I am not an economist. I used to be a chemist, much more interested in the history of my craft than most of my colleagues. I don't think this made me a better working chemist. But it helped me when the question was: "what is chemistry?" This question is not very important for chemistry. And it has a certain angels-on-pins aspect, especially when you get a bunch of physical chemists in the same room as a bunch of chemical physicists. (Yes, they have their own journals.)
But given the immense institutional prestige and scope of economics and economists, the question "what is economics" is of considerable public importance. And history is very useful in approaching this question.
What is the answer then? For example when I refer to the heat generated in a foehn wind I explain it as a chemical process but my partner insists it is a matter of physics. Which of us is right?
Thanks, John: your insights are always compelling, especially the point about the neglect of economics' recent history. The profession’s reluctance to engage deeply with its own intellectual trajectory undoubtedly limits its ability to adapt and self-correct.
I’m equally keen to see economists - and experts in other fields, for that matter - step beyond their disciplinary silos. Engaging with history, philosophy and the arts enriches not only analysis but also how ideas are communicated and debated. This broader approach also helps check hubris and ego, while cultivating empathy, which is essential for tackling the complex, human-centred challenges economics ultimately seeks to address.
FWIW, my wife was an undergraduate student of English literature in the 80's and she tells me that the interested student had access to instruction about Johnson's criticism but that it was not required and relatively few students took advantage of this opportunity. On the other hand, she says that Matthew Arnold was hard to dodge.
I think that Moskowitz has things exactly backwards from the perspective of any science, or indeed any perspective that makes use of modern epistemology: no "real" (scientific) discipline can afford to require its students to know the history of that same discipline. There is no more value in reading Newton's own writing on the calculus, or mechanics, or gravity, or optics than there would be in his writing on alchemy (if there were any) or minting coins. By the time you had learned Latin and puzzled your way through "fluxions" etc, your fellow students would have mastered differential geometry. More pithily: if a question has a right answer, then it is more valuable to read the best formulation of the answer than the original one.
You may object that economics is not really a science, and of course it differs in obvious ways from physical sciences. Perhaps it partakes of both the sciences and the humanities; but in any case it shares the epistemology of science: it assumes that there are right and wrong answers and that these can be determined by observation or even experiment, at least aspirationally. It would be a grave mistake to take the same approach to, say, Wittgenstein, or indeed Marx.
John, Why no mention of Ecological Economics, guys like Boulding, Schumacher, Daly, all made considerable contributions to the discipline. Drawing from ecology and physics they realised that you couldn't continue to pursue economic growth outside of ecological, bio- physical limits. The insights from physics, biology and ecology have brought Economics back to facing up to the limits of growth as we know it.
Boulding and Daly are still read and cited. 1000-2000 cites a year for each of them, according to Google scholar. So, the topic of the post doesn't apply to them
As an old person who won an essay prize at school nearly 70 years ago, writing about Johnson, I can say that, as a working statistician, I always kept Johnson in mind. He applied 'the triumph of hope over experience' to second marriages; I applied it to experimental design, both in teaching and in consulting.
I suspect that Boswell and Johnson sustain each other, but I have reread Rasselas and the Life of Savage many times.
Such different blokes, so complementary (as in their Western Isles books). Rasselas isn't a barrel of laughs, but there's something special there. The introduction to J's edition of Shakespeare is good, and the Dictionary is full of fun. In fact this discussion is sending me to my bookshelves. Thanks.
For my part, I can only say that when I was a 1980s undergraduate in Sydney University's English department, I and my fellows did need to know about the lit-crit supplied by Dr Johnson and Dryden (as well as some of both men's poetry, plus Johnson's *Rasselas*). When I say 'did need to know about,' I mean 'did need to be ready to answer exam questions on.'
But the 1980s were a very long time ago. And as to whether that campus even *has* an English department in 2025 - let alone whether really admirable lecturers from my day, such as Andrew Riemer and Michael Wilding, would still be welcome in such a department, assuming it still exists - others need to judge.
In many ways, Marx was a bit like Freud in terms of providing a true paradigmatic change in their disciplines while getting a lot of stuff wrong. Marx located industrial capitalism in a lineage of economy and society. In doing so he identified the importance of the emergence of a new class – the proletariat – and correctly showed that their interests are inherently at odds with capitalism. What Marx failed to do – and this is easy to say with hindsight – was to understand the enormous adaptability of capitalism and its seemingly endless capability to commoditise goods and services. He also overlooked that with a growing economy (a massive shift from mercantilist beliefs) and a robust union movement and occasional Labour-Social Democrat governments, the working class in Western capitalist societies achieve a level of human dignity (house, living wage [thank you Justice Higgins in the Harvester case]; public health; public education; pensions).
