Tyler Cowen has written a new book called GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time? It's deliberately written from a fanboy perspective and it's available free here. It's a fun read and I recommend it.
GOAT is a regular old book, but it's combined with a GPT engine that allows you to engage with its arguments. I'm not sure how well this device works, but it's something you can play around with. Oddly, when I asked it to get down to cases and tell me who Tyler eventually picks, I got two different answers. Last night it told me Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. This morning, my prompts all produced some version of "they're all great!" In the book itself, Tyler clearly awards a three-way tie between Smith, Milton Friedman, and John Stuart Mill, with Mill edging out the other two.
But I know you're wondering who I think the GOAT is. I'll tell you:
- Adam Smith: Invented modern economics and got a striking amount of it right. He is the Einstein of modern econ. A quarter of a millennium later his Wealth of Nations holds up remarkably well.
- John Maynard Keynes: Invented modern macroeconomics and, in the main, got the big stuff right. Influential to this day. In the same way that philosophy is sometimes said to be notes on Plato, 20th century economics was largely notes on Keynes.
How about the other four economists on Tyler's short list? They're all great. But not the greatest of all time:
- Milton Friedman: a brilliant technical economist, but his most influential theories about money supply haven't held up well.
- John Stuart Mill: possibly the greatest social scientist of all time, but his contributions specifically to economics weren't revolutionary.
- Friedrich Hayek: his biggest and best-known idea (decentralized markets as a price discovery mechanism) was truly groundbreaking, but there isn't much more to him.
- Thomas Malthus: underrated due to bad timing for his population thesis, but nevertheless his population thesis did turn out to be mistaken. He was smart (and right) about many other things, but none of them quite seminal.
My selections are based on a narrower definition of economics than Tyler's. I'm mostly considering key contributions to pure economics, while Tyler gives a lot of credit to ideas (and writing) that are mainly social science but show evidence of economic thinking. This is the only way that he can justify rating Mill so highly. I agree that it's unfortunate Mill is largely ignored these days, but that's mainly because he had so many sharp and enduring insights in philosophy and social science, not economics.
UPDATE: I should probably have mentioned that Tyler also nominates five runners-up: Alfred Marshall, Gary Becker, Joseph Schumpeter, Paul Samuelson, and Kenneth Arrow.
There are two surprising omissions in the book. The first and most obvious is David Ricardo, who had a short but highly influential career. He is most famous for his elucidation of comparative advantage in trade and his consistently anti-mercantile views, both of which became conventional wisdom in short order.
The other omission is Karl Marx. There are lots of good reasons to omit him—namely that he was wrong about so much—but just for his sheer influence he seems like he ought to at least be a topic of discussion.
Wow. No Marx?
Groucho?
Karl Marx should be considered, but fell out of favor with the fall of the Soviet Union. Not sure what would have happened if communism was actually implemented.
Marx contributed little to "economics". And his ideas about the government taking over the economy have been shown to work very poorly. So far, anywhere the government has become this powerful, they have also stripped citizens of nearly all their basic rights.
Marx mainly wrote inspirational nonsense to get revolutionaries to try out his whacky government-runs-everything plan. The results are in, and they have shown Marx to be one of the most harmful people in modern history. If not for Marx, Russia and China may have democratized decades ago. So we are still living with the problems Marx created.
The word is "wacky", and if it hadn't been for Marx, Russia and China would have most likely simply become fascistic sooner than they actually did.
As they say, Marx was good at analyzing the problem, but poor in coming up with viable solutions.
if reality fails to comport with friedman, reality is clearly wrong /s
Friedman famously maintained the only responsibility of corporate management was to maximize the return to investors. Jack Welsh and his disciples demonstrated this was complete BS by running great American companies like GE and Boeing into the ground.
This type of exercise dilutes Economics as a social science and the additive nature of knowledge in a field, down to individualistic achievements.
This is my second-biggest complaint with Cowen. I think it is because so many of his fellow travelers hate that economics is a social science because they are ideological adversaries to the existence of most of the other ones, so he tries to rebrand the parts he likes in order to not get pushback.
