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(Trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.) For a set of penetrating critiques of Piketty’s book by well-qualified economists, identifying major empirical or factual errors in it, see Jean-Philippe Delsol, et al., eds., Anti-Piketty: Capital for the twenty-first Century (Washington: Cato Institute, 2017). I have published two critical essays on the book: “Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Economic Treatise or Tract for the Times?”, Perspectives on Political Science, 46.1 (2017), 16–29, and “Thomas Piketty’s ‘Remedies’ for Oligarchy: Exacerbating and Globalizing the E.U.’s Democratic Deficit,” in Ann Ward, ed., Classical Rationalism and the Politics of Europe (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 252–8.
To my knowledge the opening salvo in this barrage within political science circles in the 2000’s was the 2004 report of the American Political Science Association’s Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy, “American Democracy in an Age of Inequality.”
“Agrarian (In)Equality (and Dependency) Versus Commerce and Liberty: Reconsidering the Relation between Constitutional Government and Economic Inequality in the American Republic,” in Ann and Lee Ward, eds., Reconsidering Democracy, to be published as an issue of The European Legacy, 2020.
See, on the life habits of men of prime working age who have dropped out of the labor force (neither employed, nor seeking employment, nor in school), Nicholas Eberstadt, Men without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2016), 84–93.
In a more recent, 2016 Brookings survey, 69% of Americans still judged that in this country “people get rewarded for intelligence and skill,” while only 19% thought that “coming from a wealthy family is ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ to getting ahead” (cited in Christine Rosen, “The Meritocracy Blues,” Commentary, 147.5]May, 2019], 8).
“In 2014–15, U.S. public schools spent $11,734 per student on current expenditures …. [E]xpenditures per student were 15% higher in 2014–15 than in 2000–01, after adjusting for inflation” (“Public School Expenditures,” National Center for Education Statistics, last updated April, 2018, https:/nce.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmh.asp; Dominic Rushe, “The U.S. Spends More on Education than Other Countries; Why Is It Falling Behind?,” Guardian, September 7, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education-spending-finland-south-korea; both accessed April 11, 2019).
See Arthur Brooks, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about America’s Compassionate Conservatism (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 118–24, on the contrast between Americans’ generosity and Europeans’ stinginess (both at home and abroad) – contrary to the caricature often purveyed by European and American intellectuals.
See McCloskey’s astute criticism of Veblen’s and Frank’s argument, the apparent source of Formisano’s complaint about house sizes (an encouragement of economic redistribution rooted in the indulgence of envy): Bourgeois Equality, 187.
See the New York Times lead story, March 31, 2019: “Democrats Rely on Rich Backers But Keep It Quiet.” As Watson reminds us (104), in five of the six presidential elections from 1992 on “the party that presumably represented the moneyed class lost the popular vote,” while “in four of those elections the Democratic candidate outspent the Republican” (both trends continued in 2016). See also the sources cited by Conard, The Upside of Inequality, 106 n. 42, finding that “money in politics exerts surprisingly little influence.” As he observes, “the continual increase in transfer payments … from the top 20% of income earners to the bottom 80% … hardly indicates a rise in the success of the rich to influence government at the expense of the middle class,” despite the persistence of “cronyism” (107).
On the partisan intent and effect of restrictions on campaign contributions, see Ralph Winter, Campaign Financing and Political Freedom (Washington: AEI Press, 1973) and John Samples, The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). On media bias, still relevant is Bernie Goldberg, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (New York: Regnery, 2001), as well as his more recent books on the subject.
