Dear Unknown Friends:

In this issue of TRO we publish the final section of Economics Is Diverse, by Eli Siegel. The talk is one in his great Goodbye Profit System series of lectures, begun in 1970. Economics Is Diverse was given in November of that year; and as we’ve been publishing it, I’ve been commenting on what Mr. Siegel was showing in the Goodbye Profit System series—because what he explained then is knowledge we need now.

In this final section of Economics Is Diverse, he uses a humorous work—very different from the sources he had quoted from earlier. Yet it too is a means of understanding economic history.

Here’s What Has Happened

As I have described: Mr. Siegel explained in the 1970s that history had reached the point at which economics based on contempt—on seeing people and events and the world’s possibilities in terms of how much money one could make from them—had fundamentally failed. To have the profit motive as the basis of an economy—to have as one’s impetus How much money can I make from you and him and her and that?—is something humanity more and more has seen as insulting and ugly. Men and women have felt, with anger, that this profit-driven economy has made their lives increasingly difficult rather than increasingly at ease; has added to their ill-nature rather than to their kindness and true self-expression.

The humorous book Mr. Siegel discusses in this section deals with graft in a large American city—with people’s not letting a little thing like the law get in their profitable way. The book’s humor is authentic. And there has been other—and greater—humor about the profit drive. This is so even as that profit drive has made for some of the largest, cruelest, yet everyday brutality in the world—including the brutality of child labor, sweatshops, poverty, lives made to waste away through long hours of ill-paid labor.

As an Introduction

As an introduction to this final section of his lecture, I am going to quote four maxims from Eli Siegel’s Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. And I’ll comment on them, a little, in relation to economics. Very few of this book’s nearly 800 maxims are about economics directly. But all the maxims in Damned Welcome—those tight yet flexible, surprising yet logical, vivid yet subtle musical sentences—have to do with the world and everyone’s self. And that, world and selves, is what all economics is about. —I’ll begin by quoting maxim 72, from part 1 of the book:

Art is a way of showing greater fairness to things than is customary.

In keeping with that statement: should the economy of a nation be more like art? Aesthetic Realism says, Definitely! What impels a real artist (usually without his or her knowing it) is: the way to be myself, take care of myself, is to do all I can to be just to this, to that, to the world other than me.

The purpose of an artist, Aesthetic Realism shows, is the purpose everyone was born for. It can be called liking ourselves through honestly liking the world. But that way of seeing has a competitor in us: contempt, the feeling we’ll be more through lessening, beating out, looking down on other things. What humanity is now hoping for is: Make economics be like art; have it be based on justice, not contempt!

What Is Money?

The next maxim I’ll quote is overtly about economics, maxim 386 of part 2:

Money is a way of getting a phase of another person’s life.

Whether we use cash, or a credit or debit card, or mobile wallet, it is money we’re spending when we purchase something. And Eli Siegel is the philosopher and economist who explained that whatever we buy—from a meal to the use of a streaming service—the thing we’ve bought exists because of the work, the thought, the actions of other people. It follows that we should use our money to value those people truly—to see them as real, to think about them fairly—indeed beautifully.

A Product Is Here

The next maxim I’ll quote is definitely about economics, and more. It’s maxim 10 of part 1:

Lettuce is looking for its best year next year.

What does it mean for lettuce (or any other product) to have its “best year”? That economic phrase is usually taken to mean that now the product will bring in more money than ever for certain persons. But if we take the word best really seriously, shouldn’t what’s “best” for lettuce—shouldn’t what we see lettuce itself as “looking for”—also include: a) that the proceeds from the lettuce go justly to all the people who had it grow and thrive?

And shouldn’t what’s “best” for lettuce take in too: b) enabling all people to enjoy lettuce, including—if they so desire—through eating it? (There are children who don’t know what lettuce is, because their parents are too poor to feed them salads. The really “best year” for lettuce will be the one in which that changes.)

We can say (and I believe it) that: c) the truly “best year” for lettuce would also be one in which the visual beauty of lettuce—its relation of delicacy-and-firmness-in-green—is valued by humanity. (About every variety of lettuce has that relation, each in a different way.)

