Historically, the Left is well-known for casting aside certain findings of economics for the sake of what are judged to be higher things; this prestige lets them in as economic “experts” whose expertise is somewhat self-limited. It’s amazing, in retrospect, how much of this is based upon nothing more than plain snoot.

For those of you who find it somewhat unbelievable that a whole area of economics could be given short shrift, I have, right on my desk, evidence that such was acceptable less than forty years ago, in the form of the Encyclopedia Americana, 1966 edition.

To set the stage, let me take you back to that year. In 1966, the noting that a landmark advance of a major branch of thought was being glossed over in an encyclopedia would have been met with incredulity. America was synonymous with “progress,” and this showed in many fields. Color television had been introduced into the American home at a phenomenal rate, going from the lab to almost every home in the space of a decade. It was possible for a family home to have a color TV with two bands (VHF’s channels 2-12 and UHF’s channels 13-83) in the living room with the kids getting handed down a fully working black-and-white TV which was capable of handing only VHF channels. That was what the market offered in 1955.

Space travel had also progressed at a phenomenal rate. Those of us used to the routine of the space shuttle launches would find 1966’s common expectation that passenger flights up into orbit would be offered by 1980 or so absolutely astonishing - but that was precisely what a show started a year later and unveiled in 1968 (Land of the Giants) predicted in its pilot: the offering of sub-orbital flights would be a paid service in 1983! The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, also released in 1968, shared this worldview, predicting on film that the famous monolith would be found in the midst of a survey, conducted as a matter of course, by a resident group of Moon colonists in the year 1996. (The chore of putting together a spaceship worthy of manned flight to Jupiter, including three cryogenic pods for freezing and un-freezing a living body, was judged by the still-living-now Arthur C. Clarke to be somewhat advanced for 1996 technology but perfect for the state of the art in 2001.) These predictions were built upon a base of five years’ progress from a single astronaut’s brief flight in orbit in the year 1961 (John Glenn) to the ending of the Gemini program in 1966, which brought NASA to the regularization of: a vehicle successfully changing its orbit in space; the docking of two spacecrafts to each other; and extra- vehicular “space walks.” The Apollo 1 flight was announced at approximately the same time the Gemini program was concluded, with plaudits.

As far as more Earthly matters were concerned, the color-TV example could be multiplied a thousandfold. One other example that is probably familiar to you is a certain pharmaceutical product, which meshed nicely with certain advanced clothes designs.

This progress was also extending to the social sciences. The Secretary of Defense at the time, Robert McNamara (he's still around too), was prosecuting the Vietnam War with the most advanced statistical management techniques that American business and the American university could come up with. In the private sector, the new field of econometrics had moved beyond the publication of esoteric monographs – the pioneer work being Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis - to the use of such techniques in the prediction of stock market prices. The decade following would see the gelling of this research into the “random walk hypothesis,” and the decade after that would see its findings implemented through index funds. The 1960s was also the decade that saw the cracking of the code used in our cells by our genes to build proteins.

If anything, the most intuitive kind of criticism concerning progress would be that it was moving at too breakneck a pace. A young writer by the name of Ralph Nader made the point about GM’s Corvair that year (Unsafe at Any Speed), but his book seemed to move to best- seller status simply on the basis of shock value, like Carson’s Silent Spring, a surprise best-seller in 1962. The solidification of these isolated criticisms into a serious movement would have to await the next year, a “take-off” that was most likely impelled by the fate of the Apollo 1 mission, and the shock it engendered. The small-is-beautiful crowd gained three martyrs in 1967, right from the previously accident-free space program.

All of these facts add up to the conclusion that a critic’s protest that the “Economics” article in the 1966 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana (9: 556b-568) contained a jarring lacuna would be simply dismissed out of hand. Surely the progress of America had forever banished the propagation of ignorance?

And yet, I see it, right in front of me, in the article written by Professor George Soule on the subject.

Soule, despite his left-leaning background, is a fair man; a reader searching for either bias or the snoot I mentioned above will come up empty. Writing for the masses, his goal is to inform them what economics is. This he does, in large part; the reader looking for Smith, Marx or Keynes will walk away with a fairly good idea of what their respective models were about.

But if you look through the subheadings, you will not find the marginalist revolution.

This could not be chalked up to ignorance; Soule is well-read, as evidenced by his noting that the first discoverer of the principle of marginal utility was Herman Gossen. This decision has to be the result of a judgement call.

His words indicate it. Soule folds marginal utility into deductivist economics, just as he folded its discovery into “The Development of the Classical Tradition,” a section that precedes a detailed discussion of the economics of John Stuart Mill. He omits the seminality of the discovery of marginal utility by categorizing it as just an add-on to the works of Smith, Ricardo and the other classicists; appreciation of the discovery of marginal utility as a quantal leap in the field is confined to “economic logicians” (EA, V. 9, p. 563.) The next paragraph contains a discussion of the “[m]any criticisms...directed at the application of dry and abstract mathematical [and, by implication, verbal] logic to the real economic world” (p. 563); that paragraph ends with a linking of deductivism with an aversion to discussing social policy (p. 564.)

The implication in Soule’s own discussion is that the principle of marginal utility is “only a theory” – the same label used for evolution by means of natural selection by creationists. That was the best that Encyclopedia Americana had to offer its readers in the progress-drenched year of 1966 – the categorization of the most important discovery of nineteenth-century economics as both unimportant and controversial.