Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar

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СКАЧАТЬ overflowing crowd of union supporters that squeezed into the Barnwell Workingmen’s Hall on Cambridge’s scruffy north side on Tuesday, May 11, 1874, was thus somewhat bemused to find an unlikely set of allies standing on the stage clad in caps and gowns. One of the leaders, the fiery George Mitchell, confessed, amid much laughter, that “when he saw all those gentlemen with their wide-awake hats and tippets he thought he was going to have some put on him.”⁶⁹ Sedley Taylor, a former Trinity College fellow and prominent reformer, spoke first, proposing a resolution condemning the farmers’ efforts to break the union as “prejudicial to the general interests of the country,” delivering a broadside at his fellow collegian CSM in the process.

      Then it was Marshall’s turn. Seconding a motion put forward by a dissident farmer supporting the locked-out laborers, he called for donations: “Let us sympathize with our hearts and with our purses.”

      Addressing the farmworkers, Marshall denied that political economy could “direct decisions of moral principle,” which it must instead “leave to her sister, the Science of Ethics.” Writing in the Bee Hive, he argued that “political economy is abused when any one claims for it that it is itself a guide in life. The more we study it the more we find cases in which man’s own direct material interest does not lie in the same direction as the general well being. In such cases we must fall back on duty.”⁷⁰

      The following Saturday, the Cambridge Chronicle dismissed Marshall’s speech as “ingenious sophistry.” In fact, he had successfully demonstrated why labor markets do not always produce fair wages, and why unions can lead to greater efficiency as well as equity. He’d “been asked to speak of the laws of supply and demand,” Marshall began. He poured scorn on the union’s opponents who held wages were at their “natural level” because, if they weren’t, other employers would have offered the workers more, and if a worker’s “wages be raised artificially they will come down again.” This was Ricardo’s iron law of wages, accepted even by many who sympathized with the plight of the workers. The argument was “excellent,” Marshall admitted, but the assumptions false. No farmer would offer a neighbor’s hired hands more to come and work for him. What’s more, higher wages would make the workers more productive by allowing them to be better fed. Admitting that “unions have their faults,” Marshall said that “a union gives men interests and sympathies beyond the boundaries of their parish; it will cause them to feel their need of knowledge, and to vow that their sons shall be educated . . . Wages will rise . . . poor rates will dwindle . . . England will prosper.”⁷¹

      Despite the support of the university and much of the media, the strike ultimately failed. The farmers held out by acquiring more machinery and employing more boys and girls. When the strike fund ran out in early June, the union called on the workers to return to the fields. Marshall took from the episode that new ideas would prevail over old doctrines only after a carefully plotted, patient campaign to win the hearts and minds of practical men.

      Five weeks out of New York City and bound for San Francisco, Marshall stared down on the Horseshoe Falls with a frown. From the Goat Island suspension bridge where he stood, the cataract looked nowhere near as mighty as his Baedeker guide had promised. As a mathematician, he knew that perspective was to blame and engaged in some mental calculations to reassure himself that the falls were truly as colossal as advertised. But the numerical exercise did little to dispel his feeling of having been badly let down. “Niagara is a great humbug,” he wrote to his mother on July 10, 1875. “It takes longer for a man to discover how much greater Niagara is than it seems than it does to discover that an Alpine Valley which appears to be only a mile broad is really six miles broad.”⁷²

      Marshall had come to America to study its social and economic landscape. He had left Manhattan on a paddle steamer headed for Albany. In a letter, he recalled how “disgusted and savage” Alexis de Tocqueville had been forty years earlier when he discovered that the finest of the “villas built in Greek style of marble, shining from the banks of the Hudson” were actually made of wood. He, by contrast, “did not find anything like as much sham as I expected.”⁷³

      Indeed, everywhere Marshall looked, he seemed to discover more, not less, than met the eye: American architects displayed “daring & strength,” their buildings being of “uniform thoroughness & solidity.”⁷⁴ An “American drink called ‘mint-julep’ ” was “luxurious.” American preachers gave sermons that were “way out of sight ahead of us,” having achieved “startling improvements” on Anglican liturgy.⁷⁵ American workers were full of “go.”⁷⁶ As he reported to the Moral Sciences Club on his return to Cambridge in the fall, “I met no man or woman in America whose appearance indicated an utterly dull or insipid life.”⁷⁷ By the time Marshall reached Cleveland in mid-July, he was convinced that “nine Englishmen out of ten would be themselves more happy & contented in Canada than in the U.S.; though I myself if I had to emigrate should go to the U.S.”⁷⁸

      Marshall’s magnum opus, Principles of Economics, would not appear for another fifteen years, but he had already worked out the chief tenets of his “new economics”—an alternative to both the old laissez-faire doctrines of Smith, Ricardo, and Mill and the newly ascendant Socialist gospels of Marx. He had spent a decade “laying the foundations of his subject but publishing nothing.”⁷⁹ His travels in America gave him confidence that he was on the right track.

      Marshall’s relations had scoffed at his plan to use a £250 legacy from the same uncle who had financed his university education to tour the United States. He justified himself by saying that he was gathering material for a treatise on foreign trade. While this was perfectly true, the economic historian John Whitaker observes that his actual purpose was broader, part of a growing, “almost obsessive attempt to apprehend in all its aspects an ever-changing economic reality.”⁸⁰ Like other European observers, including Tocqueville, Marshall thought of the United States as a great social laboratory. Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Trollope had been occupied by old questions, now settled, of democracy, slavery, and the survival of the union. Marshall wanted to know where the rise of industry, the growth of global commerce, and the decline of traditional morality were leading. These were advancing more rapidly in America than anywhere else. “I wanted to see the history of the future in America,” he told an audience when he returned to Cambridge.⁸¹

      Marshall sailed to America during the biggest transatlantic tourism boom in history. Sales of the most popular North American guide were climbing toward the half-million mark. The North Atlantic was now a virtual highway of the sea. No fewer than ten steamship companies offered weekly departures from Liverpool to New York, and English travelers were advised to book berths as much as a year in advance.⁸² Marshall’s trip aboard the SS Spain, one of the fastest and most luxurious of the big liners, took a mere ten days, in contrast to the miserable three-week crossing Dickens had endured in 1842. Travel in America was expensive, owing to the immense distances. Marshall had to budget £60 a month versus £15 a month when he spent summers climbing in the Alps. But afterward, according to Mary, he felt that “he had never spent money so well. It was not so much what he learnt there as that he got to know what things he wanted to learn.”⁸³

      His experiences convinced him that “economic influences play a larger part in determining the higher life of men and women than was once considered.” In particular, he believed, “there are no thoughts or actions, or feelings, which occupy a man and which thus have the opportunity of forming the man . . . as those thoughts and actions and feelings which make up his daily occupation.”⁸⁴ He spent some of his time in churches and drawing rooms, especially in Boston, where he met leading American intellectuals, including the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and the art historian Charles Eliot Norton. He lingered for several days at communes run by Shakers and disciples of Robert Owen in New England. But mostly he toured factories, filling notebooks with interviews with businessmen and workers and drawings of machinery. At Chickering and Sons piano factory near Boston, he observed that “care & judgment were required from many СКАЧАТЬ