Putting Marxism In Perpective: Brief Interview with Economics Professor Evan Osborne

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Near the beginning of August an article headline caught my attention: Economics professor barred from teaching class critical of Marxism to student body.

The professor in question was Evan Osborne of Wright State University, who received his Ph.D. in economics from UCLA in 1993. The striking feature of the article for me was the fact that there are five pro-Marxist economics classes taught at Wright State University, and this would be the only one critical of Marxism. The innocuous title of his class would be "Marxism: A History of Theory and Practice."

As a result of the publicity generated by media coverage of the school's opposition to Prof. Osborne's proposed class, things have changed. He's now going to get the opportunity to teach the curriculum he developed. (EdNote: He had taught this course in the past but it was not available to undergraduates.) After seeing The College Fix article I reached out to Professor Osborne to get further clarifications on some of these ideological economics matters.

EN: What is the appeal of Marxist economic ideology?

Evan Osborne: Market economies produce a lot of inequality in outcomes. They also produce continual progress across time, but people who are bothered by inequality right now, can only think of it as a result of some unfair process, don't view the ability to be free to start a business, buy what you want to buy and not what the government tells you you must buy, and other commercial freedoms as part of freedom more generally are prone to be fans of Marxism.

EN: What are its biggest flaws?

EO: Marxism fundamentally gives a small handful of people the power to direct the fates of millions. The results, when compared to when people are free to run their own lives, are of course miserable. Morally that is a problem already, but empirically it leads to mass terror when plans don't work out as planners forecast, and frequently mass famine when the government's plans don't work out.

EN: How would you differentiate between Marxian and the Socialist economics espoused by Left-leaning Democrats like Bernie Sanders?

EO: You are right to ask that, because they are different. But they have a common feature of supposing that a political process is better than a decentralized, competitive market process in producing wealth, and increasing amounts of it overtime. People like Senator Sanders call themselves democratic socialists, but if the senator and people like him ever got the kind of power that governments in Britain, France or Sweden had in decades past, the results would be the same as they were in those countries. I do fear though that today's American left is far more demagogic than these examples.

EN: What were your biggest takeaways, regarding how we understand China economically, from having taught in China, both Taiwan and Mainland.

EO: I actually never taught in China, although I spent several months there as a visiting scholar. I saw enough to know that actually China is a fairly free economy now, although considerably more corrupt than Taiwan. Honestly, I think that the processes through which mainlanders get their clothing, food, and consumer goods generally is not that different from how it happens in Taiwan, although it is dramatically different from the circumstances in China in 1979. The dramatic increase in the average wealth in China, and the obvious signs of it in Chinese cities, is actually one of the great human rights victories of the postwar era, although clearly the Chinese government violates many human rights daily.

EN: We live in a broken world and there's no perfect economic system. What are Capitalism's biggest shortcomings?

EO: Capitalism makes some people very rich, and those people may be able to influence the government to limit their competition, making them harder to displace through the usual market process. If by "capitalism" you mean completely unregulated businesses, clearly many environmental problems would be generated.

EN: What is the role of incentives when it comes to economics and the creation of wealth?

EO: Irreplaceable.

EN: In January I read an article that said for the first time in human history half the world was middle class or above. That article attributed it to Capitalism. Would you say this was an accurate assumption?

EO: Yes.

EN: Do you have a blog or place where people can read more of your ideas?

EO: I don't have a blog or anything like that, although I have written three books, two of them academic and one textbook for my own students. They are all available through Amazon.

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List of unique or at least distinctive courses designed by Evan Osborne:
Economics of State and Society; Marxism: Theory and Practice; Adam Smith; Economics of Diversity; Financial and Economic Instability; The Great Depression; Globalization; Business and Society.

Related Links
Marxism: Theory and Practice (The curriculum Prof. Osborne developed.)
List of scholarly articles published by Prof. Osborne
Life Among the Academic Radicals
Books by Evan Osborne (at Amazon)