(The biggest one is that he is increasingly friendly to authoritarian arguments. Also probably due to bad influences, but that doesn't change anything.)
Just to add, Agree that Smith sort of has to come out on top, at least until there is an economic analog to relativity theory.
While a giant in the field, Mill is not the greatest social scientist of all time. I suppose it depends on how you want to define social scientist, which is kind of the point: "social scientist" is far too broad of a title, kinda of like declaring the greatest athlete of all time. But at least with athletics there is a component of the quantifiable.
As for the actual question, I don't care what anybody else says. It's Keynes by a country mile. Adam Smith, while deserving of recognition for being among the first, isn't close.
Also, of course Cowen thinks a bunch of guys whose work is used to attempt to justify libertarian fantasies are the greatest. Who cares what Cowen writes, anyway? He's a hack most of the time.
adam smith quotes:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices"
***
"We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent."
***
“We rarely hear, it is said, of the
combination of masters [to obtain power over the wage], though
frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this
account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as
of this subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit
and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their
actual rate.”
***
"The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company."
smith on banking regulations
Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respect a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as or the most despotical. The obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty, exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed.
smith on the flat tax:
"It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."
There's Adam Smith the economist-philosopher and "Adam Smith" the ideologue of libertarian imagination. The first guy deserves all the credit he's getting, the second one is just some a-hole to put on ties and sell at CPAC.
Great quotes above. It's not coincidental that Smith was embraced by more democratic and egalitarian Jeffersonians and rejected by elitist Hamiltonians (although Hamilton did get some things right). My favorite anti-libertarian Smith quote:
"Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty. It denotes that he is a subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master."
>Who cares what Cowen writes, anyway? He's a hack most of the time.
+1,000,000
Adam Smith is the Isaac Newton of Economics.
John Maynard Keynes is the Albert Einstein.
Physics would not be the same without Isaac and Albert; both dramatically showed the way.
Economics would not be the same without Adam and John.
I noticed that all these people wrote in English, so there may be some Anglosphere-centric bias here. I've heard of an economist named Leon Walras, who was very highly esteemed by Joseph Schumpeter among others, but there could be many other non-Anglophone economists just as important as those on the list.
Also, the most famous is not always the greatest. That's true in all fields, not just in economics. There's no mention of David Ricardo, who was probably at least as great an economist as Mill. Paul Samuelson probably made as many if not more significant contributions to economics as Hayek and Friedman, and he wasn't wrong nearly as often.
Regarding this:
"I agree that it's unfortunate Mill is largely ignored these days"
I think he's more than just ignored. I suspect pretty strongly that our modern university system has become so stridently and narrowly ideological that they are, in essence, the antithesis of Mill. He is rejected, not just ignored.
I don't happen to have a copy of "On Liberty" sitting around, but here's the quote I was looking for (supplied by GoodReads):
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
I am not exaggerating or resorting to hyperbole when I say that this sentiment is more than enough to get a professor fired from a modern American university. If a teacher or student adopts Mill's approach, they are entirely likely to face accusations of "triggering" someone with "harmful" or "violent" speech, and they will likely wind up in a DEI admin's office to face the repercussions of their wrongthink.
In fact, that's almost exactly what happened in the case of Dr. Nicholas Christakis and the infamous shrieking girl at Yale. His wife sent an email out to the campus stating what was once a fairly common Liberal ideal: "Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society." This message was in response to complaints that no one should be allowed to wear Halloween costumes that might be deemed offensive.
In response, Nicholas Christakis was assaulted in public by the shrieking girl (one among a number of students who were harassing him) who told him through her tears that “It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It is about creating a home here!”
Got that? John Stuart Mill is thrown under the bus in favor of safe spaces.
For good measure, the girl proceeded to scream at the eminent professor that he was disgusting. Keep in mind, his great sin was agreeing with his wife who had sent out an email supporting free expression (and Halloween costumes). But to many on the left these days, free speech is just short hand for violence, oppression, and racism (everything, after all, somehow gets implicated as racist).
Mr. and Mrs Christakis left Yale shortly after this incident. The shrieking student, on the other hand, was presented with a university award for promoting diversity, whatever that means.
So, by all means, read John Stuart Mill. But you'll probably have to do it on your own. Because if you bring him up at American schools, you might get assaulted by the mob. Welcome to 21st century academia.
the shrieking girl! how many divisions has she got?
Why yes, a single instance naturally universalizes to all institutes of higher learning. Thank you for sharing your research.
Everyone else, please ignore the crank.
after leaving yale, you'll never guess where christakis is these days
yale!
man, that's some wildly ineffectual thought-policing; the intolerant left really needs to up its game
@different_name: You cannot possibly believe this phenomenon is reducible to a single incident. You would have to have been sleeping under a rock for the last ten years to believe that.
There was the highly reported incident of the Hamline University professor fired for showing an artwork of the prophet Muhammad in an art history class. See the Atlantic, "Academic Freedom Is Not a Matter of Opinion: Students should not decide a college’s curriculum."
Astonishingly, the same scenario played out a few months later at SFSU. A professor showed a pedagogically relevant image of Muhammed, a student complained, and the professor remains under investigation.
Another professor was fired from USC because he referenced a Chinese word, "ne ga" His black students complained about the violence they had suffered: so long professor.
Tabia Lee (an administrator) was fired from De Anza Community College for, among other things, pointing out that the school was apparently practicing illegal racial discrimination by refusing to hire white people.
And then, of course, there is the entire community college system of California, which now mandates that all teachers must accept, practice, and preach anti-racism. Otherwise, no tenure. See the SF chronicle: "First Amendment lawsuits challenge state’s DEI rules for community colleges"
There are entire organizations, such as FIRE, keeping track of the increasing number of sanctions issued against professors who fall afoul of their social justice students and administrators.
And there are any number of books available on the issue: The Coddling of the American Mind, Woke Racism, Left is not Woke, etc. And in case you're biased against Conservatives, these titles are all written by Liberals. Obviously, there's a whole library on the issue if you include conservative authors (such as Rufo).
The idea that I'm referencing an isolated incident? Did you just emerge from a decade long coma?
These are all still anecdotes. I am sure if you were so inclined you could find similar incidents of professors being driven from their jobs for similar reasons going back decades. The further back you go the more likely you are to find professors being dismissed for being too radical rather than the reverse.
There are millions of college students in this country and hundreds of universities. To really talk about whether something is a "phenomenon" in such a large range of institutions involving so many people you'd need an actual study that looked at actual numbers.
Having been deep into the liberal university system as a grad student in the early 90s, I would say, color me skeptical that things are really so much different now.
No special mention for Frank Ramsey? Greatest economist to die by 27?
good post with valid points! What about Karl Marx? He should be number 1?
Re Malthus, have we determined a sustainable population level yet?
Seems like there's still time in the next century or two for him to be proven right.
John Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist), who predated even Adam Smith, should be considered. Ultimately, he became known more for being involved with financial bubbles, but the ideas he introduced were centuries ahead of their time.
I think I'd ultimately go for Keynes, though. Smith, yes, but his ideas and speculations were not too far removed from what contemporaries were thinking. Keynes was a bit of a revolution, from where I sit.
"We're all Keynesians now"
Do google search--said by many, including Nixon.
Drum >> Cowen.
Blech on Hayek and Malthus. Smith and Keyes rule.
All of Malthus's important ideas about population are in Smith chapter 8. Yes to Ricardo, Keynes, and Ramsey. Let's add the greatest economists since WWII: Arrow and Becker.
What, Cowen doesn't list Any Rand?
Mill is THE theorist of liberalism as we might understand in the Popper/1940s/opposition to totalitarianism sense.
The extent to which you think this is important depends on the extent to which we are losing sight of what made liberalism distinct in a rush to "soft totalitarianism".
Tyler thinks this IS important; Kevin doesn't. I suspect the difference is that Tyler sees what's happening in academia everyday in a way that Kevin does not.
KD thinks a lot of things, perhaps all, are unimportant.
Fuck Tyler Cowen. Useless fucker.
Malthus will be proven right in the loooooong run. As you said, the fertilizer revolution thwarted him but it is unsustainable and ultimately produces a climate that works against us.