| | Ed, thanks for your review (which was almost as long as the book). I read Looking Backward less than a year ago myself, so it is fresh with me. Your criticism is generally correct.
That said, it is somewhat unfair to use Austrian economics as a platform for your negatives. You just as well might have taken Bellamy's home voice projector to task for failing both older broadcast and newer fiber optics. I mean, no one in 1888 could be held responsible for errors committed in the absence of Von Mises's Human Action.
Much of what Bellamy attempted to critique and solve was admitted to even by Adam Smith. Life sucked for a factory worker only marginally less than it did for a serf. In Bellamy's day, the clergyman, doctor and lawyer faired about the same as they did in Smith's. What Bellamy - and Smith - did not and could not foresee was our society of information, service, and retail shop clerks. "Do you want fries with that?" would take another book to explain to the people of 1888.
In the topic thread here on Austrian Economics versus Objectivism, Dean Michael Gores questioned von Mises's views on creativity by pointing to his own job as a computer programmer. A what? ... and millions do this? "Oh, yes," I said. "Our community colleges - the tuition to which is subsidized for the national good by the federal government through special loans (which can never be repudiated, even by bankruptcy) - train millions of people every year to design websites for ecommerce." The Visitor asked what a website is...
You said, "If Bellamy were alive today and could see our socioeconomic conditions, he would still think he was correct and would argue that his utopia has been postponed but that it will still one day be a reality." Perhaps. Perhaps he would see our society as the fulfilment of his dream, or as a journey well down that road...
I suggest, also, that the punch card of his story is not so much like our debit card (granted that) but more like our credit card. The citizen of the time was granted a certain amount of consumption against future earnings. That is not so much like a debit card, and more like a credit card. That, too, suggests that Bellamy might not have been so displeased, were he brought to our world.
The wars and crimes of our time, however, would still challenge and perhaps falsify his theories. One of the reasons that I chose to pursue a degree in criminology is that it is crime seems to be the sine qua non problem of every society. Admittedly, however, Bellamy even touched on this, allowing that some individuals were unremediable, they were still allocated their share. And in fact, we devote about $60,000 per year to the care and feeding of each criminal, which may further underscore the success of Bellamy's predictions.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 9/26, 4:54pm)
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