The Economy: Stirrings from the New Left

The spirit of radical protest that has been sweeping the U.S. academic community has been late in showing itself among economists. Last week it finally surfaced at the Manhattan convention of the American Economic Association. As protests go, this one was rather decorous. A group of young dissenters pushed its way onto the speakers' platform at the A.E.A.'s full membership meeting despite efforts by outnumbered private guards to block the intrusion. Though ruled out of order by the meeting's chairman, the radicals denounced their more conservative colleagues as "sycophants of inequality, destruction of environment, imperialism, racism and the subjection of women."

Otherwise, the radicals did not disrupt the A.E.A. meetings. Instead, they concentrated on holding a "counterconvention"—in a room thoughtfully set aside for them at the New York Hilton by the A.E.A.—at which they explained their ideas to whomever they could persuade to attend.

Genteel as it was, the counterconvention did serve to introduce older members of the profession to the Union for Radical Political Economics, or URPE. It was formed in 1968 and now has 1,000 members, mostly university instructors in their late 20s or early 30s. They are difficult to classify according to political spectrum. They are not Marxists, although they accept Marx's idea that change can only be brought about through social conflict; they are not classical economists, although they use some methods of standard economic analysis. For example, Samuel Bowles, an assistant economics professor at Harvard and the son of Chester Bowles, the former U.S. Ambassador to India, has done what even conservative colleagues call a first-rate statistical analysis indicating that increased schooling helps the sons of the rich more than the sons of the poor.

Goods or Bads? The spirit of the radicals' dissent is New Left, in that they contend that the capitalist system is fundamentally bad and should be replaced by something else. "We would like to know if it is possible to run an economic system on something other than greed," says James Weaver, professor of economics at Washington's American University. But they readily admit that they do not have any clear idea of what the something else might be. For the moment, they are able only to question and criticize. Nevertheless, they try to make a virtue out of the fact that they have no program for reform. "Which do you care more about," asked Stephan Michelson, research fellow in economics at Harvard, at the A.E.A. meeting, "who is asking the right questions, or who has found answers to the wrong ones?"