American Labor and United States Foreign Policy, Ronald Radosh. New York: Random House. 463 pp. $10.00. Reluctantly, one must deal harshly with this book. I say reluctantly because the topic —union involvement in overseas affairs— is an important one. The …
To the Russian invaders, the liberal socialism of Ota Sik, one-time head of the Czechoslovakian Economic Institute, was intolerable. After the Russians entered Prague, Sik was high on the list of those to be removed from office. He happened to …
Americans are proud of the fact that the nation is becoming young. Nearly half the population is now under 25 years of age and about a third under 15. While this may mean crowded colleges or teen-age unemployment, the problems …
Sooner or later someone was apt to characterize the contemporary era as the age of Keynes. It was back in the 1930’s that capitalism seemed to have come to a dead end: the great productive system of the West had …
One supposes that when raw nerves are exposed there will be some sort of reaction. All too often such reactions are like the flailing of arms by a patient in a dentist’s chair. Mr. Simon behaves like the patient. Mr. …
That the machine does in fact displace workers had been directly experienced during the Industrial Revolution by hand loom weaver and Luddite. Yet economists have always persisted in consoling workers with the optimistic notion that in the long run new …
The counterattack has started. Purveyors of the conventional wisdom have suddenly launched an all-out assault on all those who over the last few years have called attention to the dark side of automation. Last January, within a few days of …
In the first quarter of the 19th century, secret societies of English working men banded together to defend themselves against the machine. Determined to destroy the looms that were displacing them, they roamed through West Riding and Lancashire and Nottingham …
In recent years, managerial elites have urgently sought to justify what it is they do. As Wilbert Moore remarked in his Conduct of the Corporation (1962), executives have become worried about the merit of their positions, the salaries they receive …
THE OTHER AMERICA, by Michael Harrington. Macmillan, 1962. 191 pages. WEALTH AND POWER IN AMERICA, by Gabriel Kolko. Frederick A. Praeger, 1962. 178 pages. Those who have been preoccupied by the marvels of American affluence often forget that beneath it …
When FDR came to Washington in 1933 he was accompanied by dashing young economists and social scientists ready to remake the government, if not the world. Many were fresh from Columbia University, and quite unlike the Harvard—MIT contingent that now …
BEYOND THE WELFARE STATE, by Gunnar Myrdal. Yale University Press: 1960. One of the more curious things about the teaching of economics these days is the sharp and often vitriolic attack on planning. All too often the idea that careful …
Bedazzled by the way in which the American economy successfully handled three post-war recessions, many observers have concluded that prosperity is now normal and routine, built-in to the system. Not only has the economy become less susceptible, they say, to …
One of the more ironic incidents in the history of economic thought was the development of a theory of socialism utilizing the very ideas employed to attack Marx. Dismayed by the sharply critical turn he had given to classicism, economists …
The contempt frequently expressed by many economists toward Karl Marx first began to dissolve when the growth of monopoly and the possibility of such disturbing phenomena as unemployment became genuine realities. More and more, social scientists came to agree that …
