Economists on Economic Ethics

Abstract

UDGED by reasonable standards, Getting and Earning, by Professors J Bye and Blodgett of the Department of Economics in the University of Pennsylvania, is an excellent book, and one to be strongly commended to students of economics as well as to that larger public to whom, in form and style, it is primarily addressed. It is well writtenbut not too well-and logically arranged. And it contains much penetrating and sound economic analysis, and in particular avoids many of the fallacies which an economist expects to find in a book dealing with this subject, if written from the standpoint of a more or less "advanced" position, in program as well as sympathies. Especially good, in the reviewer's judgment, is the chapter on wages (ethical significance of differences in money wages [chap. iii]). The repeated emphasis on the necessity of a price system as the only feasible mechanism for comparing and adjusting the innumerable conflicts of individual interest involved in any largescale economic co-operation is also a notably superior feature (cf., e.g., p. 48). The present note, however, is not intended as a book review in the conventional sense' but as an examination of issues. Hence, admittedly at the cost of seeming somewhat ungracious, it is proposed to judge the book by unreasonable standards-even to make of it a sort of bad example. The main impression which reading it has left on the present writer's mind is one of acute realization of the difficulties of the problem of criticizing the economic system in ethical terms or proposing ideals to guide efforts to improve it, and the long, long way we have to go before even the foundations are laid for anything like a satisfactory treatment of the issues. Such a treatment would, of course, presuppose and build upon "sound" economic analysis, and even in this preliminary task it is clear that very much remains to be done before there is general agreement on essentials among the presumptive competent. Economic principles and social policy.-Following two chapters on the statistical facts of inequality and their implications and on the meaning of earned and unearned income-more broadly the problem of economic justice and desert-the authors devote the main body of their book (chaps. iii-vi, pp. 59-2I7) to a critical examination of the four distributive shares traditional in economic discussion-interest, rent, wages, and profit. The main effort in each case is to discover the degree in which the respective