Books for Americans

September 30, 1963

Strange are the ways of committees that select books. Take, for example, the first definitive list of books assembled for the White House Library as made public in mid-August. This was chosen under the leadership of James T. Babb, the librarian of Yale University. He had the assistance of what one report called “the best brains of the Library of Congress . . . and a host of distinguished scholars, librarians, publishers, and experts in many fields throughout the nation.” The authors had to be United States citizens except for creators of “a very few classics.” After more than a year of “agonizing” weighing and sifting, the selectors finally settled on 1,780 titles in almost 2,600 volumes.

What was the result? I will confine my comments to the 96 books on economics. The selection is haphazard so far as quality is concerned, and with a pronounced leaning to the left. One is glad to see in it John Bates Clark’s epoch-making work, The Distribution of Wealth (1890), and to find Irving Fisher represented by his admirable Theory of Interest. But after a handful of books, the puzzles begin.

SOME PUZZLES

Why, for example, is Frank Knight represented by The Ethics of Competition (a collection of miscellaneous essays brought together by former students), while by far his most important and original work, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, is omitted? Why is F.W. Taussig represented by his specialized “Tariff History of the United States,” while his Principles of Economics, the most famous, lucid, and long-lived college textbook ever published in America, is unmentioned? Why are not such outstanding free-enterprise economists as Frank A. Fetter, Benjamin M. Anderson, H.J. Davenport, and T.N. Carver not represented by a single book? And why, finally, is the greatest contribution to economic theory in the present generation, Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action, simply left out?

There are plenty of anti-capitalist books on the list. Emerson P. Schmidt, chief economist of the United States Chamber of Commerce, has pointed out that books supporting the inflationist-controllist philosophy of the late Lord Keynes outnumber the Keynes opponents three to one. J.K. Galbraith, with his pro-bureaucratic tax-and-spend philosophy, is represented by no fewer than three books. The list is loaded with many a dull, pedantic compilation, and some pure junk.

AN INSPIRING STORY

But there are still greater puzzles. The American Booksellers Association, in collaboration with Robert Kennedy, the U.S. Information Agency, and the International White House Libraries Project, has assembled about 100 books to be presented to each of 100 heads of state. The declared purpose is “to help tell the story of the American way of life to the people of one hundred nations in all parts of the world.”

Yet one looks in vain for a single book on the list that does tell the inspiring story of American industry and American enterprise. The compilers had as possible choices John Chamberlain’s The Enterprising Americans, which tells this fascinating history in both human and technical terms, and H.F. Williamson’s Growth of the American Economy and J.W. Oliver’s History of American Technology.

Instead of complaining of bad choices, it is a much more grateful task to recommend good books that have not yet received the attention they deserve. I have been meaning for a number of weeks to write about two economics books that appeared earlier this year. The first is a primer, Essentials of Economics (Van Nostrand, $4), by a Mexican author, the late Faustino Ballvé. It is an admirable introduction, brief, simple, authoritative, and lively. The second is Economics of the Free Society, by Wilhelm Röpke (Regnery, $4.95), which, though it occasionally concedes too much to Keynesian theories for my taste, is on the whole, because of its humanity, erudition, penetration, and its felicitous and luminous exposition, the most satisfactory intermediate and medium length text available.