Spineless economists

There are lots of things I want to blog about, which I will do soon... probably. But for now, just thought I'd share something I read today that made me smile. It seems a bit self-indulgent when there are probably still kids being beaten up in Parliament Square as I type, but...

My boss has a bit of a thing about John Ruskin, and organised a seminar for us today on 'Unto This Last', his relatively little-known foray into political economy. Her relentless Ruskin-plugging must be working, since I've borrowed her copy and started reading it on the train home. Here's what he has to say about the idea of the self-interested, maximising individual that underlies much of classical economics:

"Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusion of the science if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability.

"Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death's-head and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory: I simply deny its applicability to the present phase of the world."

Okay Catherine, you've sold me. This guy is clearly awesome.