Readers may find Formisano’s concluding focus on the welfare of the middle class, rather than the poor, surprising. But it reflects his political strategy (mimicking Franklin Roosevelt’s design for ensuring that “his” Social Security program would never be repealed) of achieving “universality” for social-welfare programs, so that “the rich, the middle class, and the poor” all benefit (168–9, 186). How could even a plutocrat then object? (Besides, in a country as wealthy as the United States, “poverty” is not a fixed category, such that one might envision its ultimate elimination, but a purely relative term, so that the distinction between poor and nonpoor is “arbitrary” [167–8]. Hence, pending attainment of Marx’s classless society, the need for ever-expanding government programs will never end. But who will pay the bills? And quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)
Frankfurt is something of a brevity specialist: the present, 98-page treatise exceeds by 30 pages his previous monograph, On B—-t, which achieved No. 1 New York Times bestseller status.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ibid., 40–48, 55, 69–71.
On Rawls, see my Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007).
On the derivation of this claim from the philosophic teaching of John Locke, see Michael Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1996), Pt. I.
See Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 142–4 for evidence that top CEO’s, no less than sports or entertainment celebrities, earn their high compensation through the return on investment that they provide.
Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (2nd ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), after taking utilitarianism to task for “failing to take seriously the distinction between persons,” similarly commits the same error by dictating that all social and economic inequalities be arranged to benefit of the (undefined) “least advantaged” members of society (24, 87, 280–81; Schaefer, Illiberal Justice, 49–51).
See also, on the deficiency of Federal measurements of poverty, Nicholas Eberstadt, The Poverty of “The Poverty Rate” (Washington: AEI Press, 2008).
For elaboration of this point, see Nicholas Eberstadt, A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2012) as well as Men without Work.:
Conard, Upside, 203 makes a similar point.
Swain, “Equality Chic,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2019; Rachel Sherman, “The Rich Kid Revolutionaries,” New York Times Sunday Review, April 28, 2019, 1, 4; on the conversion of “charismatic” young Democratic politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to quasi-socialism, Daniel Henninger, “Socialism? Yes, Be Afraid,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2019, A17; and, on the call of the “young Dutch historian” Rutger Bregman, whose most recent book has already been translated into 32 languages and whose program calls for “taxes, taxes, taxes,” all for the sake of “a 15-h working week, a world without borders, and a basic salary for every citizen,” Patrick Kingsley, “Ruffling Feathers in a Global Conversation on Income,” New York Times, March 2, 2019, A9. (Anyone who still believes that socialism is the road to societal wealth or the alleviation of poverty is urged to read Joshua Muravchik’s Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism [New York: Encounter Books, 2019].)
A look at Thucydides’ portrayal of the Athenians would readily refute McCloskey’s assumption that democratic peoples do not sometimes adopt militaristic policies of their own volition, whether for good reasons or bad ones.
Just one news item might challenge McCloskey’s optimism in this regard: between 2007 and 2017 the suicide rate among Americans rose 26%, with the rate among youths 10 to 17 more than doubling (“One Teenager Killed Himself, Then Six More Followed,” Wall Street Journal, April 13–14, 2019, A1).
The classic study of Smith’s reasoning in this regard is Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957).
Curiously, McCloskey even opposes her emphasis on rhetoric as the source of change in people’s moral outlook to Tocqueville’s emphasis on the “habits of the heart” (277), as if the Frenchman would have denied the contribution that rhetoric makes in that regard.
Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), Part II; Caton, The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic, 1600–1835 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988); Harvey C. Mansfield, “Party Government and the Settlement of 1688,” American Political Science Review, 58 (1964), 933–946. While John Locke’s liberal theorizing may well have been enriched, as McCloskey surmises, by his five years’ exile in Holland (343), it has deeper roots, underestimated by McCloskey (109–10), in the writings of such predecessors as Machiavelli and Hobbes, along with Montaigne. Instead of exploring those roots, McCloskey follows Quentin Skinner in implausibly attributing the rise of liberal theory, including the doctrine of natural rights, to the influence of medieval friars and sixteenth-century scholastics (369–70). Contrast Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
See, on the latter, Naomi Schaefer Riley, Be the Parent, Please (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2017).
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Schaefer, D.L. Is Economic Inequality a Threat to American Constitutional Democracy?. Soc 57, 98–108 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-019-00446-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-019-00446-6