Dear Unknown Friends:
We begin to serialize here a lecture Eli Siegel gave in November 1970: Economics Is Diverse. It is one of his many Goodbye Profit System talks—a landmark series begun in May of that year. And what Mr. Siegel, as historian, explained then, the ensuing years have ratified. He showed that a way of economics based on contempt for people had reached the point in history at which it could no longer succeed as it had seemed to do in earlier years and centuries.
Aesthetic Realism is philosophy, and is not political. It is ethics, and it is aesthetics. What’s central to both ethics and aesthetics is described in this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
For example, big opposites in the life of everyone are freedom and that exactitude which is justice. We want to do as we please, but unless the freedom of doing what we please is also our being just to other things and people, the way we’re “free” will make us ashamed—and also mean—and also inefficient. That is true too about a way of economics. And Mr. Siegel showed that something called “free enterprise,” in order to be rightly free, and efficient, had to be justice too, good will too. He wrote: “Perhaps then we should change a well-known term to Free-and-Accurate Enterprise; or, perhaps, Free-and-Just Enterprise; or, even, Free-and-Beautiful Enterprise” (Hail, American Development, p. 131).
Always Human
In the lecture we’re now serializing, Mr. Siegel is giving evidence that economics itself is aesthetics too. He speaks of such opposites as the everyday and the mysterious, liberty and restraint. In this talk we are with some of the “technical” elements of economics—but these, as Mr. Siegel speaks of them, are not dry or intimidating but immensely interesting, clear, very close to one, and very human. Always, as Mr. Siegel spoke about economics, one felt the lives of human beings, including their hopes, and also their pain.
In his economics lectures, Mr. Siegel used wide-ranging evidence from history, literature, and the events of the time. He showed that the most important question for economics and humanity is What does a person deserve by being a person? And he showed that our economy would fare well only if people (including economists) were trying honestly to answer that question. This is so, more intensely than ever, today. And I’ll mention some of the situations of our present time which, in different ways, are insisting that we see our fellow humans as real—situations that make the matter of “What does a person deserve by being a person?” something one cannot get away from.
1) As to the first instance I’ll mention: I’m certainly not praising it—there’s human suffering in it. It is the matter of migrants: people trying, in large numbers, to enter the United States and also various European nations. The immediate answer to this situation may be very hard to find. But the situation itself—with real people, photographed, televised—does have one feel that one’s own life cannot be entirely dissevered from the hopes and troubles of people whom one saw as apart from oneself, or whom one didn’t think about at all.
This matter is forcing people to feel that persons whom they might want to ignore cannot be ignored entirely. Someone may be furious (even cruelly furious) about migrants coming into a land one sees as one’s own. Nevertheless, the sense that other people are more real than one had seen is present in some fashion. And seeing people as real is the beginning of justice to them—even as one may not want to think about justice.
Unions
2) The second instance I’ll mention is very different from the first, but the matter of “What does a person deserve by being a person?” is magnificently vivid in it. This instance is the many victories of unions in recent months—from autoworkers to screen actors. Strikes across the nation and the winning of them by unions, have been a saying: the work one does and the wealth it produces belong (to put it mildly) much more to the worker than various employers have wanted to admit. In 1970, Eli Siegel explained:
The most important thing in industry is the person who does the industry, which is the worker….Labor is the only source of wealth. There is no other source, except land, the raw material.
To the question “What does a person deserve by being a person?” one of the answers is: a person deserves to get what used to be called the fruits of one’s labor. That fact is being felt more and more in various ways throughout America.
In 2023—though not articulated with the clarity and beauty Eli Siegel gave it—the matter of what a person deserves walked the picket lines and ratified new union contracts. And as that happened, an American economy of “Free-and-Just Enterprise” was closer to being born.
This Too
3) The third instance I’ll give can seem very different from the first two. And it is different. But it, too, is about economics and ethics, and the fact that what is different from oneself is also needed by oneself. This instance is about the relation between China and the United States.
Those two nations, with the world’s two largest economies, have been seen as big economic rivals; and in a sense, that is certainly so. But it has also been seen that the two nations need each other, to trade with each other, to buy one another’s products.
