10/31/1993
"It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in 8 `- Eastern Europe are miserable," wrote Samuelson in the tenth edition of his textbook "Economics." This, mind you, in the aftermath of the 1953 East German uprising, the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the Poznan protests in Poland, the 1968 revolution in Czechoslovakia--all suppressed with bloodshed by Soviet tanks. In the eleventh edition, he took out the word "vulgar." In the 1985 twelfth edition, that entire passage had disappeared. Instead, he and his co-author, William Nordhaus, substituted a sentence asking whether Soviet political repression was "worth the economic gains." This non-question Samuelson and Co. identified as "one of the most profound dilemmas of human society." After seventy years of Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism which took at least 100 million lives, this is still a dilemma? It seemed to me utterly incredible that an otherwise great economist could parrot idiotic Marxist propaganda. At a time when the magnitude of the Soviet economic disaster was apparent even to the most willfully blind Marxist in Central Europe and the USSR, the 1985 Samuelson text offered these paragraphs about the Soviet economy: "But it would be misleading to dwell on the shortcomings. Every economy has its contradictions and difficulties with incentives--witness the paradoxes raised by the separation of ownership and control in America... "What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth." And again, writes Samuelson: "The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid 8 `- growth and awesome military power. But it has done so in an atmosphere of great human sacrifice--even loss of life--and political repression. Is such a frightful human toll worth the economic gains?" Let us substitute the Hitler "model" for the Soviet "model." Would Samuelson have written that "the Nazi model has surely demonstrated a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth and awesome military power"? And having said that would he have then asked the question (as if the answer was in any doubt) as to whether "a frightful human toll [was] worth the economic gains?" Here was a world class economist assuming that there had been rapid Soviet growth when Soviet economists were saying there hadn't been any for years. Professor Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in 1983: "The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused resources of political and social stability to endure the deepest difficulties." Even more incredible was the judgment of MIT Professor Lester Thurow who as late as 1989 wrote: "Can economic command significantly compress and accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can...Today it [Soviet Union] is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States." << Perhaps the most serious offender against moral decency and academic standards was Paul Samuelson, the 1970 Nobel Prize winner in economics, and author of one of the most widely used economics textbooks in the U.S. Whatever empirical approach normally guides a great economist which Samuelson is was thrown overboard by the idea of a communist revolution, the "rapture-of- the-deep" syndrome which afflicts wayward liberal intellectuals. << "It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable," wrote Samuelson in the tenth edition of his textbook "Economics." This, mind you, in the aftermath of the 1953 East German uprising, the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the Poznan protests in Poland, the 1968 revolution in Czechoslovakia--all suppressed with bloodshed by Soviet tanks. In the eleventh edition, he took out the word "vulgar." In the 1985 twelfth edition, that entire passage had disappeared. Instead, he and his co-author, William Nordhaus, substituted a sentence asking whether Soviet political repression was "worth the economic gains." This non-question Samuelson and Co. P0 `- identified as "one of the most profound dilemmas of human society." After seventy years of Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism which took at least 100 million lives, this is still a dilemma? << I was so amazed by the Fortune quotations from Samuleson text that I started looking through the book to see what else he had written about communism. It seemed to me utterly incredible that an otherwise great economist could parrot idiotic Marxist propaganda. At a time when it was apparent even to the most willfully blind Marxist in Central Europe and the USSR, when even Gorbachev was beginning to hint at the magnitude of the Soviet economic disaster, the 1985 Samuelson text offered these paragraphs: << "But it would be misleading to dwell on the shortcomings. Every economy has its contradictions and difficulties with incentives--witness the paradoxes raised by the separation of ownership and control in America... << "What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth." << And again, writes Samuelson: << "The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth and awesome military power. But it has done so in an atmosphere of great human sacrifice--even loss of life--and political repression. Is such a frightful human toll worth the economic gains?" << Let us substitute the Hitler "model" for the Soviet "model." Would Samuelson have written that "the Nazi model has surely demonstrated a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth and awesome military power"? And having said that would he have then asked the question (as if the answer was in any doubt) as to whether "a frightful human toll [was] worth the economic gains?" Here was a world class economist assuming that there had been rapid Soviet growth when Soviet economists were saying there hadn't been any for years. ----------------------------------------------------------