The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

good barons 489human computers rushing about calculating what economists are pleasedto call “marginal utility.” Early in the resistance to a new and precisely mathematicalexpression of a Benthamite Max U, Thorstein Veblen, I have noted,attacked the notion that people were “lightning calculators.” But such precisionis not necessary to get the more important results of economics, andVeblen’s criticism falls flat. This could be proven easily with our massivecomputing capacity nowadays. If you were to simulate a toy economy of1,000 consumers and producers, you would find that even approximatemaximizing would put the economy very near to where it would be withsuper rationality.Interpreting a broad, contextual, rhetorical prudence as the same thing asa narrow, rationalist, first-order predicate logic of “rationality” has alwaysbeen a mistake. Plato committed it. Modern economists commit it with gusto.Their allies in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology delight in it. In areview of a book by one of the present-day committers of the mistake, StevenPinker, the philosopher Jerry Fodor notes that “as far as anyone knows, relevance,strength, simplicity, centrality and the like are properties, not of singlesentences, but of whole belief systems; and there’s no reason at all to supposethat such global properties of belief systems are syntactic. In my view, the cognitivescience that we’ve got so far has hardly begun to face this issue.” 2 Relevance,strength, simplicity, and so forth are therefore not reducible to a Turingmachine. That is, they are not the formal inferences of the rational theory ofmind, such as that “all bachelors are men; John is a bachelor; therefore [triumphantlyconcluded, in case we hadn’t already noticed it] John is a man.”The same could be said of metaphor, irony, narrative, jokes. They are localproperties of whole belief systems, not of single sentences.Allocation of goods to the use of the highest value is one result of profit. Theother is invention, which in a larger view is just another form of alertness inbuying (ideas) low and selling high. The American economy in the late nineteenthcentury was a deal-making, inventive place, with secure private propertyand reasonably honest courts in which deals could be repaired whenthings went wrong, and a society that accorded work very high prestige.National product per head therefore went up smartly 1870–1900, slower thanit did in the 1990s, for example, but very respectably for the time. If you lookinto the way Carnegie and Rockefeller actually got their fortunes, it turns out