Socialism by the textbook: our best-selling economics textbooks still treat socialism as the ideal system, communism as its imperfect-but-ever-improving embodiment

National Review, Oct 13, 1989 by Tom Bethell

Socialism by the Textbook

PUBLISHERS don't give out the figures, and the authors themselves have been known to exaggerate, but no one denies that the market for economics-principles textbooks is a lucrative one. A textbook costs about $45 these days, and about 600,000 new textbooks are sold each year. All the leading textbook authors are kept busy turning out new editions every three or four years. If they didn't, used copies of their most recent editions would rapidly swamp the market.

For decades, the best-selling economics textbook was Nobel Prize--winner Paul A. Samuelson's Economics, now in its 13th edition and co-authored by William D. Nordhaus of Yale. In all editions it has sold over three million copies. Perhaps more than any other book, Samuelson's has promoted the Keynesian view that there is an abstract entity called "the economy," which will provide people with jobs if it is fine-tuned, its pump primed, and the "aggregate demand" flowing through its metaphorical pipes suitably controlled by wise economists in Washington, D.C. In his 1955 edition Samuelson wrote that the private economy is "like a machine without an effective steering wheel." The steering was to be done by economists--with mathematical minds and compassionate hearts.

Samuelson has slipped, in terms of sales and market share, but his rivals say that he is still in the top ten. Everyone agrees that the current best-selling economics-principles text is Campbell R. McConnell's Economics, the 11th (1990) edition of which will be published by McGraw-Hill this October. And several sources said that the second-best-selling book today is William J. Baumol and Alan Blinder's Economics: Principles & Policy, published by Harcourt Brace (fourth edition, 1988). Other "top ten" texts probably include those by Ralph Byrns & Gerald Stone; Edwin G. Dolan & David Lindsey; Bradley R. Schiller; Roger LeRoy Miller; James Gwartney & Richard Stroup; and Roy Ruffin & Paul Gregory.

Most observers now pretty much concede that socialism as an economic system is a failure. Even most U.S. journalists have thrown in the towel. Nice in theory, they say, but somehow it just doesn't deliver the goods. "Communism," said 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney recently, "is fundamentally a more uplifting idea than capitalism." Its "only real weakness seems to be that it doesn't work." Western holdouts for the triumph of socialism now also have to contend with all manner of renegade Soviet economists. Some preach private property! Even Mikhail Gorbachev said recently that people in the Soviet Union "forgot how to work because they got used to being paid often just for coming to work." (U.S. economists have not yet dared put their finger on that crucial defect of Communism.)

So, what do our leading textbook authors have to say on the subject?

CAMPBELL MCCONNELL is a genial 61-year-old professor of economics at the University of Nebraska and the best-selling economics-textbook writer for at least the last decade. According to one source, his 1987 edition sold 200,000 copies in its first year of publication, probably netting McConnell $1 million in royalties and one-third of the new-book market in that year.

As with Samuelson, the Keynesian hydraulic metaphor remains enshrined by McConnell, but he is regarded as "middle of the road" ideologically, with a devout following in the professoriate. McConnell is "the successor to Samuelson," but better disposed toward the market. Nonetheless, he politely but firmly resisted my suggestion that a 968-page book on economics principles should have more than one paragraph on private property. It is "a good paragraph," he said, as indeed it is.

In his 1987 edition, McConnell says: "Despite the gargantuan character of the coordination problem, Soviet central planning has worked, and historically has functioned reasonably well." This was toned down from the 1981 edition, in which central planning had worked "remarkably well." He notes (1987) that "the real standard of living of the average Soviet citizen is roughly one-third that of an American counterpart," down from one-half in the 1981 edition, in which it was also reported that labor-union strikes "simply do not occur." In 1987 this was amended to "do occur with some frequency."

McConnell reported in 1981 that "authoritative estimates put the Soviet GNP at slightly more than one-half that of the United States," By 1987 this had risen, surprisingly, to "about 60 per cent." He told me that in his 1990 edition "I use 50 per cent. But that may be on the low side." (He seemed to worry that I might accuse him of being too hard on Communism.) In 1987 he inserted a section based on Marshall Goldman's USSR in Crisis: The Failure of an Economic System, and even though McConnell was quite tentative in his presentation of this material ("it is to be emphasized that Goldman's view is very controversial, and has sparked heated debate") he nonetheless "got some flak from a couple of experts on the Soviet economy." They said he shouldn't have put it in at all. "In the next edition I have replaced Goldman with the Gorbachev reforms," McConnell said, seemingly relieved at moving away from controversy.