to be. Phillips-Fein also notes, in trying to further illustrate the achievements of the Chicago School, that “by 1982, the nation had elected a president who believed that cutting tax rates and shrinking the government were the keys to economic growth,” though it’s not clear at all that anything but displeasure with Jimmy Carter won Ronald Reagan the presidency in 1980, before anyone had conceived of the “Morning in America” marketing conceit – not to mention Reagan’s huge expansion of government spending creating record deficits.
Phillips-Fein recovers somewhat, though, later in the piece when formula book reviewing calls for lodging criticism. “In the marketplace of ideas, Chicago won out,” Phillips-Fein writes. “But this explanation evades the hard realities of politics and of power that shape our choices about economic policy.”
For Example: As noted by Phillips-Fein, it was the U of C’s own Thorstein Veblen “who argued that the calculating individuals portrayed by Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall were a pleasant fiction, and that people are instead motivated by primitive, atavistic drives to demonstrate their social status by wasting great sums of money in craven acts of ‘conspicuous consumption (think Louis Vitton bags).”
The idea that human beings are “rational” economic actors is pure folly, and to see Gary Becker, for example, compare racial discrimination to international trade may be the stuff that Nobel Prizes are made of, but it’s nothing of value to improving (or even explaining) the way people live.
Finally: Overveldt quotes former U of C professor Deidre McCloskey as saying “Don’t you know that the greatness of the University of Chicago has always rested on the fact that the city of Chicago is so boring that the professors have nothing else to do but to work?”
What a patently ridiculous statement. As opposed to, say, all the exciting things going on in Palo Alto for the Stanford faculty? For that matter, you’d think North Dakota State University would have produced the world’s greatest economists.
With the recent passing of Milton Freidman, a less sycophantic account of Chicago’s economists (including advising dictators) might be in store. This, however, doesn’t feel like a book worth reading about an otherwise tired subject.
*
Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: If you focus your eyes just right, it’s Stalin.
Review of Note: Sun-Times deputy features editor Bob Oswald reviews The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by conservative writer Amity Shlaes. I saw Shlaes talking about her book on C-SPAN over the weekend with libertarian Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie, and found her attacks on FDR and support of Herbert Hoover (“they were the same person” I pretty much remember her saying) unbearable. That’s not to say I’m not open to a puncturing of the hype – seems to me Hitler and WWII got us out of the Depression, but the safeguards put into place the New Deal were unassailable even to Ronald Reagan, who said it was LBJ’s Great Society that he wanted to reverse, not FDR’s safety net.
So I just skimmed this review and found it wanting.
Also: A week after calling Carl Bernstein’s tragically flawed biography of Hillary Clinton is “fresh, complete and detailed,” saying that Bernstein is “dead solid perfect in his reporting,” despite, as I said last week, reams of evidence to the contrary, Sun-Times general manager John Barron is back with a more critical but still flawed review of Her Way, the thoroughly debunked Hillary biography by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.
“Still,” Barron writes,”Hertz [sic] and Van Natta have done a great service to confused people everywhere by beautifully explaining the early Clinton scandals like Whitewater, Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and Hillary’s remarkable success in the commodities market.”
Barron is apparently unaware that Gerth’s reporting on just those subjects has been decimated.
As for that “secret” plan the Clinton’s had to rule over America for a combined 16 years, Barron is rightfully skeptical but, again, is apparently unaware of the scorn this claim by the book’s authors has generated, given that they have not been able to provide any evidence of any such plan.
*
Publication: New York Times
Cover: A drawing depicting a man, possibly with a rock in his hand behind his back, and a dog. For a review of Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses. Yawn.
Review of Note: “How can Judas be branded evil for carrying out God’s plan?” Because theology – Christian and otherwise – makes no sense, even within the elaborate frameworks that flawed, zealous, and unstable humans have constructed around it. To focus, though, this is among the central questions Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King take up in Reading Judas, reviewed by Stephen Prothero.
Prothero, the chairman of the religion department at Boston University and the author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn’t, unwittingly gives up the game in his review-ending dismissal of Pagels’ work and the Gospel of Judas, tossed aside by early Christians for its inconvenience. “Most Americans will rightly prefer Luke’s Jesus, whose heart breaks over the oppression of women and the poor [then why aren’t more Christians liberals?] , to a smart-aleck Jesus who guffaws at the stupidity of his listeners. America is supposed to be a happy place. Americans want their Jesus to channel Paula Abdul rather than Simon Cowell, Dorothy rather than the Wicked Witch of the West.”
Ah, but you don’t go to eternity with the God you want, but the God that is. All Prothero does is repeat the mistake of throwing away that which does not square with the pleasing myth construced by the radical cultists of their day.
As for America, well, Prothero notes that “Thomas Jefferson, in his own cut-and-paste version of the Gospels made in the White House in 1804, depicted Jesus not as a savior who died to pay for our sins but as a great moral teacher who lived to show us how to live ourselves . . . Jefferson’s Bible scoffs at the notion that God would sacrifice his son to atone for the world’s sins.”
Pity that means he couldn’t get elected today.
Letter of Note: “They Could Be Heroes.”
*
CHARTS
1. Reagan
2. Gore
3. God
Einsein is 4th; Jesus is 9th; Iacocca is 11th; Rickles is 14th.
Posted on June 25, 2007