Maggie's Farm

Naturally it was pleasant for successful businessmen to believe that these were, in fact, the first principles of economics. But, one might ask, hadn't they learned in the classroom that economics is just a little more complex than that?

To this question there are two answers. The first is that mighty few of the tycoons of 1900 had ever studied economics. Take, for instance, eight of the most successful of all: John D. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, and Baker, whom we have just mentioned; and also J. Pierpont Morgan, William Rockefeller, James Stillman, and H. H. Rogers. Of these eight, only Morgan had had anything approaching what we today would call a college education; he had spent two years at the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he had pretty certainly not studied anything that we would now classify as economics. And it is doubtful if even in the prime of life many of these men, or of their innumerable rivals and imitators, had much truck with economic science, or thought of professors of economics as anything but absurdly impractical theorists. A man who had come up in the world liked to describe himself as a graduate of the School of Hard Knocks. Education was all right in its way, and you sent your son to college if you could, if only because it was a good place to make useful contacts with the right people; but these college professors knew nothing about business, which was a battlefield for hard-shelled fighters. And anyhow the principles laid down by Ben Franklin, and somewhat foolishly simplified for boys by Horatio Alger, were fundamentally sound.



At the turn of the century there were, however, several hundred thousand Americans who had gone to college. Of these, a somewhat smaller number had gone to institutions so up-to-date as to include economics in the curriculum. And a still smaller number had actually studied the subject. What had they been taught about economic life?