But the post-Boomer generation with abysmal levels of historical knowledge, have no idea of the struggle it took to get to the stage we are now. When I taught in high school and at university, I used to ask my students in April why they were getting a holiday around 1 May. No one knew that it celebrated the truly significant breakthrough of the 8-8-8 working week.
As a left-oriented person, I am prepared to acknowledge that, while Keynesianism worked extremely well (for Roosevelt and Hitler and later post war governments, whether Tory or Labour), it had lost its puff in the early 1970s. This, I believe, was largely due to governments not being allowed by popular opinion to rein back expenditures that were appropriate during the recessions. I well remember working in one of the economic departments in Canberra in 1975 reading Cabinet briefings. Bill Hayden was one of the few who “got it”, warning his colleagues to ease up a little. Of course, the demise of Keynesianism coincided with the OPEC oil crisis to produce awful stagflation [Rex Connor had the right idea – get a couple of billion dollars and create oil from shale; mind you, this is before non-fossil fuels were possible).
Furthermore, as a leftie, I’m prepared to concede that a circuit breaker was needed. Reagan and Thatcher provided this. However, their disdain for the working class was matched by their shared avarice with the wealthy classes and their hatred of government providing the foundations of a humane society. Hence neo-liberalism for which we are still paying.
So, yes, history is important but not the sort that looks too closely at the works of dead white men, however noble they might have been. We need to be teaching our social history (including things like Australia “living off the sheep’s back” being extended to include “and slave labour”).
Unlike say physics or chemistry or paleontology, economics has an inevitably large normative component. How could it be otherwise, since it deals with who gets what, on what terms? An acquaintance with the history of the discipline is then essential to understanding what (often unstated) normative assumptions underlie the current discourse. This also provides a glimpse into economic regimes that do not fit the current models (ie most historical ones, many current ones and disregarded parts of our own economic machine).
Re Marx, he was trying to understand the profound transition he saw happening around him, from an order based on agriculture and rents to one based on industry. His own use of the terms 'productive' and 'unproductive' point to roles in the new system, for instance ('productive' means 'producing a money return over and above the capital invested', so household labour is in this sense 'unproductive' - you get clean dishes but no money). Given that the non-monetised portion of the economy is still around 35-45%, this is a useful distinction, even if the terms are unfortunate. His observations on the role of finance are acute, his insistence on power as a basic component of any regime is acknowledged as a gaping hole in current economics and, while the labour theory of value is unsound, it is at least a theory of value. AFAIK, the mainstream ignores the question entirely, concentrating instead on price - a different thing entirely.
If people don’t know the histories of their disciplines they don’t know how they developed conceptually and the historical geographical and cultural context and ideologies within which they developed. That means they can’t understand the as much about the limitations and virtues offered by the concepts in the discipline. In my view familiarity with Marx and the other earlier economists can only inform a richer understanding of economic behaviour. Back in the day comparative economic systems was taught and it’s a loss not understanding how non capitalist or pre capitalist systems work.
you used to be able to search flickr for creative commons imagery, there was almost always something usable.
Artists and art historians are expected to know something about the history of art criticism simply because criticism and theory and art production have all been strongly interactive, back to the renaissance at least. In many ways visual arts are a type of intellectual debate about the world that can be carried out both in imagery and discussion of imagery so they are facets of the same cultural activity but of course there is a school of thought whose contribution to the debate would be to argue this is not so.
So I asked my nearest English literature professor. She edited the Cambridge edition of "The History of Sir Charles Grandison", which may be a conflict of interest in this case? Anyway, she's happy to recommend Johnson's literary criticism as entertaining and thoughtful criticism of his peers.
Is that the same thing as continuing to a science that gradually uncovers universal truths? Probably not, but I can't see economics being that kind of endeavour either. The object of study is mutating too quickly.
At the risk of sounding like someone who has received the kind of shallow education one receives in a modern economics degree, I think the concept of opportunity cost is relevant here. It's easy to opine about what economists (or anyone else) should read if one assumes if they weren't reading Marx, Samuel Johnson or Aristotle they would be staring at a wall or playing inane computer games.
