Abstract
According to Sir Arthur Salter, an early champion of laissez-faire economics, the narcissism of economic actors is quite sufficient for regulation:
The normal economic system works itself …. Over the whole range of human activity and human need, supply is adjusted to demand and production to consumption, by a process that is automatic, elastic and responsive.1
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Notes
J.A. Salter, Allied Shipping Control. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921, pp. 16–17. R. H. Coase traces the influence of Salter’s analysis on subsequent economists and the defense of the view that the economic system “works itself.” See The Firm, the Market and the Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 34.
Joan Robinson, The Economics of Imperfect Competition. London: Macmillan & Co., 1933; Frank H. Knight, On the History and Method of Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species. Introduction by Sir Julian Huxley. New York: New American Library, [1859] 1958.
This is what Douglass C. North calls “institutions.” See his Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Anthony de Jasay, Social Contract, Free Ride. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 16.
Aristotle, Politics. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. New York: Modern Library, 1943, p. 191.
William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers, [1852] 1963; Max Weber, “The Distribution of Power within the Political Community: Class, Status, Party,” pp. 926–940 in Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (eds.), Economy and Society, Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown in Transition. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936; Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Modern Library, 1899; C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956; Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers. New York: Free Press, 1982.
William Lloyd Warner, Yankee City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon, 1963.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society. Trans. Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Voll. Trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P Mayer. New York: Doubleday, [1836] 1969, p. 266.
Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 199–201.
See Stanley Lebergott, The Americans: An Economic Record. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984, pp. 69–73; Daniel J. Walkowitz, Worker City, Company Town. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978; David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity and the American City, 1840–1925. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Lee Soltow, The Wealth, Income and Social Class in Large Northern Cities of the United States in 1860, pp. 233–276 in James D. Smith (ed.), The Personal Distribution of Income and Wealth: Studies in Income and Wealth. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1975; Robert E. Gallman, “Trends in the Size Distribution of Wealth in the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 1–24 in Lee Soltow (ed.), Six Papers on the Size Distribution of Wealth and Income. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1969.
Clarence D. Long, Wages and Earnings in the United States, 1860–1890. Princeton: Princeton University Press and the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1960.
Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; also see Stephan Thermstrom, The Other Bostonians. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.
Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Melanie Archer, “Self-Employment and Occupational Structure in an Industrializing City,” Social Forces 69 (1991): 785–810.
Blumin, op. cit., p. 136.
Theodore Hershberg (ed.), Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982, p. 128.
Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.
Ibid., p. 99.
James MacGregor Burns, The Workshop of Democracy. New York: Vintage Press, 1985, pp. 119–126.
Trachtenberg, op. cit., p. 129.
John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990.
Norbert Elias, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989; Mary Ryan, “The American Parade: Representations of Nineteenth-Century Social Order,” pp. 131–153 in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900. New York: New York University Press, 1982.
Stanley Lebergott, op. cit., p. 436. For a discussion about the emerging middle class in work organizations, see also John McDermott, Corporate Society. Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 181–191.
Judith R. Blau, The Shape of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America. New York: Basic Books, 1988; Barry Bluestone, “The Great U-Turn Revisited: Economic Restructuring, Jobs, and the Redistribution of Earnings,” pp. 7–44 in John D. Kasarda (ed.), Jobs, Earnings, and Employment Growth Policies in the United States. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990.
Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. and Michael G. M. McGreary, “Conclusions,” pp. 253–270 in Lynn and McGreary (eds.), Inner-City Poverty in the United States. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1990.
Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor. New York: Random House, 1990, p. 20.
Katherine S. Newman, Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class. New York: Free Press, 1988, pp. 23–26.
“A Shifting Job Market Is Squeezing the Working Poor,” Business Week, March 21, 1988, p. 16.
Robert Kuttner, The Economic Illusion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984, p. 189.
Phillips, op. cit., p. 79.
Richard Butler and James B. McDonald, “Income Inequality in the United States,” in Ronald G. Ehrenberg (ed.), Research in Labor Economics. Vol. 8, Part A. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1986; Richard Sobel, The White Working Class. New York: Praeger, 1989; Lester C. Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Economic Change. New York: Basic Books, 1980.
Phillips, op. cit., p. 16.
Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1976.
William Julius Wilson, op. cit. The controversies concerning the term underclass are reviewed in Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989. Briefly, the basic argument deals with whether there is a “culture of poverty” that has been perpetuated by dependency, or whether urban poverty is the consequence of historical and economic conditions. Wilson takes the latter position, but understates, in my opinion, the role of racism. For an important account of the persistence of racism, see Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams (eds.), A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society. Washington, DC: Committee on the Status of Black Americans, National Academy Press, 1989, pp. 113–160.
Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are disproportionately represented among the homeless; see Peter H. Rossi, Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 122–125.
Warren D. St. James, NAACP. Smithtown, NY: Exposition Press, 1980, p. 32.
Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg, A Concise History of the American Republic. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 696.
Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie: Black and White Immigration since 1880. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
John D. Kasarda, “Urban Change and Minority Opportunities,” in Paul E. Peterson (ed.), The New Urban Reality. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1985.
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(1993). The Wherewithal of Social Class. In: Social Contracts and Economic Markets. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28187-2_7
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