LOSS OF LEADERSHIP^453
economy, smiting the heretics during the business crisis of the mid-
18808:
Freedom of trade may be regarded as a fundamental axiom of political
economy.... We may welcome bona fide investigation into the state of
trade, and the causes of our present depression, but we can no more expect
to have our opinions on free trade altered by such an investigation, than the
Mathematical Society would expect to have axioms of Euclid disproved
during the investigation of a complex problem.^27As a result, concerns about Britain's loss of industrial leadership were
rejected by many—including many economists—because they could be
and were used to challenge the sacred.
- An economy built on exports was losing its export markets. In re
sponse to labor unions and political pressure, the British government
subsidized and socialized the old standbys—iron and steel, cotton tex
tiles, coal. But no growth there. Just underemployed labor, encrusted
practices, and torturous decline.
As for new technologies and manufactures, well, jobs were opening
up in lesser lines. The Cambridge economic historian J. H. Clapham
pointed out that such a shift was normal: as branches close down, peo
ple have to leave them and move "to some expanding occupation, say,
chocolate-making or chorus singing." He said this in 1942; had he
been able to see the future, he would have spoken of the Beatles. The
problem with such specialties is that some of them are culture-specific
and do not travel well, at least not everywhere. Some people, for ex
ample, do not care for British chocolate—too milky, too sweet. But it
suits British taste, and children like it, and it sells in U.S. supermarkets.
De gustibus...
More important, these new lines may not have the same social and
economic value as older employments. That was the gravamen of the
Chamberlain argument. Not clear, says Barry Supple. "Is the produc
tion of cigarettes or tanks inherently more useful than the supply of
nurses or violinists?" he asks, loading the choices and inviting a "no"
answer. Other comparisons—say autos or computers vs. movies or sax
ophonists—might yield a "yes," though not to all.^28 Many of these
new products do not have the same payoff in skills, knowledge, and
high-wage jobs that high-tech items do. All of this raises a fundamen
tal question: are some activities more fruitful than others? Economists
are sharply divided on this, but the neoclassicists would insist that a dol
lar of hamburger is the same as a dollar of computer chip; or in Ricar-