A more serious discussion would demand that a commentator specify what future economists should give up in order to read more Marx or Smith. Otherwise you end up piling an endless amount of reading onto your imaginary ideal economics student. I think it’s also worth noting that students aren’t what they used to be. When universities were elite institutions for the privileged or talented few, it might have been reasonable to ask students to extract nuggets of wisdom from the muddy stream of 18th century writing, but today they may struggle.
For undergraduate students, I’d prefer there was more time spent on economic history than the history of economic thought. I think it’s more useful both in terms of vocational application and helping students become better citizens. To make room for that, I’d like students to work less (by paying adequate benefits and fixing the housing crisis). I certainly didn’t feel there was much superfluous stuff in my degree.
Having said that, I get the sense this discussion is mostly about economists with PhDs, rather than those who only hold undergraduate degrees. I don’t have a PhD in economics, but I don’t get the sense there’s much fat to be trimmed in those programs. The technical demands are such that there’s very little space left to read old stuff that’s mostly wrong. The solution might be to stop teaching the technical stuff to those who don’t need it, but then where that happens (political economy, history of economic thought, economic history), students probably do read Marx and Smith.
On the other hand, if the argument is that students should add extra reading in the form of Marx and Smith, well then that would obviously make them better economists. So would reading literary fiction, philosophy, history or any number of other disciplines - that’s one of the wonderful things about economics.
"That’s because not many economists do Marxist/Marxian economics any more...."
For me this begs the questions 'why?' And 'should they?'.
This is off topic and I should probably do my own home work, but if you are still around JQ, could you point to any good sources on current relevance of Marx?
As I just wrote elsewhere “begs the question” is wrong, should be “prompts the question”. Heaps of people have written on the current relevance of Marx, including me
Yes, shouldn't be much begging or prompting needed. There is tons out there, was being lazy. Thanks for the link. Will need to look uo labour theory of value. If I want to read articles with a wokish warning I should be prepared to do my own research.
Since most people (I think) use the phrase "begs the question" in the way Cam uses it, it is surely now right. The major dictionaries, like Oxford and Cambridge, tell us they describe rather than prescribe what words and phrases mean, simply following actual usage. Hence the Cambridge dictionary now includes biological males within the definition of women to reflect current usage. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/15/us/cambridge-dictionary-woman-definition-trans-cec/index.html
My university background is social science. It was a long time ago. As I remember it, the Boer War had only just begun when I was an undergrad. I think Noah is right to be skeptical of the grand thinking of the Moskowitzs in the humanities and social sciences.
I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that if we listened too closely to these seemingly amiable professors in their endearingly unfashionable cardigans and thin rimmed spectacles, the result would be a repetition of the 20th century horror shows.
To quote Noah:
" Economists should read Marx, and they should read him with all of this history in mind. It’s a vivid reminder of how social science ideas, applied sweepingly and with maximal hubris to real-world politics and institutions, have the potential to do incredible harm. Marxism is perhaps the single greatest example of social-science malpractice that the human race has ever seen.
This should serve as a warning to economists — a reminder of why although narrow theories about auctions or randomized controlled trials of anti-poverty policies might seem like small potatoes, they’re not going to end with the skulls of thousands of children smashed against trees."
That is by far the biggest lesson Marx has to teach us (apart from his contribution to social science, which deserves one short paragraph in a sociology 101 textbook). This is why I'm a moderate centre leftist, not a revolutionary leftist.
What is the current economist’s response to the former distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” labour? It certainly still has popular appeal (“real jobs”, “a country that makes things”, “Golgafrincham B Ark” etc) and I can see Smith’s argument that one leads to capital production and the other doesn’t. Is it just that you can’t have one without the other so the distinction is not helpful?
The current popular fallacy isn't quite the same as Smith. But to give an example of the foolishness in both versions, building a hospital is "productive", but doctors and nurses are "unproductive"
Marrying your paid housekeeper is said to decrease productivity, while the Exxon Valdez oil spill increased productivity - would you include such events in your examples of economic foolishness?
I am not an economist. I used to be a chemist, much more interested in the history of my craft than most of my colleagues. I don't think this made me a better working chemist. But it helped me when the question was: "what is chemistry?" This question is not very important for chemistry. And it has a certain angels-on-pins aspect, especially when you get a bunch of physical chemists in the same room as a bunch of chemical physicists. (Yes, they have their own journals.)
