During the month of March (2008) I lived social science. I devoted every spare time I had to thinking about the major social scientists and their contributions to their field of endeavor. I am now done with that task. However, I find myself wondering whether social science really is a science or a pseudo science? In this essay, I will try to answer my own question and if, perchance, similar questions exercise your mind you could benefit from my cogitations. To answer my question we first must have some clarity as to what is science?  What is science? During the…

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a German Jew who systematized socialism and tried to make the ideology a science worthy of academic study (his book, Das Capital has academic pretensions). Karl Marx and Frederic Engels collaborated in writing the Communist Manifesto (1848), a sort of Bible for Communist revolutionaries. Marx did not see himself as utopian but an utopian (social idealist) he was, for only such a person would disregard human nature and say: “from each according to  his abilities and to each according to his needs”. That is to say that all people should work together, each using his…

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) was a French writer whose writings come under the rubric of socialism, that is, social idealism. Proudhon is famous for saying that all property is theft. Proudhon chose to believe that everything in nature belong to all people and that any one who claims a part of it as his personal property has stolen it from the rest of us. Proudhon believed that what one produces is ones property. He agrees that the only legitimate justification for property is labor, but the individual’s labor. If I work for something directly that something is legitimately mine. But if…

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a British industrialist turned philanthropist and utopian socialist. Owen made money running factories and apparently took pity on the workers laboring in his factories and sought ways to ameliorate their plight. He came up with ideas on having workers work in a cooperative manner where they jointly owned the factories and jointly made management decisions on how to run the factories. He also sought ways to improve the workers living conditions and saw cooperative, communal living, as one way to go about this. Owen built communal communities where folk lived and worked together. He called his…

Francois Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837) is considered by many as one of the founders of the socialist movement. Actually, he is best characterized as a social idealist. The man saw the imperfect real world and did not like what he saw and used introspection to come up with how the world should be. His mind produced ideals for everything he saw and believed was imperfect. Alas, ideals are of the mind, are mentalistic and when tried in the real world the exigencies of the environment, space, time and social opposition alter them. Ideals never turn out as hoped when attempted…

Arthur Laffer (1940- ) is an American economist of the Chicago school; that is, he believes in the Laissez Faire economic system. His claim to fame is his teaching that governments obtain more revenue by growing business (supply side) so that they produce goods and services, sell them and the economy expands. He does not want governments to over tax the goose that lays the golden egg. He would prefer that governments did not tax corporations and businesses at all but since governments cannot exist without revenue from taxation, that corporate taxes be very minimal. This does not mean that…

Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was an American economic historian (his book on the economic history of the United States is considered a classic). Friedman appeared to be an ideologue for capitalism; his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, made the case that Capitalism is correlated with freedom; in fact, he seemed to believe that capitalism is the only economic system that can sustain freedom. Friedman devoted much of his academic career to making the argument that capitalism ought to be the preferred economic system of the countries of the world because it is, he believed, the only economic system capable of sustaining…

Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) was an Italian economist who did significant work on income distribution and individual choices. He demonstrated that in most economies a handful of the population, 20 percent of the population, seems to have as much as the other 80% of the population. (Actually the percentages have worsened, in the USA one percent of the population own as much as the rest of the population; CEOs of America’s top corporations make as much as all their other employees lumped together. In modern societies, wealth is concentrated in a few hands.) Basically, what Pareto contributed to economic discourse is…

Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) was a Moravian economist and political scientist.  His major contribution to economic discourse is his work on Business cycles (developed in his book, The Theory of Economic Development). Schumpeter talked about the absence of innovations and circular flow which ultimately leads to stagnation of economic activities (sort of like negative equilibrium) until the business entrepreneur enters the picture with his new ideas on how to do things and jump starts the economy. The entrepreneurial businesses disturb the equilibrium and generate business development in the economy. Each business cycle allegedly lasts for about fifty years before stagnation sets…