The New Argument in Economics

From the author:

As the history of social theories shows, the pleaders and engineers of “social change” usually need a dichotomy, a “polarization” of social reality. Once it was proletariat and bourgeoisie, imperialist and colonial people, rural and urban areas, developed and underdeveloped; and now it is the private and the public sector. These semantic devices usually imply merely a preferred direction of change. “Social change,” so the proponents of the dichotomy insist, must transfer power, prestige, income, influence, expenditures, etc., from one to the other. Depending on the viewpoint of the observer, the transfer is inexorable and progressive, or reactionary and wicked.

The authors who have contributed to this volume tend to disagree perhaps, either on pragmatic or philosophical grounds, in regard to the exact balance between the private and the public sectors for any particular area of life. But they do share, it would seem, an abiding distrust of the notion that history, that social change, is a one-way street.