Stephen Marglin

Background

Marglin grew up in a moderately left-wing Jewish family, and attended Hollywood High School in Los Angeles before moving to Harvard for his university studies in 1955. He earned membership of Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated summa cum laude (1959). He was then honored with a Harvard Junior Fellowship (1960–63), and was later a Guggenheim fellow.

Career

Marglin started out as a neoclassical economist, and was regarded, even while still an undergraduate, as the star of Harvard's economics department. Arthur Maass, the Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government, Emeritus, at Harvard, once remembered how Marglin, "when he was just a senior, wrote two of the best chapters in a book published by a team of graduate students and professors." His exceptional early contributions to neoclassical theory led to his becoming a tenured professor at Harvard in 1968, one of the youngest in the history of the university.

After the late 1960s, however, having been immersed in the events of that decade, and possessing the security of tenure and the psychological confidence of having made it to the top tier of mainstream economics, he followed the lead of people like Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and Arthur MacEwan by turning his back on orthodox economics and permitting his left-wing world view to express itself in his academic work. According to his former teacher, James Duesenberry, Marglin's career subsequently suffered as a result of his department and university taking a negative view of this transformation. Brad DeLong noted in a similar vein that the wider community of Ivy League economists also took a rather dim view of Marglin's post-tenure "deviancy", something that has "not been pretty" to observe.

Marglin has published in areas including the foundations of cost–benefit analysis, the workings of the labor-surplus economy, the organization of production, the relationship between the growth of income and its distribution, and the process of macroeconomic adjustment.

He wrote the widely discussed 1974 paper "What do bosses do?", followed by a series of others, in which he argued that

the most important innovation of the Industrial Revolution was not technological, but organizational: the linear hierarchy (master–journeyman–apprentice) typical of crafts in the premodern era was replaced by the pyramidal hierarchy (boss–foreman–worker) of the modern, capitalist enterprise. How did this happen? What hold did the capitalist have on the worker that permitted this new form of organization to thrive and eventually to dominate?

The conventional answer is superior efficiency, a better mousetrap. If the capitalist enterprise comes into existence because of its superior efficiency, then the boss can entice the worker by offering him more money than the worker could earn on his own. […] By contrast, the answer in "Bosses" is that the capitalist organization of work came into existence not because of superior efficiency but in consequence of the rent-seeking activities of the capitalist.

Elsewhere, Marglin argued: "The obstacles to liberating the workplace lie not only in the dominance of classes in whose interest it is to perpetuate the authoritarian workplace, but also in the dominance of the knowledge system that legitimizes the authority of the boss. In this perspective, to liberate the workplace it is hardly sufficient to overthrow capitalism. The commissar turned out to be an even more formidable obstacle to workers' control than the capitalist."

"What do bosses do?" came as part of Marglin's disagreement with fellow Harvard professor David Landes over aspects of the Industrial Revolution; years later, Landes wrote "What do bosses really do?" in reply.

Marglin is critical of those who explicitly set out to deny the normative aspect of economics—something that he believes "really started with the British economist Lionel Robbins"—arguing that opposing ideology is "a methodological error":

What is ideology, after all, but the unproved assumptions, beliefs, and values that must underlie any intellectual inquiry, or for that matter, any form of contemplation or action? […] As long as we deny the ideological component of our theories, we shall never transcend it.

Marglin's recent research has focused on the foundational assumptions of economics, concentrating on whether they represent universal human values or merely reflect western culture and history. The Dismal Science (2008) looks at, amongst other things, the manner in which community is steadily gutted as human relations are replaced with market transactions. He is currently finishing a book entitled Raising Keynes: A 21st-Century 'General Theory'.

In line with his view of economics teaching as extremely narrow and restrictive, he teaches, every other year, an alternative to Greg Mankiw's course in introductory economics.

Political and other views

A liberal in his earlier years, since the mid-1960s Marglin has been a Leftist, and has even been labelled a Marxist, though he describes himself as Marxist "only in the sense of not being anti-Marx." He identifies as a cultural Jew and a secular humanist, and maintains his practice of Judaism for the sense of community it provides.

Marglin was arrested in 1972 while demonstrating against the Vietnam War. He supported the Occupy movement, and contributed to a teach-in at Occupy Harvard.

Personal life

Marglin is married to cultural anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin. They have four children. Daughter Jessica Marglin is an assistant professor of Jewish Studies.