In a 1970 lecture, Mr. Siegel explained: “Ethics is a force like electricity, steam, the atom—and will have its way.” Ethics as a force, working in the form of what has been called progress, has made the nations of the world become closer to each other. This has happened very much through technology, and through transportation that enables people to travel swiftly to nearly everywhere on our planet. The ability for production—including sophisticated production—to take place in multitudinous nations is an instance of progress. And again: progress is a form of ethics as a force in history.
So we have China—the once agricultural land that is now a giant producer of ever so many and diverse and needed things. (And just to be clear: I am not praising the Chinese government.) Then we have that other great producer, our dear United States. That despite being mighty competitors, these two nations are inevitably also trading partners who need each other—I see as an ethical fact.
Certainly, there is very much evil in the world. And Aesthetic Realism has shown that the source of human evil, cruelty, injustice, is contempt: “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” Contempt takes many forms, including prejudice in all its horrors. But also present now is an increasing sense of relation: you are real, and I have to do with you, am like you, in all our difference. If there is more sense of relatedness, that is in behalf of ethics. And a larger sense of ethics will affect every aspect of human life, including how money is made.
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education
Economics Is Diverse
By Eli Siegel
One of the purposes of this talk is to bring the two aspects of economics together. The first aspect is the obviousness, the ordinariness, the fact that economics is present every time we eat or buy anything. Then there is the other side: that no one in this world knows what is going on—no one knows just what money is doing in the various continents, let alone in the United States itself. Why should that be so, and what do the apparent and unapparent, the obvious and the unknown, have to do with each other? The unapparent aspect of economics includes what money is doing, what credit is doing, what inflation is, the state of the economy—mysterious things that are ever so around us but, like sunbeams that vanish very quickly, seem to change into something else.
I thought the best way, for now, to relate both aspects of economics would be to deal with a representative textbook rather closely, but one that has enough of the abstruse in it and enough of the customary to be representative of what people have met and what they may meet. There are quite a few books on economics I could have used. But there is one that I remember liking years ago: Principles and Problems of Economics, by Otho C. Ault and Ernest J. Eberling (1936). The essentials of economics have not changed over the years. They’ve only been stirred. Wars stirred them. And what’s happening now is certainly stirring economics. But the essentials have remained pretty much as they are. And this work is well written.
The way Aesthetic Realism sees economics as such, I think should be apparent as I go on with these talks. I don’t want to say swiftly that economics is aesthetics, and I hope people here don’t say that, unless you come to see it. The question is whether, using a basis that has been accepted, one can see that.
For Example, Credit & Debt
About everybody in the world, above the age of 3½, is a debtor and a creditor. That is, there are things which are owing to one, if it’s only the rest of the subscription to a magazine. Then, in some fashion or other, something is owing from one.
In business, you can’t avoid being both a creditor and debtor. Even if you go bankrupt, you have a few assets, and some of them are presumptive, which means there’s money coming to you that you haven’t gotten yet.
The history of debt and credit is a very big thing. It has to do with the meaning of the world, and quite clearly has to do with the problem of ethics: what are my rights and what are my responsibilities? My rights are things that are coming to me, which are very nice things. My responsibilities seem less nice. But the two are in everyone. And the fact that we have them at once is a sign that contrary things are mingled. We cannot say, This is the part of me that has the rights, and this is the part of me that has the responsibilities.
At the moment, in November 1970, there is much talk about the debt of the United States. It’s quite clear that the American government will be owing money to all kinds of people, including everybody who has a U.S. bond.
A question is, then, whether credit and debit, in the largest sense, are in an aesthetic relation. You don’t have to say yes. Tonight I’m not going to talk about the beauty of being both a debtor and a creditor, though I could.
What Economics Is
In their first chapter, Ault and Eberling tell what economics is. I once defined economics as the study of wealth and what happens to it. And there is the matter of wealth itself, which these writers say has never been acceptably defined. One definition I can give is: Wealth is the world thought of as being used. However, the word wealth has not yet been agreed upon. —A description of economics is given as follows by Ault and Eberling:
Its subject matter is commonly divided into the four fields of production, consumption, distribution, and exchange.
