Robert Heilbroner (1919 – 2005)
American economist and historian of economic thought.
But the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old ones.
To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort, dignity, and personal advance is only a myth, or worse, a bitter mockery.
But like Marx, Veblen badly underestimated the capacity of a democratic system to correct its own excesses.
Even today-in blithe disregard to his actual philosophy-Smith is generally regarded as a conservative economist, whereas in fact, he is more avowedly hostile to the motives of businessman then most New Deal economists.
" one accumulates or one gets accumulated."
But while Ricardo, the economist, walked like a god (although he was a modest and retiring person), Malthus was relegated to a lower status.
The Wealth of Nations may not be an original book, but it is unquestionably a masterpiece.
It is one of the dangerous self-deceptions of our society to pretend that mechanisms of control do not really exist, and to maintain, without qualification, that we are an economically "free" people.
For one who has read the works of Marx it is frightening to look back at the grim determination with which so many nations steadfastly hewed to the very course which he insisted would lead to their undoing.
Very few of the heroes of the Golden Age of American finance had much interest in the solid realities of what underlay their structure of stocks and bonds and credits.
The rise of the welfare state, on the one hand, and of the military bureaucracy, on the other, are instances of the manner in which technology is enforcing a socialization of life.
The total amount of electric power generated by India would not suffice to light up New York City.
Marx did not call for an opposition to the forces of history. On the contrary he accepted all of them, the drive of technology, the revolutionizing effects of democratic striving, even the vagaries of capitalism, as being indeed the carriers of a brighter future.
We may make progress only by freeing ourselves from the rut of the past, but without this rut an orderly society would hardly be possible in the first place.
Keynes disdained inside information - in fact, he once declared that Wall Street traders could make huge fortunes if only they would disregard their "inside" information - and his own oracles were nothing but his minute scrutiny of balance sheets, his encyclopedic knowledge of finance, his intuition into personalities, and a certain flair for trading.
The basic function of the military - to achieve victory over the enemy - has been rendered obsolete by the fact that "victory" and defeat are almost certain to be achieved simultaneously.
Nobody wanted this commercialization of life.
It may strike us as odd that the idea of gain is a relatively modern one; we are schooled to believe that man is essentially an acquisitive creature and that left to himself he will behave as any self-respecting businessman would. The profit motive, we are constantly being told, is as old as man himself.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Ricardo saw that the escalator worked with different effects on different classes, that some rode triumphantly to the top, while others were carried up a few steps and then kicked back down to the bottom.
The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources, but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears.