|
|
|
CAPITALISM: |
|
The Clearest and
Most Comprehensive Contemporary Defense of the Capitalist
Economic System Available |
Literature and Lectures by Edith Packer, George Reisman, and Others |
|
|
|
|
|
From Chapter 3: The Loss of the Concept of Economic Progress (p. 106)This excerpt is taken from George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by George Reisman. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without written permission of the author. The following limited exception is granted: Namely, provided they are reproduced in full and include this copyright notice and are made for noncommercial use, i.e., for use other than for sale, including use as part of any publication that is sold, copies of this excerpt may be downloaded into personal computers and distributed electronically or on paper printouts from a personal computer; reproduction on the internet is permitted provided the copy of the excerpt is accompanied by the following link to the Jefferson School's home page (which may, and hopefully will, be displayed elsewhere and more prominently): The Jefferson School of Philosophy, Economics, and Psychology. This limited right of reproduction expires on December 31, 1999. This page has been visited An important intellectual confusion in the decades prior to the appearance of the ecology movement, which helped to pave the way for it and continues to sustain it, was the loss of very concept of economic progress. Somewhere along the line, the seemingly synonymous, but in fact very different, concept of economic growth took its place. Only after this change had occurred could the ecology doctrine succeed. Growth is a concept that applies to individual living organisms. An organism grows until it reaches maturity, then it declines, and sooner or later dies. The concept of growth is also morally neutral, equally capable of describing a negative as a positive: tumors and cancers can grow. Thus the concept of growth both necessarily implies limits and can easily be applied negatively. In contrast, the concept of progress applies across succeeding generations of human beings.95 The individual human beings reach maturity and die. But because they possess the faculty of reason, they can both discover new and additional knowledge and transmit it to the rising generation, which then starts out in life in possession of a larger body of knowledge than did the present generation. If the new generation continues to think, it succeeds in further enlarging the sum of human knowledge and thus it too passes on a larger body of knowledge to its successors than it inherited. And so it can continue from generation to generation, with each succeeding generation receiving a greater inheritance of knowledge than the one before it and making its own fresh contribution to knowledge. This continuously expanding body of knowledge, insofar as it takes the form of continuously increasing scientific and technological knowledge and correspondingly improved capital equipment, is the foundation of continuous economic progress. Progress is a concept unique to man: it is founded on his possession of reason and thus his ability to accumulate and transmit a growing body of knowledge across the generations. Totally unlike growth, whose essential confines are the limits of a single organism, progress has no practical limit. Only if man could achieve omniscience would progress have to end. But the actual effect of the acquisition of knowledge is always to lay the foundation for the acquisition of still more knowledge. Through applying his reason, man enlarges all of his capacities, and the more he enlarges them, the more he enlarges his capacity to enlarge them.96 The concept of progress differs radically from the concept of growth in that it also has built into it a positive evaluation: progress is movement in the direction of a higher, better, and more desirable state of affairs. This improving state of affairs is founded on the growing body of knowledge that the possession and application of human reason makes possible. Its foundation is the rising potential for human achievement that is based on growing knowledge. While it is possible to utter denunciations of too rapid "growth" as being
harmful, it would be a contradiction in terms even to utter the thought of too rapid progress,
let alone denounce it. The meaning would be that things can get better too
quickly--that things getting better meant they were getting worse. Notes 95. I am indebted for this vital distinction to von Mises. It was an observation he made in his seminar at New York University. 96. This proposition bears an essential similarity to the theory of capital accumulation presented below on pp. 622642. |
||