But given the immense institutional prestige and scope of economics and economists, the question "what is economics" is of considerable public importance. And history is very useful in approaching this question.
What is the answer then? For example when I refer to the heat generated in a foehn wind I explain it as a chemical process but my partner insists it is a matter of physics. Which of us is right?
Your partner is always right: a good general rule for living.
I think the general rule is correct except that it applies in reverse. Some of the things she believes are outrageous. 😊
Thanks, John: your insights are always compelling, especially the point about the neglect of economics' recent history. The profession’s reluctance to engage deeply with its own intellectual trajectory undoubtedly limits its ability to adapt and self-correct.
I’m equally keen to see economists - and experts in other fields, for that matter - step beyond their disciplinary silos. Engaging with history, philosophy and the arts enriches not only analysis but also how ideas are communicated and debated. This broader approach also helps check hubris and ego, while cultivating empathy, which is essential for tackling the complex, human-centred challenges economics ultimately seeks to address.
FWIW, my wife was an undergraduate student of English literature in the 80's and she tells me that the interested student had access to instruction about Johnson's criticism but that it was not required and relatively few students took advantage of this opportunity. On the other hand, she says that Matthew Arnold was hard to dodge.
I think that Moskowitz has things exactly backwards from the perspective of any science, or indeed any perspective that makes use of modern epistemology: no "real" (scientific) discipline can afford to require its students to know the history of that same discipline. There is no more value in reading Newton's own writing on the calculus, or mechanics, or gravity, or optics than there would be in his writing on alchemy (if there were any) or minting coins. By the time you had learned Latin and puzzled your way through "fluxions" etc, your fellow students would have mastered differential geometry. More pithily: if a question has a right answer, then it is more valuable to read the best formulation of the answer than the original one.
You may object that economics is not really a science, and of course it differs in obvious ways from physical sciences. Perhaps it partakes of both the sciences and the humanities; but in any case it shares the epistemology of science: it assumes that there are right and wrong answers and that these can be determined by observation or even experiment, at least aspirationally. It would be a grave mistake to take the same approach to, say, Wittgenstein, or indeed Marx.
John, Why no mention of Ecological Economics, guys like Boulding, Schumacher, Daly, all made considerable contributions to the discipline. Drawing from ecology and physics they realised that you couldn't continue to pursue economic growth outside of ecological, bio- physical limits. The insights from physics, biology and ecology have brought Economics back to facing up to the limits of growth as we know it.
Boulding and Daly are still read and cited. 1000-2000 cites a year for each of them, according to Google scholar. So, the topic of the post doesn't apply to them
Schumacher was more a philosopher.
As an old person who won an essay prize at school nearly 70 years ago, writing about Johnson, I can say that, as a working statistician, I always kept Johnson in mind. He applied 'the triumph of hope over experience' to second marriages; I applied it to experimental design, both in teaching and in consulting.
I suspect that Boswell and Johnson sustain each other, but I have reread Rasselas and the Life of Savage many times.
Oliver
I've read Boswell's Life, and both of them on the (then exotic) Western Isles, but never contemplated tackling Rasselas.
Such different blokes, so complementary (as in their Western Isles books). Rasselas isn't a barrel of laughs, but there's something special there. The introduction to J's edition of Shakespeare is good, and the Dictionary is full of fun. In fact this discussion is sending me to my bookshelves. Thanks.
For my part, I can only say that when I was a 1980s undergraduate in Sydney University's English department, I and my fellows did need to know about the lit-crit supplied by Dr Johnson and Dryden (as well as some of both men's poetry, plus Johnson's *Rasselas*). When I say 'did need to know about,' I mean 'did need to be ready to answer exam questions on.'
But the 1980s were a very long time ago. And as to whether that campus even *has* an English department in 2025 - let alone whether really admirable lecturers from my day, such as Andrew Riemer and Michael Wilding, would still be welcome in such a department, assuming it still exists - others need to judge.
If Wilding's academic satire (Macadamanias?) is anything to go by, I doubt it.
On the original question, I looked through the course offerings at Yale, which still has an English department, and couldn't see anything like that.
