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34: Blaug: edging toward full appreciation
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, April, 2004 by Mary M. Cleveland
I owe the decision to study economics to the influence of the writings of Henry George and Karl Marx. In 1944 I was 17 years old and attending Peter Stuyvesant High School in New York City. I enrolled for a course in Commerce, and in the last week of the term the teacher took some of the better students, which included me, to a special lecture at a nearby Henry George School. The lecture was an explanation of why the unrestrained growth of land rentals had produced poverty, wars, and all the other ills of modern civilization. Henry George had long ago provided both the diagnosis of the evil and the treatment that would cure it: a single con fiscatory tax on ground rent! At the end of the lecture, we were all presented with free copies of Henry George's Progress and Poverty, which I duly read without understanding much of it. But years later when I finally studied the Ricardian theory of differential rent, I did have a moment of excitement at discovering the true source of George's theory. (1)
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Thus begins the intellectual autobiography of noted economic historian Mark Blaug. Over the years, Blaug has retained what he calls a "soft spot" for George. In the November 1980 issue of Economica, he reviewed the first edition of Critics of Henry George, not unfavorably. (2) In 1992, he edited a collection of 26 articles on Henry George. (3) In May 1996 he reviewed--rather less favorably--the three Georgist Paradigm books published by Shepheard-Walwyn. (4) In June 1999, he gave an invited lecture on Henry George at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, part of a series funded by the F. J. Walsh bequest. He published this lecture in 2000 as "Henry George: Rebel with a Cause." (5) On June 29, 2002, I interviewed Blaug at his home in the Dutch university town of Leiden.
Blaug was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Netherlands, where his father was a successful raincoat manufacturer, "the Raincoat King of the Netherlands." In 1940, when the Nazis invaded Holland, the family fled to New York City. "I was brought up as an orthodox Jew, achieved pantheism by the age of 12, agnosticism by the age of 15, and militant atheism by the age of 17, from which I have never wavered." (6)
Following high school, Blaug attended New York University, where he quickly became an avowed Marxist. "I was always a bit of a smart alec when I was young and Marxism was made to order for me: it allowed me to pontificate on every subject with a cocksureness that suited me perfectly." (7) He also joined the Communist Party, and was quickly expelled for signing a petition in support of the Party president, who had himself been expelled for disagreeing with an item of doctrine. "To those who have never been a member of a conspiratorial or quasi-conspiratorial group, the speed with which party members will ostracize a heretic is hard to believe." (8)
The Marxist theory that "economic interests and economic forces are the foundations of all social and political conflicts" led Blaug to the study of economics, and to a rapid abandonment of his Marxist view. He graduated from Queens College of the City University of New York in 1950 and began Ph.D. work at Columbia. In 1952, while he was an instructor at Queens, three senior professors at Queens refused to cooperate with U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy's communist-hunting committee--and were summarily fired. Blaug signed a petition in their support, and was immediately forced to resign, leaving him broke and depressed. But from out of nowhere a grant materialized to send him abroad to write his Ph.D. thesis. He spent the "best two years" of his life in London, where he discovered that "scholarly research was my true metier." (9) His dissertation on the rise and fall of the school of David Ricardo, supervised by George Stigler, was published in 1958 as Ricardian Economics. (10)
In 1954, Blaug became an assistant professor at Yale. Assigned to teach history of economic thought--a required subject in those days!--he created a massive set of notes that became the basis of his best-known publication, Economic Theory in Retrospect, (11) now in its fifth edition.
In 1962, still considering himself a European, Blaug joined the London Institute of Education as a professor in the new field of economics of education, a position he held for twenty-three years. He began as an enthusiastic proponent of human capital theory, but ended up disillusioned, concluding, "not that human capital theory is wrong, but that it is thin and unproductive despite its early promise, and unable to vanquish its principal competitor, the screening hypothesis, credentialism, the diploma disease, call it what you will." (12) During this period he also spent much time in Africa and Asia as an educational consultant for various UN agencies and the World Bank. He became equally disillusioned, concluding that, "The whole business of UN aid missions and advice to Third World governments on what to do or not to do in economic policy was a gigantic charade," (13) designed to justify aid, much of which would end up lining the pockets of local politicians.
