A TEXTBOOK CASE

My copy of Robert L. Heilbroner’s “The Worldly Philosophers” is from 1961 -- no doubt I plucked it from the curbside discards of someone moving out of the neighborhood, or the deep bins outside the Davis Square Goodwill. Most of the text is fine, of course, because it deals with long-ago times and the roots of economic thought.

Toward the end, though, Heilbroner starts looking at the modern world (of 1961) and into the future, and suddenly the whole world is in Eastmancolor.

Assessing the strengths of the world’s economies, and where they’re headed, he writes that the United States is “closer than any community in history to attaining that bright goal seen by Keynes -- an economy without poverty. Indeed, we are almost there! For if the trend of the past continues into the future for another twenty years, we may within our own lifetimes usher into being the first economy of universal sufficiency the world has ever seen.”

Or maybe not.

“In that potential world of plenty,” he continues, “the gulf between rich and poor will likely have narrowed still further ... Partly this has been due to a great leap in the productivity of the working class; partly it has been due to a deliberate attempt to limit wealth at the top by policies of progressive taxation ... there can be no doubt that capitalism is handing out its rewards on a more egalitarian basis than ever before.”

Productivity is greater than ever, but the rewards somehow slipped away. And progressive taxation is seen as akin to eating your grandmother. Heilbroner, however, wouldn’t be the first person to appear foolish for putting too much faith in the idealism of his country.