Meanwhile, this maxim, charming and funny, is musical. Those three short eh sounds (in lettuce, best, next) seem to issue uncertainly, pleadingly, from the inner life of that delicate vegetable. Yet at the same time we’re hearing something that makes the vegetable seem substantial and strong too: it’s going for that big thing “its best year,” and bést yéar, as sound, has the solidity of two definite accented monosyllables.

Pretending & Hope

The last maxim I’ll quote is maxim 15 of part 1:

The radiant pretenses of people may be signs of what they are hoping for.

This maxim is about every aspect of life. For instance, a person greets enthusiastically somebody he doesn’t much care about. Could that pretense of enthusiasm be in any way a self-criticism—a sign that he deeply hopes to care more about people than he now does?

In economics there has been much pretense. For centuries, people have tried to act as though what they were doing in relation to business and money was kind, just, in behalf of humanity. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. But why, if one’s business purposes were not based on kindness, has one felt driven to act as if they were?

It’s because the structure of our human self is deeply ethical, and we can’t respect ourselves unless we feel we’re just. Further, we feel (and it’s true) that others can’t respect us unless they see us as just. So there has been pretense. Yet the pretense has never really convinced the pretender or others, because, while one may want to go along with a lie, the depths of oneself are not so easily fooled.

This maxim, like the ones I quoted earlier, is musical. The phrase “radiant pretenses” is comic: it is a concise, severe, two-word criticism; yet, as sound, it also sparkles, and spreads. And the maxim’s last two phrases, “whát they are” and “hóping for,” are classical dactyls. Each is firm in its opening accented syllable, which is followed by two unaccented syllables. We hear in those phrases firmness and yearning together: “whát they are hóping for.”

Today, the good will in economics that was much pretended about for centuries is demanding to become real. Humanity and history want an economy authentically based on ethics.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

There Are Acquisition & Self

By Eli Siegel

The last item I’ll speak about also has to do with economics and ethics, and if it seems to be more low-brow than the earlier material, I’m sorry, or not sorry—any way you want.

1932 was a big year in New York, because this was the time of the Seabury Inquiry, with its asking what really was going on in New York government. What was James J. Walker doing, and others? Pretty much forgot now but maybe the livest history of what went on in New York, is a work by a well-known reporter. He is Milton MacKaye and the book, published in 1934, is called The Tin Box Parade: A Handbook for Larceny.

As MacKaye writes about New York in the 1920s, the first person he deals with is one of the famous heads of Tammany*, Charles Murphy, who died on April 25, 1924. He had a funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and all his friends—or what others would call his henchmen and servants—were there. And MacKaye has an interesting image:

Silk hats glittered like black water in the somber procession to the church.

That’s not economics, but it’s a simile worth retaining.

MacKaye deals with some of the intense feeling about money that went on among people in the 1920s. He says even sober, learned people were affected by it:

Valedictorians from Bowdoin and Ohio Wesleyan equipped themselves with mistresses and wine cellars, lean young economists from the Wharton School of Finance collected hydroplanes and the works of the Marquis de Sade, and dozens of tired reformers assuaged their consciences by endowing Labor Colleges and Little Theaters and wondering, as they hefted their checkbooks, whether Evolution rather than Revolution wasn’t the surest way to reach the Goal….Indignation was a gauche and juvenile emotion; as a civilized realist one took things as one found them. Good government, for example, was a relative affair; a certain amount of larceny was to be expected.

Politics & Money

The way politics and money were together is described quite valuably by MacKaye. Here, he mentions various aspects of it:

Nothing was too big and nothing too small for the district leaders and wardheelers who made the city pay dividends during this era. The system was organized for profit from the top to the bottom….‌ Politicians in the upper stratum of power took their cut on such ambitious projects as the leasing of piers, the purchase of real estate for public improvements, the sale of building materials, the granting of franchises; it was almost impossible to engage in private business without in some manner rendering unto Caesar the things that weren’t Caesar’s. Appointments and nominations to the bench were often bought and sold, the quoted prices running from $10,000 for a magistrate’s gown up to $60,000 or $100,000 for a place in General Sessions or the Supreme Court. Pardons could be had for a price, and speakeasies and gambling games did not operate successfully without expensive protection. The rackets…produced handsome incomes for the politicians whose concessions they were.

