STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Wednesday, 19 June 2013

[bread_and_roses]

18. "Meet America’s Most Shameless Defender of the 1 Percent, Harvard Economist Greg Mankiw"

http://www.alternet.org/economy/greg-mankiw-and-one-percent

AlterNet [1] / By Lynn Stuart Parramore [2]

Meet America’s Most Shameless Defender of the 1 Percent, Harvard Economist Greg Mankiw

June 17, 2013 |

It’s not really news that America’s economics departments, particularly at elite institutions, are stuffed with people whose careers are founded on protecting monied interests. But it’s pretty rare when someone just comes straight out and announces the fact.

Meet Greg Mankiw, chairman and professor of economics at Harvard, one of the most influential economists in the country. As chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, he guided the economic blundering of George W. Bush. Then in 2006, he became an adviser to Mitt Romney and steered Romney's economic positions in 2012, which included some of the most shocking expressions of classism yet heard from a presidential candidate.

... Above all, Mankiw is the self-appointed Defender in Chief of the 1 percent. How do we know this? Well, because he just published a 23-page paper called “Defending the One Percent [4].” It’s helpful to understand the official propaganda line in the class war, and Mankiw has laid it out in a paper that purports to determine whether income inequality requires any intervention.

...Professor Mankiw begins by asking the reader to imagine a perfectly egalitarian society where the economy is totally efficient and everybody has the same amount of money. What happens, he asks, when a Steve Jobs pops up? Somebody smarter, more creative than everybody else? Suddenly Mr. Entrepreneur makes amazing things that everybody wants to buy, and now economic inequality has entered the egalitarian utopia. Is it fair to intervene and restore equality by penalizing Mr. Entrepreneur?

It must be said that this opening sally, with its clumsily constructed straw man, would not pass muster with a high school debating coach.

... Mankiw’s writing displays the sensibility of a young person suddenly infatuated with the writings of Ayn Rand, and in the fine tradition of Randian entrepreneur worship, he pretends that economic inequality is mostly the result of certain people being smarter and more creative than others ... In a nutshell, he argues that egalitarianism in antithetical to entrepreneurialism

I think the writer is way too timid ... she points out the obvious straw man - few people are calling for "a perfect eqalitarian society" - but implicitly accepts "entrepreneurialism" in itself as a social good. I would argue otherwise - at least as the word is commonly used in English.

World English Dictionary
entrepreneur
— n
1. the owner or manager of a business enterprise who, by risk and initiative, attempts to make profits
2. a middleman or commercial intermediary

Creativity can be a social good; artistry can be a social good, problem solving can be a social good, but none are inherently limited to an "entrepreneurial" system. And "entrepreneurialism" itself has it's down side for the social good - even aside from a system that rewards it for crushing the commons, which ours does.