What My Friend, Eli Ginsberg, Had To Say About “Special Generalists”.

Posted on | February 23, 2014 | 2 Comments

Eli Ginzberg

Mike Magee

Recently I’ve been reflecting on the need for “special generalists”, people who possess unique skills and attributes, but also the wisdom and insight to place that knowledge within the context of history, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology.

These types of leaders not only know what needs to be done, but also why and how and when.

What we need is a liberal arts approach to advancing health and human potential; a broad and wise view of how best to integrate education, economics, health and imagination. Much of this has to do with intellectual curiousity and a willingness and openness to listen – a bias toward continuous learning.

Last week I shared with you the survey work of one sociologist, my son, Marc Porter Magee. His regional findings regarding public opinion toward public education and priority setting in this sector are revealing and relevant for other sectors, like health care, which are actively transforming.

This week, I would like to share with you the thoughts of another “special generalist”, my friend Eli Ginzberg, who passed away on December 14, 2002. Over a five year period, while I was working in New York City, we had the opportunity to share lunch, with some regularity, always in the Oak Room at the Plaza. He was generous with his time and advice, as I struggled to understand the complexities, politically and ethically, of participating in senior management leadership at Pfizer.

What I have chosen to share with you is a portion of Eli’s 1964 preface that he wrote for the 2nd edition publication of his 1930’s book on Adam Smith titled The House of Adam Smith. Here it is:

“The House of Adam Smith was conceived, written and published when I was a young man. Thirty years have passed since then. It would be foolhardy to venture a reassessment of an interpretation developed so many years ago. I could not possibly reconstruct the sense of excitement that I experienced as I read The Wealth of Nations for the first time. Nor could I reconstruct the intensity of my feeling as I saw the possibility of correcting a major historic misinterpretation and revealing Adam Smith for what he was, a liberal reformer, instead of, as so many wished him to be, a rigid defender of free enterprise.

Man and time are locked in an embrace from birth to death. I wrote this book during the most devastating depression in this nation’s history — a period which revealed once and for all the inappropriateness and futility of our nation’s relying exclusively on the institution of the free market to provide an adequate number of jobs for all who were able and willing to work. Although the Great Depression did not yield readily even to the massive government interference practiced under the aegis of the New Deal, the period since 1940 has dimmed almost into obscurity the havoc wrought, by that depression. No student of economics can ever isolate himself from the world in which he lives or the world in which he aspires to live. This is a further reason why I cannot deal anew with the materials which I analyzed in the early 1930’s.

What, then, can an author say about a book that he wrote many years ago when he was young and eager and when he had few doubts about what was wrong with the world, the economy, and economics. Perhaps he should say nothing and leave the new generation of readers to extract what they can from it. But perhaps he can say a little about the intervening years while leaving intact the integrity of his earlier effort. It is, after all, a scholarly imperative that in re-submitting an analysis one must consider whether new materials have come to light or new interpretations been proffered which require a reassessment of earlier analysis and conclusions…

Thirty years, in addition to making new materials available, have given me new insights. I would like to make more explicit than I was originally capable of doing the central focus of Smith’s approach.

In his Introduction to The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith stipulates that the key to a nation’s wealth is the ‘skill, dexterity and judgment with which its labour is generally applied…’ He then includes in his analysis not only the market forces that influence the demand and supply of labor, but also the circumstances that govern the development of skill, the institutions that facilitate or retard the proper distribution of the labor force, the manner in which the values that people hold help to determine the investments which they make in the training of their children, and a great many other aspects of the complex process involved in the development and utilization of human resources.

This face of Smith’s work had only limited influence until very recently. Even now it is only halfheartedly that economists have begun to broaden their focus from an exclusive preoccupation with commodities to one that includes human resources.

Another lead of Smith’s has likewise been largely ignored. While he concentrated in the first instance on illuminating the operations of the competitive market, this was his starting place, not his end. Before he finished his work he demonstrated how economic history and what today is called cultural anthropology could be used to illuminate important aspects of economic development; how individual and group psychology could help explain the processes of occupational choice and the determinants of work satisfaction; how political theory could be used to develop the agendas of government and the private sector; how education is related to skill acquisition and a sound polity; how a rampant nationalism could lead to a serious misallocation of valuable resources.

Smith was concerned with economic policy, but he made use of knowledge from every domain in the hope that he could better illuminate the processes of economic activity. He would have been at a loss to understand the present position of academic economists who have beaten a retreat into mathematical model building at the very time, as my friend and colleague, Arthur F. Burns, has emphasized that economic life and problems are suffused with political considerations.

But this generation of economists, which is slowly coming to recognize the wisdom that was Smith’s in concentrating on human resources, may also slowly come to appreciate that he was right in keeping economics closely bound to the other disciplines of history, psychology, ethics, and politics. Economics alone can never answer the question of what men want from the economic activities in which they engage; economics can not even tell us whether men should be encouraged to intensify their pursuit of material gain. Adam Smith was a moral philosopher before he became the founder of economics.

It is important that we restudy his teachings, for there is no future for an economics that sees itself as an end in itself.”

In Dr. Ginzberg’s classic 1984 New England Journal of Medicine article, “The Monetarization of Medical Care” , he made it clear that what was true for the field of economics was doubly true for Medicine and Health Care. All of the above are worth a close reading.

For Health Commentary, I’m Mike Magee

Comments

2 Responses to “What My Friend, Eli Ginsberg, Had To Say About “Special Generalists”.”

janice mancuso
February 28th, 2014 @ 4:43 pm

I always enjoy your essays, this one especially. Too bad the link for Dr. Ginzberg’s 1984 NEJM article does not link to the article itself. Would you be willing to share the PDF if you have it? Thank you.
Mike Magee
March 4th, 2014 @ 1:03 pm

Thanks, Janice! Try the link now.