13 Harris and his anachronistic attack - Part III: nineteenth-century Americas critics

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Nov, 2003  by Charles F. Collier

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William Torrey Harris (1835-1909) is best known as an American educator, editor, and philosopher. He served as a teacher in, and superintendent of, the St. Louis, Missouri, school system, and later as the U.S. Commissioner of Education. He edited Appleton's International Education Series, Webster's New International Dictionary, and the philosophy section of Johnson's Encyclopedia; he wrote numerous reports, papers and articles, and books. He was (with Emerson and Alcott) a founder of the influential School of Philosophy in Concord, Massachusetts, founder and editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and a promoter of Hegelian idealism. Yet, on several occasions, Harris took time from these activities to offer his critique of George's Progress and Poverty. (None of George's other works were discussed.) Harris believed that his basic arguments against George's ideas were never refuted. (1)

Attack on the Deductive Method

It is not surprising that Harris emerged as a critic of George since, on matters of economic theory, Harris was a disciple of Henry C. Carey. (2) Carey was a critic of the deductive method of analysis and the Ricardian rent theory in particular. Further, his theory of income distribution was quite different from the theories of the classicists and George. (3) Carey's ideas provided the foundation for Harris's critique.

Harris's attack began in September 1886 in an address to the Saratoga meeting of the American Social Science Association. (4) The speech was important for several reasons. First, it set the pattern for all of his other attacks. Since Harris believed that his arguments were devastating and that they had not been refuted, he did little to revise them. Second, as Barker noted in his definitive biography of George, with this speech Harris became "the most famous person to speak against [George] in this period." (5)

After some preliminary remarks, Harris, following Carey, attacked all of the classical economists, including George, for their use of the deductive method of reasoning. Carey claimed that the axioms of the classicists (wealth-maximizing behavior, drives to reproduce, etc.) simply did not adequately represent actual human behavior. He also claimed that when classicists applied deductive logic to these inadequate axioms they inevitably got inadequate results. Further, he charged that the classicists never detected the flaws because their test of their theories' validity was logical consistency, not the ability to explain and predict "real world" behavior. He maintained that if the classicists ever tested their theories against actual data, they would have had to reject most of their theories. (6) Harris, in similar fashion, said that classicists failed because they "set up principles for absolute ones which serve only for a nation of mere shopkeepers." (7) He too believed that empirical tests would lead to the rejection of most of classical political economy. Carey felt that one of the worst errors produced by the classicists was the Ricardian rent theory, a theory that postulated that the most fertile land would be settled first and that the margin of cultivation would then extend downward and outward as more land was needed. Carey said that the historical evidence of England, the home of most of the classicists, revealed that the reverse was true, namely, that the first settlements were in the hill country and that settlement extended to, not from, the richer soil of the river bottoms. (8) That pattern, insisted Carey, was quite general. Harris, in turn, argued that the Ricardian view was obviously incorrect because, if the best land had been settled first, the lush Amazon basin would have been settled before most other parts of the world. (9)

In reiterating Carey's arguments, Harris apparently never realized that leading economists had refuted them twenty years before. John Stuart Mill reasoned that in areas of new settlement, in which labor and capital were scarce relative to land, people might not settle on land that would eventually prove to be the most fertile if initial cultivation of that land required more capital and labor than cultivation of another plot that would eventually prove less fertile. But, said Mill, once societies had become well populated by people with adequate capital, it would be nothing short of absurd for them to let the more fertile plots remain idle while they lived on the less fertile plots. Mill claimed that after a certain state of development had been reached, societies did act in accordance with the Ricardian view. (10) Francis Amasa Walker, perhaps the foremost American economist of the era, also had written a lengthy and devastating analysis of Carey's ideas before Harris reiterated them. (11) Finally, Alfred Marshall, the greatest economist alive at the turn of the century, also had refuted Carey's arguments. He accepted Mill's analysis and then added that the first settlers in a country may settle on hills and not on river bottoms since hills can be more defensible positions against enemies and wild animals. Further, he noted that many river bottoms are places in which one was more likely to catch diseases such as malaria. Marshall argued that since such risks must be taken into account, it would be quite logical to delay settlement of the river bottoms until medical technology and defense capability were developed. (12) Mill, Walker, and Marshall all agreed that the Carey-Harris objections were valid when they were directed at careless statements of the Ricardian theory, but they argued that the Carey-Harris objections were entirely irrelevant or incorrect when they were directed against careful statements of the theory. Harris's failure to deal with, or even acknowledge, these arguments indicates that he was not as conversant with the literature as he should have been.