At 07:55 PM 9/10/00 -0700, you wrote:
>Dierdre McCloskey was claiming this morning that Marx had never visited
>either a farm or a factory. Does anyone know of documented counterexamples?
maybe, but didn't his friend Fred manage a factory? If old Karlos didn't
have the time or resources to visit Fred's factory, I'm sure that the
latter would have corrected any of his misconceptions.
I don't think Adam Smith ever visited a pin factory, either. The idea of
going to an actual factory to study it is pretty rare among economists.
Some of the guys that Marx cites did so, however, including those in the
official Factory Commissions. BTW, if Marx had visited an actual factory
and had left a paper trail indicating that he had done so, one of his
opponents would probably accuse him of being biased by his negative
experience there...
Modern sociologists (like Michael Burawoy) visit factories. Economists
don't do so, and in fact sneer at sociologists as being unscientific louts.
Economists instead ignorantly talk about how q = f(K, L), how something
called "capital" (K) is combined with something called "labor" or "effort"
(L) to produce output (q) according to a regular function f. Despite all of
the "efficiency" wage literature, economists don't actually _study_
factories and other workplaces. They're like stereotyped Aristotelians, who
speculate about the number of teeth in the horse without actually looking
the horse's mouth. (Some economists, like George Akerlof, are better,
because they look at literatures outside of economics. I'm talking about
the vast majority of economists.) Even if Marx never visited a factory, he
is to be praised to the stars for being willing to open what economists
treat as a mere black box, the production process.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