In many ways, Marx was a bit like Freud in terms of providing a true paradigmatic change in their disciplines while getting a lot of stuff wrong. Marx located industrial capitalism in a lineage of economy and society. In doing so he identified the importance of the emergence of a new class – the proletariat – and correctly showed that their interests are inherently at odds with capitalism. What Marx failed to do – and this is easy to say with hindsight – was to understand the enormous adaptability of capitalism and its seemingly endless capability to commoditise goods and services. He also overlooked that with a growing economy (a massive shift from mercantilist beliefs) and a robust union movement and occasional Labour-Social Democrat governments, the working class in Western capitalist societies achieve a level of human dignity (house, living wage [thank you Justice Higgins in the Harvester case]; public health; public education; pensions).
But the post-Boomer generation with abysmal levels of historical knowledge, have no idea of the struggle it took to get to the stage we are now. When I taught in high school and at university, I used to ask my students in April why they were getting a holiday around 1 May. No one knew that it celebrated the truly significant breakthrough of the 8-8-8 working week.
As a left-oriented person, I am prepared to acknowledge that, while Keynesianism worked extremely well (for Roosevelt and Hitler and later post war governments, whether Tory or Labour), it had lost its puff in the early 1970s. This, I believe, was largely due to governments not being allowed by popular opinion to rein back expenditures that were appropriate during the recessions. I well remember working in one of the economic departments in Canberra in 1975 reading Cabinet briefings. Bill Hayden was one of the few who “got it”, warning his colleagues to ease up a little. Of course, the demise of Keynesianism coincided with the OPEC oil crisis to produce awful stagflation [Rex Connor had the right idea – get a couple of billion dollars and create oil from shale; mind you, this is before non-fossil fuels were possible).
Furthermore, as a leftie, I’m prepared to concede that a circuit breaker was needed. Reagan and Thatcher provided this. However, their disdain for the working class was matched by their shared avarice with the wealthy classes and their hatred of government providing the foundations of a humane society. Hence neo-liberalism for which we are still paying.
So, yes, history is important but not the sort that looks too closely at the works of dead white men, however noble they might have been. We need to be teaching our social history (including things like Australia “living off the sheep’s back” being extended to include “and slave labour”).
Unlike say physics or chemistry or paleontology, economics has an inevitably large normative component. How could it be otherwise, since it deals with who gets what, on what terms? An acquaintance with the history of the discipline is then essential to understanding what (often unstated) normative assumptions underlie the current discourse. This also provides a glimpse into economic regimes that do not fit the current models (ie most historical ones, many current ones and disregarded parts of our own economic machine).
Re Marx, he was trying to understand the profound transition he saw happening around him, from an order based on agriculture and rents to one based on industry. His own use of the terms 'productive' and 'unproductive' point to roles in the new system, for instance ('productive' means 'producing a money return over and above the capital invested', so household labour is in this sense 'unproductive' - you get clean dishes but no money). Given that the non-monetised portion of the economy is still around 35-45%, this is a useful distinction, even if the terms are unfortunate. His observations on the role of finance are acute, his insistence on power as a basic component of any regime is acknowledged as a gaping hole in current economics and, while the labour theory of value is unsound, it is at least a theory of value. AFAIK, the mainstream ignores the question entirely, concentrating instead on price - a different thing entirely.
If people don’t know the histories of their disciplines they don’t know how they developed conceptually and the historical geographical and cultural context and ideologies within which they developed. That means they can’t understand the as much about the limitations and virtues offered by the concepts in the discipline. In my view familiarity with Marx and the other earlier economists can only inform a richer understanding of economic behaviour. Back in the day comparative economic systems was taught and it’s a loss not understanding how non capitalist or pre capitalist systems work.
you used to be able to search flickr for creative commons imagery, there was almost always something usable.
Artists and art historians are expected to know something about the history of art criticism simply because criticism and theory and art production have all been strongly interactive, back to the renaissance at least. In many ways visual arts are a type of intellectual debate about the world that can be carried out both in imagery and discussion of imagery so they are facets of the same cultural activity but of course there is a school of thought whose contribution to the debate would be to argue this is not so.
So I asked my nearest English literature professor. She edited the Cambridge edition of "The History of Sir Charles Grandison", which may be a conflict of interest in this case? Anyway, she's happy to recommend Johnson's literary criticism as entertaining and thoughtful criticism of his peers.
Is that the same thing as continuing to a science that gradually uncovers universal truths? Probably not, but I can't see economics being that kind of endeavour either. The object of study is mutating too quickly.
At the risk of sounding like someone who has received the kind of shallow education one receives in a modern economics degree, I think the concept of opportunity cost is relevant here. It's easy to opine about what economists (or anyone else) should read if one assumes if they weren't reading Marx, Samuel Johnson or Aristotle they would be staring at a wall or playing inane computer games.
