"On Luxury, Idleness and Industry"

by the Sandwichman

Having proposed the counter-narrative to Economic Man, I will now undertake to test it rigorously and exhaustively by examining it's presence in numerous and various texts. I begin with Benjamin Franklin because he is indelibly associated with the work ethic and Economic Man's incarnation as "self-made".


In addition to his star performance on the U.S. one-hundred dollar bill, for Max Weber, Franklin personified the "spirit of capitalism". One might say the myth of Franklin (if not the man himself) personified Economic Man. The Weber connection is crucial because it was Weber who argued, in "Marginal Utility Theory and 'the Fundamental Law of Psychophysics'," for the methodological canonization of Economic Man, an argument subsequently pursued by Lionel Robbins in his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science.

In a letter to Benjamin Vaughn, dated July 1784, Franklin wrote:

It has been computed by some political arithmetician, that, if every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful, that labour would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life: want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and pleasure.

What occasions then so much want and misery? It is the employment of men and women in works that produce neither the necessaries nor conveniences of life, who, with those who do nothing, consume necessaries raised by the laborious...

Look round the world, and see the millions employed in doing nothing, or in something that amounts to nothing, when the necessaries and conveniences of life are in question. What is the bulk of commerce, for which we fight and destroy each other but the toil of millions for superfluities, to the great hazard and loss of many lives by the constant dangers of the sea?...

A question may be asked; Could all these people now employed in raising, making, or carrying superfluities, be subsisted by raising necessaries? I think they might....

It is, however, some comfort to reflect that, upon the whole, the quantity of industry and prudence among mankind exceeds the quantity of idleness and folly....

One reflection more, and I will end this long rambling letter... Our eyes, though exceeding useful, ask, when reasonable, only the cheap assistance of spectacles, which could not much impair our finances. But the eyes of other people are the eyes that ruin us. If all but myself were blind, I should want neither fine clothes, fine houses, nor fine furniture.

This is easy! In the counter-narrative post, I wrote, "Persona parsimoniae has two different kinds of preferences -- organic needs and aspirations for social distinction. The means for satisfying those desires are limited absolutely, not just transiently, by physical laws and/or social institutions. And utility is mostly a function of habit [and emulation] rather than calculation."

In the passage cited above, Franklin distinguished between two kinds of wants or preferences -- for the "necessaries and conveniences of life" and for "superfluities" the desire for which arises from "the eyes of other people", that is to say from the desire for social distinction and emulation. With regard to physical and social limits, Franklin is optimistic. He speculates that people could be converted from producing superfluities to producing necessaries and conveniences and he is reassured that there is more industry and prudence among mankind than there is idleness and folly. Note that for Franklin "leisure and pleasure" contrast with "idleness and folly", which constitute the "toil of millions for superfluities".

Economic Man -- complete set of preferences, rationality, utility maximization and all -- might feel some ambivalence toward Franklin's scenario. One the one hand, the "toil of millions for superfluities" offers untold opportunities for profit. On the other hand, such idle toil occasions "so much want and misery," surely not the ideal picture of utility maximization for the population as a whole. Would that there were yet some other other hand -- invisible, perchance? -- to reconcile the desire for gain with the general well being!