The physical therapist with whom I have been working is a very competent young woman, although she seems to be about 11 years old (but then, at my age, everybody younger than 50 seems to be about 11 years old.) She referred me to several research articles on Parkinson’s, from which I got two important takeaways: first, the medication I am taking, although it addresses some of the symptoms, does nothing to slow the progress of the disease; and second, most importantly, aerobic exercise raising my heart rate to 100 or more and keeping it there for half an hour will, if done regularly four or more times a week, actually measurably slow down the inexorable advance of the disease. So for the past week I have been pushing myself to walk as hard and fast as I can each morning and I have successfully been getting my heart rate into the target range and keeping it there for the second half of my walk. My goal is to hold off the last stages of Parkinson’s for so long that I die of something else before I am ever consigned to a wheelchair.
This morning, as I was plugging along, urging myself “longer
steps, faster, longer steps, faster,” I found myself thinking for no reason at
all about an old story I had heard somewhere about the famous right wing Nobel
Laureate in Economics Milton Friedman. Sure enough, Google popped the story up,
not surprisingly on the American Enterprise Institute website. Here it is:
“While traveling by car during one of his many overseas
travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth
with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment
wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep
employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern
road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic.
“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and
create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.”
This, I reflected, is Friedman at his very best: stupid,
ignorant, and cruel. Needless to say, he is a God among modern economists.
17 comments:
I'm amazed at your "reflection". If anyone is "stupid, ignorant, and cruel", surely it is his host and the construction industry on display.
Friedman was simply taking the system to its absurd logical extreme. Reductio ad absurdum. A perfectly smart, wise and helpful strategy for demonstrating the falsehood of a proposition or course of action.
Indeed. And your evidence for this reading?
I too took Friedman quip to be a reductio ad absurdum. I don't have any evidence for what went on in Friedman's mind, but I doubt that anyone smart enough to win a Nobel Prize for economics was so stupid and ignorant as to seriously propose using spoons to build a road.
Friedman may have been heartless and cruel, but that doesn't make him a complete fool.
I am with Prof. Wolff on this one.
The reductio ad absurdum argument is intended to expose a fallacy in a syllogism by demonstrating that the syllogism leads to an impossible result.
Friedman’s argument, however, ignores that there are premises in the contractor/government’s argument which he is disregarding – the premise that they want to build the road in an efficient way which both maximizes employment and minimizes the amount of time spent on the project. While using spoons would maximize employment, it would not be efficient. The government’s objective is to achieve a happy medium. This premise is not absurd, and Friedman was ignoring it.
Your reading of Friedman's quip is kind of crazy, Bob - some kind of ideological distortion is at work here, or something (and AA's weird reply does nothing to save it from this charge).
Anonymous,
"Weird" reply??? What's "weird" about it?
The purpose of not using spoons, and not using the most up to date technology, was obvious. And Freidman's quip totally missed it.
There's a further unmentioned point that supports the sense of appropriateness and wisdom of the professor's comment: the social dimension. Those of us who've worked in such construction for a decade or two can attest to the camaraderie that arises from and is sustained in such collective projects: the collective coordination, the mutual aid, the passing-on of techniques and tricks, the singing, the storytelling, the joking, the instilling of virtues--no whining nor free-riding, on pain of shaming and ridicule--, the great daily shared rhythms of exertion and relaxation, and so forth associated with working in those projects, things that don't arise so readily with a few isolated people operating heavy machines, nor of course with the sadism of the spoons. All of this is too alien from the experience and thought-world of someone like Friedman, or for that matter most academics, to so much as notice it. Alasdair MacIntyre has suggested that working in a cooperative collective, such as on a fishing boat, should be a pre-requisite for teaching ethics. The wisdom of his suggestion is likewise beyond the comprehension of most academics, not just economists.
"When Firedman asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic."
Notice: This is the reason the host GAVE: not the fancy imaginings proposed by other commenters ("maximize enjoyment"; "camaraderie").
Against the ONLY reason given, Friedman's reductio is unanswerable. He can't be blamed for not refuting an argument that he was not actually presented with.
Should Friedman have thought of those other reasons? Better question: why didn't the host give them?
I basically agree with Anonymous.
I'm not going to argue with Another about whether Friedman's remark is technically a reductio because having done graduate work in philosophy, Another knows more about the technical definition of reductio than I do.