A more serious discussion would demand that a commentator specify what future economists should give up in order to read more Marx or Smith. Otherwise you end up piling an endless amount of reading onto your imaginary ideal economics student. I think it’s also worth noting that students aren’t what they used to be. When universities were elite institutions for the privileged or talented few, it might have been reasonable to ask students to extract nuggets of wisdom from the muddy stream of 18th century writing, but today they may struggle.
For undergraduate students, I’d prefer there was more time spent on economic history than the history of economic thought. I think it’s more useful both in terms of vocational application and helping students become better citizens. To make room for that, I’d like students to work less (by paying adequate benefits and fixing the housing crisis). I certainly didn’t feel there was much superfluous stuff in my degree.
Having said that, I get the sense this discussion is mostly about economists with PhDs, rather than those who only hold undergraduate degrees. I don’t have a PhD in economics, but I don’t get the sense there’s much fat to be trimmed in those programs. The technical demands are such that there’s very little space left to read old stuff that’s mostly wrong. The solution might be to stop teaching the technical stuff to those who don’t need it, but then where that happens (political economy, history of economic thought, economic history), students probably do read Marx and Smith.
On the other hand, if the argument is that students should add extra reading in the form of Marx and Smith, well then that would obviously make them better economists. So would reading literary fiction, philosophy, history or any number of other disciplines - that’s one of the wonderful things about economics.
"That’s because not many economists do Marxist/Marxian economics any more...."
For me this begs the questions 'why?' And 'should they?'.
This is off topic and I should probably do my own home work, but if you are still around JQ, could you point to any good sources on current relevance of Marx?
As I just wrote elsewhere “begs the question” is wrong, should be “prompts the question”. Heaps of people have written on the current relevance of Marx, including me
https://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/01/marxism-without-revolution-capital/
Yes, shouldn't be much begging or prompting needed. There is tons out there, was being lazy. Thanks for the link. Will need to look uo labour theory of value. If I want to read articles with a wokish warning I should be prepared to do my own research.
Since most people (I think) use the phrase "begs the question" in the way Cam uses it, it is surely now right. The major dictionaries, like Oxford and Cambridge, tell us they describe rather than prescribe what words and phrases mean, simply following actual usage. Hence the Cambridge dictionary now includes biological males within the definition of women to reflect current usage. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/15/us/cambridge-dictionary-woman-definition-trans-cec/index.html
Noah Smith has also written on this but his essay is very different from yours. Both essays are equally worth reading. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/should-economists-read-marx
My university background is social science. It was a long time ago. As I remember it, the Boer War had only just begun when I was an undergrad. I think Noah is right to be skeptical of the grand thinking of the Moskowitzs in the humanities and social sciences.
I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that if we listened too closely to these seemingly amiable professors in their endearingly unfashionable cardigans and thin rimmed spectacles, the result would be a repetition of the 20th century horror shows.
To quote Noah:
" Economists should read Marx, and they should read him with all of this history in mind. It’s a vivid reminder of how social science ideas, applied sweepingly and with maximal hubris to real-world politics and institutions, have the potential to do incredible harm. Marxism is perhaps the single greatest example of social-science malpractice that the human race has ever seen.
This should serve as a warning to economists — a reminder of why although narrow theories about auctions or randomized controlled trials of anti-poverty policies might seem like small potatoes, they’re not going to end with the skulls of thousands of children smashed against trees."
That is by far the biggest lesson Marx has to teach us (apart from his contribution to social science, which deserves one short paragraph in a sociology 101 textbook). This is why I'm a moderate centre leftist, not a revolutionary leftist.
What is the current economist’s response to the former distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” labour? It certainly still has popular appeal (“real jobs”, “a country that makes things”, “Golgafrincham B Ark” etc) and I can see Smith’s argument that one leads to capital production and the other doesn’t. Is it just that you can’t have one without the other so the distinction is not helpful?
The current popular fallacy isn't quite the same as Smith. But to give an example of the foolishness in both versions, building a hospital is "productive", but doctors and nurses are "unproductive"
Marrying your paid housekeeper is said to decrease productivity, while the Exxon Valdez oil spill increased productivity - would you include such events in your examples of economic foolishness?
Yes, I've written heaps about this, for example here
https://johnquiggin.com/2012/06/25/theres-more-to-good-policy-than-increasing-gdp/