Historia Del Pensamiento Economico

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THE :MAKING OF ECONOMIC SOCIETY
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Robert L. Heilbroner and William Milberg

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Saddle River, New Jersey 07458

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ow that we have decided on our course of exploration, it would be convenient if we could immediately begin to examine our economic past. But not quite yet. Before wecan retrace economic history, we need to know what economic history is, and that, in turn, requires us to take a moment to clarify what we mean by economics and by the economic problem itself. The answer is not a complicated one. In its broadest sense,economics is the study of a process we find in all human societies-the process of providing for the material well-being of society. In its simplestterms, economics is the study of how humankind securesits daily bread. This hardly seemslike a particularly exciting subject for historical scrutiny. Indeed, when we look back over the pageant of what is usually called "history," the humble matter of bread hardly strikes the eye at all. Power and glory, faith and fanaticism, ideas and ideologies are the aspectsof the human chronicle that crowd thepagesof history books. If the simple quest for bread is a moving force in human destiny, it is well concealed behind what one philosopher has called "that history of international crime and massmurder which has been advertised as the history of mankind."! Yet, if mankind does not live by bread alone, it is obvious that it cannot live without bread. Like every other living thing, the human beingmust eat - the imperious first rule of continued existence.This first prerequisite is less to be taken for granted than at first appears,for the human organism is not in itself a highly efficient mechanism for survival. From each 100calories of food it consumes, can deliver only about it 20 calories of mechanical energy. On a decent diet, human beings can produce just about one horsepower-hour ofwork daily, and with that they must replenish their exhausted bodies.With what is left over, they are free to build a civilization. As a result, in many countries. the sheer continuity of human existence is far from assured.In the vast continents of Asia and Africa, in the Near East, even in some countries of South America, brute survival is the problem that stares humanity in the face. Millions ofhuman beings have died of starvation or malnutrition in our present era, as countless hundreds of millions have died over the long past.Whole nations are acutely aware of what it means to face hunger as a condition of ordinary life; it has been said, for example,that a peasant in Bangladesh,from the day he or she is born to the day he or she dies,may never know what it is to have a full stomach.In many of the so-called underdeveloped nations, the life span of the average person is less than half of ours. Not so many years ago, an Indian demographer made the chilling calculation that of 100 Asian and 100 American infants, more Americans would be alive at age 65 than Asians at age 5! The statistics, not of life but of premature death throughout most of the world, are overwhelming andcrushing.

lKarl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies,3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1957),ll, 270.

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CHAPTER 1 . The Economic Problem
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Thus,we can see that economichistory must begin with the crucial problem of survival and on how humankind hassolvedthat problem. For most Americans,this may make ec0nomics seemvery remote. Few of us are consciousof anything resemblinga life-or-death struggle for existence. That it might be possible for us to experienceseverewant, that we might ever know in our own bodies the pangsof hunger experiencedby an Indian villager or a...