Just Curious

An Inquiry Into Human Prospect

This is a very grim book written by Professor Robert L. Heilbroner of the New School University in New York City.

Heilbroner is a very versatile writer and Institutional economist, and has written such classics as The Worldly Philosophers (1955), The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (1980), Marx: For and Against (1979) and The Making of the Economic Society (1963). His The Worldly Philosphers sold over 4 million copies and is the second best selling written on economics in the 20th century. (The first being Samuelson's Economics)

Among these books, Marx: For and Against is in fact one of my personal favorites. For those of you who doesn't have the time or patience to read through Das Kapital, Heilbroner's book is a really fascinating non-dogmatic introduction.

Unfortunately, his An Inquiry into Human Prospect came off as a slight disappointment. This is because although most of the topics he covered are still timely, some of the scenarios he conjectured are less realistic today than they were, and the solution he provided is very grim.

In this little booklet Heilbroner discussed in great details the challenge posed to human beings by natural disasters like global warming; population explosion and its possible repercussion, etc.

He mentioned things like how poor nations would attempt to nuclear-blackmail immoral first world nations, yet so far this has happened only with North Korea, which is not even a third world country, in Heilbroner's analytical framework (it's a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship).

He also made a very very elaborate analysis on how well the two great world systems, capitalism and socialism, could respond to these challenges. Alas he based his socialist model on Soviet reality, which is no longer a reality. He should probably compare relatively unbridled capitalism, like that in the U.S., with social democracies, like the Scandinavian economies.

His prediction is very interesting though. Being faced with third world challenge and an increasingly Malthusian situaion, Heilbroner argued that the only way the world could even survive is to thoroughly abolish the political system known as liberal democracy. I really don't think I am even entitled to comment on this suggestion, since I really have not done enough of comparative study of governments and polities. What I do know is, given the conservative nature of the Western peoples, and the common quality shared across cultures known as inertia, a radical reform of government probably is not going to take place, at least not in the United States of America. Whereas I certainly hope the U.S. could undergo some radical reform, I do not think this is ever going to happen.

posted by James Chang @ 7:52 PM