In the next paragraph MacKaye mentions something that, early in New York, had been very significant—Weights and Measures:

While important politicians took the big profits the lesser fry collected the small change. Building inspectors accepted a ten-spot here and a ten-spot there to overlook illegal kitchenettes and violations of the fire laws, [and] inspectors for the Bureau of Weights and Measures earned pocket money by approving the short-weight scales of hard-working grocers.

I’m presenting something that has to be considered. It does concern what can be called the fate-in-history of the profit system. After all, businessmen didn’t yield to that arrangement for nothing.

MacKaye says this about judges and magistrates:

Political considerations outweighed judicial qualifications, and some of the most snide club-house lawyers on record were rewarded with gown and gavel for their loyalty.

That is a taking phrase, “gown and gavel.”

There is a description of the way the Tammany people changed: with their increased education, there was more dignity in their illegal behavior. MacKaye says:

Once upon a time grafters had been only a step above safe-blowers in the social scale; under the beneficent influence of book learning and scholarship they found themselves stealing as politely as investment bankers and oil magnates, and with equal aplomb. The new methods were satisfying; the profits were greater, dignity was preserved, and the risk was negligible.

Well, this is newspaper writing; but still, there’s something there. How bribery went on, the delicacy with which it went on: that was something studied.

There Was Klein’s

MacKaye has a chapter, “Tycoon of Union Square,” given to the founder of Klein’s department store. He’s presented as an interesting person.

MacKaye describes some of the purchasing at Klein’s:

On a Saturday the multitudes there make a Times Square rush-hour seem as lonely as a cloud….Every customer must thumb through the racks, grab what she wanted before the woman behind her did, and then carry her prize off to the dressing-rooms.

Samuel Klein is described as a person who felt, as people in business often have, what persons were looking for.

This is about Klein himself:

His greatest assets were a pocketful of cash and the nose of a terrier for manufacturers in trouble.

Many persons still read the announcements of bankruptcy sales. They know they can pick up something there.

He knew goods, and he knew workmanship, and he could locate infallibly the firms which were about to close their doors. At the last minute before the sheriff came, Klein, his stocky shoulders hunched in an old brown coat, would appear with five hundred dollars in cash to buy the two-thousand-dollar stock on hand. He was hard-boiled, and there were no codes in those days; business was business. The bargain he drove with a strong whip he passed on to his customers.

There are some happenings told of. This is about shoplifting:

The kleptomaniac wife of a prominent man, for example, pilfered from most of the 5th Avenue shops and got away with it, even when apprehended, because of her husband’s influence. She was caught at Klein’s and sent away to the Welfare Island reformatory for three days in spite of everything her husband could do.

Further, a description of the manner of Klein:

Klein’s tough ways with confirmed criminals were offset at times by a rich vein of understanding and tolerance where first-offenders were concerned, but he hated to have stories of his leniency get about. He thought it was bad for business. Usually he called in a representative of the Girls’ Service League or some other welfare agency when his detectives collared a first-offender….Often the matter ended up by the merchant presenting an outfit of clothing to the guilty girl together with a self-conscious admonition to go and sin no more.

Still, Economics & Ethics

There’s a story here about a woman, Annie Mathews, who was a member of Tammany. She worked as Register of New York County; that is, she took care of information about old properties and new owners. MacKaye tells how, as an invited speaker at the New School for Social Research, she responded to the accusation that judges had to pay off the politicians who enabled them to be appointed. People gasped at what she said— because she was giving it away. Here is part of the description:

“A vacancy arises for a judge’s position,” she said. “The district leader gets a chance to recommend a man for a place that pays $25,000 a year for fourteen years.”…She turned and faced her listeners with a pleading smile and a dramatic man-to-man gesture.

“If somebody offered you a thing like that,” she demanded, “wouldn’t you say, ‘Thank you’? Wouldn’t you leave him a present?”

This book has to do with economics and the history of ethics, and is part of the world picture. The book is about some of the ways New York was—and New York has been a most piquant and salient example of world history.

A world like this presents an opinion; and one opinion it has presented is, “I’m uncomfortable with the profit system.” Its discomfort came to a head this year.