Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar

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СКАЧАТЬ and personally financed an essay-writing prize in economics for female students, as well as, later on, contributing a substantial £60 to the construction fund for Newnham Hall, the nucleus of one of Cambridge’s first women’s colleges. In 1873, Marshall joined Sidgwick, other members of the Grote Club, and Millicent Fawcett—whose sister Elizabeth Garrett was attempting to study medicine—to found the General Committee of Management of the Lectures for Women.⁵¹

      Marshall’s lectures focused on the central paradox of modern society: poverty amid plenty. He taught by posing a series of questions: Why hadn’t the Industrial Revolution freed the working class “from misery and vice?” How much improvement is possible under current social arrangements based on private property and competition? His answers reflected how far he had distanced himself from the specific assumptions and conclusions of his predecessors. He told the women that philanthropy and political economy were not, as Malthus had supposed and latter-day Malthusians continued to believe, irreconcilable.

      Even as he contradicted the conclusions of the founders of political economy, Marshall insisted that the science itself was indispensible. The problem of poverty was far more complicated than most reformers admitted. Economic science, like the physical sciences, was nothing more or less than a tool for breaking down complex problems into simpler parts that could be analyzed one at a time. Intervention based on faulty theories of causes could easily make the problem worse. Marshall cited Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and John Stuart Mill to demonstrate the power of the “engine of analysis” they had constructed, as well as to show how it had to be improved. Without such a tool, he told them, discovering truths would always be a matter of accident and the accumulation of knowledge with time wholly impossible.

      Marshall agreed with Mill that the industrial revolution hadn’t liberated him from the tyranny of economic necessity or supplied the material requisites for a “higher life.” “Our rapid progress in science and arts of production might have been expected to have prevented to a great extent the sacrifice of the interests of the laborer to the interests of production . . . It has not done so.”⁵² What he strenuously disputed was the assertion by political economists that it could not do so, that the remuneration of labor as such, skilled or unskilled, could never rise much above its present level.⁵³

      He did not doubt that the chief cause of poverty was low wages, but what caused wages to be low? Radicals claimed that it was the rapacity of employers, while Malthusians argued that it was the moral failings of the poor. Marshall proposed a different answer: low productivity. He cited as evidence the fact that, contrary to Marx’s claim that competition would cause the wages of skilled and unskilled workers to converge near subsistence level, skilled workers were earning “two, three, four times” as much as unskilled laborers. The fact that employers were willing to pay more for specialized training or skill implied that wages depended on workers’ contribution to current output. Or, put another way, that the demand for labor, not only the supply, helped to determine pay. If that was the case, the average wage wouldn’t be stationary. As technology, education, and improvements in organization increased productivity over time, the income of the workers would rise in tandem. The fruits of better organization, knowledge, and technology would, over time, eliminate the chief cause of poverty. Activity and initiative, not resignation, were called for.

      Arnold Toynbee the historian later described the significance of Marshall’s insight: “Here is the first great hope which the latest analysis of the wages question opens out to the laborer. It shows him that there is another mode of raising his wages besides limiting his numbers.”⁵⁴ Workers themselves could influence their own and their children’s ability to earn better wages. “The chief remedy, then, for low wages is better education,” Marshall told his audience.

      He took great pains to demolish Socialists’ claim that but for oppression by the rich, the poor could live in “absolute luxury.” England’s annual income totaled about £900 million, he told the women. The wages paid to manual workers amounted to a total of £400 million. Most of the remaining £500 million, Marshall pointed out, represented the wages of workers who did not belong to the so-called working classes: semiskilled and skilled workers, government officials and military, professionals, and managers. In fact, an absolutely equal division of Britain’s annual income would provide less than £37 per capita. Reducing poverty required expanding output and increasing efficiency; in other words, economic growth.

      The chief error of the older economists, in Marshall’s view, was to not see that man was a creature of circumstances and that as circumstances changed, man was liable to change as well. The chief error of their critics—but, ironically, one that the founders of political economy shared—was a failure to understand the cumulative power of incremental change and the compounding effects of time.

      There are I believe in the world few things with greater capability of poetry in it than the multiplication table . . . If you can get mental and moral capital to grow at some rate per annum there is no limit to the advance that may be made; if you can give it the vital force which will make the multiplication table applicable to it, it becomes a little seed that will grow up to a tree of boundless size.⁵⁵

      Ideas mattered when the past was not simply being reproduced but something new was being created. “An organon” or instrument for discovering truths—truths that depended, like all scientific truths, on circumstances—would be an independent force. “The world is moving on,” Marshall said, “but the pace at which it moves, depends upon how much we think for ourselves.”⁵⁶

      A year later, Marshall was deep in conversation with Henry Sidgwick in Anne Clough’s sitting room on Regent Street, discussing “high subjects” when he felt someone staring at him.⁵⁷ The young woman who sat with her sewing untouched in her lap looking toward them had a “brilliant complexion,” “deep set large eyes,” and masses of mahogany hair “which goes back in a great wave and is very loosely pinned up behind.”⁵⁸ Later, someone said of the twenty-year-old Mary Paley, “She is Princess Ida.” The eponymous heroine of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera had “forsworn the world, / And, with a band of women, shut herself / Within a lonely country house, and there / Devotes herself to stern philosophies!” Mary had just broken off her engagement to a handsome but stupid army officer to join a handful of female pioneers seeking a Cambridge education. Her part in this “outrageous proceeding” was not a rejection of men, or of the usual terms of marriage. “He who desires to gain their favor must / Be qualified to strike their teeming brains, / And not their hearts! / They’re safety matches, sir. / And they light only on the knowledge box.”⁵⁹

      Mary went to one of Marshall’s lectures at the coach house at Grovedodge and listened, enchanted, as he rhapsodized over Kant, Bentham, and Mill. “I then thought I had never seen such an attractive face,” she confessed, captivated by his “brilliant eyes.” She went to a dance at Marshall’s college, and, emboldened by his “melancholy” look, she asked him to dance “the Lancers.” Ignoring his protestations that he didn’t know how, she led him through the complex steps only to be “shocked at my own boldness.”⁶⁰ Before long she was among the regular guests at his “Sunday evening parties” in his rooms at St. John’s, where he served her tea, crumpets, sandwiches, and oranges and showed her his “large collection of portraits arranged in groups of Philosophers, Poets, Artists . . .”

      Possibly Mary reminded Marshall of Maggie Tulliver, the intelligent but math-phobic heroine of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, who wanted to learn “the Euclid” like her brother, Tom.⁶¹ At the time, Eliot’s novel was Marshall’s favorite. Meeting Mary Paley and her best friend, Mary Kennedy, in the street one day, Marshall proposed—not marriage, but something more outrageous. The young professor wanted his two best students to take the Moral Sciences Tripos, the final examination in political economy, politics, and philosophy that male undergraduates had to take to get a degree. This was a far more ambitious project than acquiring “general cultivation” by attending lectures in literature, СКАЧАТЬ