That’s pretty useful. As to wealth and production: some wealth is not produced by human beings, because a good deal of wealth is already there. Every coconut that wasn’t grown by a farmer is wealth. So is the rubber that used to grow wild. And there is quinine: some quinine was not grown in Peru—it was found there. But when wealth is produced, something is done to the material—even if it means that in order to sell flowers, you can’t sell them right there where they grow; you have to take them to the florist shop. So you produce the flowers by—poor things—tearing them away.
Production has a great deal to do with transportation. Production is the processing of wealth so it can be there, in a form people want.
Consumption is the most delightful aspect of economics. People consume gasoline, and they consume artworks. They consume each other somewhat—the phrase is I have a consuming love for you.
Distribution means that something has to get to the parties wanting it. There’s no reason to distribute English world almanacs, at this time, in certain parts of Asia. Distribution is a large term that includes the ethics of economics: who gets the wealth? But distribution also means what a newsboy used to do when he delivered papers.
The fourth phase of economics in the sentence I read is exchange. That you can exchange something for something else is an important matter. You can exchange a copy of the Kenyon Review for a comb, if you want to, or for various dimes. And exchange is what, as Shelley says, sea and sky and air do: they exchange the powers of one another.
Economics Is Related
When I saw this book first, I was taken by the fact that the authors related economics to the other social sciences. We have economics in relation to sociology—quite clearly it’s related to that—then to history, politics, law. It’s related to anthropology too. Something in common between the life studied in anthropology and what can be called the more complex life is that you have to make a living. Whether it means spearing fish or lending money, you have to make a living.
Ault and Eberling have this sentence about economics and law:
LAW. —Man is allowed much liberty and freedom in his relations with his fellow men although his actions are restrained within certain bounds or limits.
Law is about freedom and limitation, or about liberty and restraint. As soon as there’s a commission, people get the idea that a little restraint is going on, or will go on. The most famous commission at the moment is the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC. And that puts a limit on how you sell securities. Well, we have limitation and freedom, and these opposites are in economics. The way limitation and freedom are in the sciences and also in the arts is a very taking thing.
Another sentence about law:
In a large sense, law, common or statute, may be looked upon as the rules of the state which define man’s rights and duties as a citizen.
Common law can be considered as coming from the unconscious of man. That is, it was felt very early that it isn’t good to be stolen from, and it isn’t good to be hit with a hammer. And there are other things that were felt to be unjust. English common law is law that Parliament never passed, but which is seen as part of English law anyway, and much of it has been codified. Likewise in America, common law is law that Congress never passed; but it’s based on judicial rulings. Then there’s statute law, and statute law is conscious—it has definitely been passed by a body seen as having authority.
One of the things that had me feel the profit system is going out is this: the history of law in America—for definitely more than a hundred years, but you can say from the beginning—has been very much an attempt to make profit-making look just, to curtail it so that it seem more beautiful. And that is going on now. For instance, the ecology movement’s fight with pollution is against the use of the earth for profit-making. Ecology hated such profit-making ever since ecology was born.
The history of law will get into these talks, because my purpose is, beginning with economics as accepted, to show how the history of the world has evolved into something discernible in 1970. I’m trying to have perspective.
—Going on. The authors say:
The seeking of wealth is essential to the life of man, and all acquiring and spending of wealth should meet the approval of ethical conduct.
That phrase “meet the approval of ethical conduct” is a little awkward.
All wealth comes from the world. And we were all born without any. No person was ever born with anything that could be got at Woolworth’s. As Job said: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb.” So wealth is what you add to yourself. And every infant can be seen as a potential acquirer of wealth.
The authors say: “The seeking of wealth is essential to the life of man.” It is. We need something. If an infant didn’t get something that is wealth—if it’s only his mother’s milk—he soon wouldn’t be around. And an infant needs certain articles of clothing.
“All acquiring and spending of wealth should meet the approval of ethical conduct.” Quite so. Just what does that mean, though? And it’s been rather hard so far, because one thing about human nature is that it can prefer wealth to ethics.