However, I did live for several years in Chile during the hegemony of the so-called "Chicago boys", Chilean economists who had studied with Friedman in Chicago and were busy instituting a radical version of neoliberal economics in Chile under Pinochet. In fact, the great man himself, Milton Friedman, visited Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship and approved of their work.
Thus, I know that neither Friedman nor his disciples cared in the least about maximizing enjoyment or camaraderie or keeping down unemployment. Their only interest was the smooth functioning of the capitalist economy and thus, Friedman would believe that paying so many men to do the job when it could be done more efficiently and more cheaply by machines was to sin against the basic principles of economic life. His remark would be considered a great witticism in some circles and in no way indicates that Friedman was
stupid or ignorant, as the original post claims.
The world would be a beter place if economists cared more about maximizing enjoyment, working class camaraderie, keeping down unemployment and raising salaries, but that doesn't make them stupid or ignorant, just people who look at the world from the point of view of capitalists.
s. wallerstein,
My point was that Friedman's quip did not employ a reductio ad absurdum. This is what Anonymous claimed. Friedman was ignoring the implicit premise that the contractor/government had two objectives, to maximize employment (which the contractor mentioned), at the same time as maintaining efficiency. There was nothing absurd or, as Anonymous puts it. weird about this position.
sw, we shouldn't forget Hayek's stamp of approval as well as his seeing Chile back then as an example for the UK to follow. Good times!
I remember TV commercials for Care back in the late forties/early fifties. Shovels were one of the tools being sent to farmers in Europe. Times and scale. Had Friedman done a back of the envelope calculation instead of an ideologically driven, offhand quip, he might have found that men and shovels made sense at that stage of development on that project in that country (spoons would probably wind up costing more then an appropriate dozer and would cripple the laborers - steam hasn't been a thing since the early 1930s).
First, I've been with Friedman all my life on this point, but this article has made me think a little deeper on the subject.
As in, what's the counterfactual here. If you use the machinery, are the unemployed now on welfare? Does the crime rate rise with higher costs for policing, courts, prisons, etc.?
Perhaps using machinery is the more expensive option when you add in all those other costs.
I am an economist whose specialty was once upon a time was macroeconomics. I think it fair to say that Friedman has lost much of his caché over the years, beginning first with the Volker recession (i.e., 1980-82), and then much more since the Global Financial Crisis (2008). Strangely enough, the rise of the Ratex/New Classical Macro school of Lucas, Prescott and many others (1970s-1990s) also contributed to this since Friedman was seen as someone who worked with partial equilibrium analysis and the latter group claimed to be doing general equilibrium analysis. Saying that he is a God among modern economists is at least a decade, and more like 3-4 decades out of date.
Blogger Jerry Fresia said...
"This, I reflected, is Friedman at his very best: stupid, ignorant, and cruel."
Indeed. And we may add that Friedman's thinking is also an example of an "absurd form of thought" that has "social value." To wit, as the professor explained in a post long ago:
"The form of thought whose absurdity he has just revealed has social validity both on the side of the capitalist and on the side of the worker. This mode of thought has social validity for the capitalist because only by conforming his thought and action to it can he function in a competitive marketplace and earn the going rate of return on his investment. If he makes the mistake of thinking of these commodities actually as useful objects made by the labor of real men and women and designed to satisfy human needs, he may become distracted by the reality of the factory or workplace and find himself lavishing more labor on a fabric than will be justified in the market by the price he can get for it. As I say in Moneybags, he will become like a tailor seduced by the feel of fine cloth between his fingers or like a whiskey priest drunk on sacramental wine.
"On the side of the workers, the necessity that they stifle their natural desires, instincts, and creative efforts in their labor in order to work steadily, efficiently, and in a fashion that produces an adequate profit for their employers will of course have a severely destructive effect on their human being. But in so far as they yield to that necessity and even embrace it, they will be sought after by employers, praised by their families as good workers, blessed by their priests, and even publicly celebrated as Stakhanovites. Thus the capitalist way of viewing productive labor, assumed without question by Ricardo or the other classical Political Economists, is a form of thought that has, in Marx’s felicitous phrase, 'social validity,' despite being absurd."
Hello Jerry Fresia,
Nice to see you commenting here again.
thanks s. wallerstein but I posted my comment with the wrong blog!
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