“The more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for.”
–Norman Vincent Peale
Here’s a Thanksgiving message from my 2001 book, The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey, from a chapter titled “The Joy of Capitalism.”
I pointed out in Chapter 1 that British author Thomas Carlyle called economics “the dismal science” because the free-market economists around him were strongly opposed to slavery. For me, economics is the joyous science. I started off believing in economic freedom (sometimes called capitalism) as a moral imperative, as something that should exist because it is the only system in which people deal with each other on the basis of choice rather than on the basis of force. But the more I learned about economics, the more I saw that economic freedom was also enormously practical, that it delivered the goods better than any other system, and not just better, but incredibly better.
Capitalism’s incredible productivity wasn’t so easy for me to appreciate when I was in my teens and my early 20s. This was so for two reasons. First, starting at age 16, I was on my own financially and lived on a shoestring budget until I got my first full-time academic job as an assistant professor at age 24. Second, and more important, I was incredibly ignorant of economic history. Most of the history I learned in school was of the “who fought what war when and for what four reasons” variety. I learned very little about the day-to-day lives of ordinary people centuries ago.
In the last 20 years, though, I have found it easier and easier to appreciate capitalism. That’s in part because my income, adjusted for inflation, has risen a lot. But it’s also because the awesome technological revolution that has been going on around us has increased virtually everyone’s real income–even those people whose incomes, adjusted for the government’s faulty inflation measure, have been stagnant.
Think of what we can do nowadays, even those of us with modest incomes. If we miss a movie when it’s in the theatres, we don’t have to wait, the way we used to, until either it comes around again (unlikely) or is shown, years later, on TV, interrupted by ads and missing some of the best parts courtesy of network “censors.” Instead, we can see the uncut version at our convenience on a video recorder [DRH note: remember that I wrote this in 2001] that costs less than the earnings from three days of work at the minimum wage. We can rent the movie for a price that is often less than half of what we would have had to pay to see it on the big screen. I know we often take this for granted. One of the joys of capitalism is that we can take its awesome productivity for granted. But it’s good, every once in a while, to have some wonder about the many things that are wonderful. A lot of “wonder robbers” out there think it’s not “cool” to have wonder. But don’t ever let anyone rob you of your sense of wonder. If you’ve already lost it, here’s your chance to reclaim it.
Happy Thanksgiving to you all.
I wrote this as a blog post in 2015.
My daughter arrived home from San Francisco this morning and we had a nice Thanksgiving dinner in the early afternoon. At the start of the meal, she suggested that we each say 3 things we’re thankful for. I went first. The first 2 were easy: I’m thankful for her and my wife. I pondered slightly before naming the third. Then I said, “For all this country’s faults–and there are many–I’m thankful for living in the United States.” It’s still one of the freest and most dynamic countries in the world.
Addendum: Emma Camp gives thanks for American grocery stores.
If I had one chance to show a medieval peasant the glories of the modern world, I wouldn’t take them to a space launch or a science lab. I would take them to a grocery store.
What more could you want to awe the medieval imagination? Ginormous, GMO’d strawberries in January? Check. Fifty different kinds of soup? Check. Whatever the hell this is? You bet. American grocery stores don’t just have a shocking abundance of food; they have a variety almost completely unknown to humanity.
Our grocery stores are famously astounding to outsiders—from Mikhail Gorbachev to Venezuelan immigrants like Daniel Di Martino, our grocery stores showcase the bounties available in a free society with free markets.
READER COMMENTS
Billt
Nov 23 2023 at 11:08pm
“For all this country’s faults–and there are many” Why do you feel the need to insert this phrase regarding the United States but not elsewhere. If your wife is anything like mine, she has plenty of faults (as do I). Yet neither of us would insert a similar phrase before stating our thanks for our wives.
It seems strange to denigrate a country that people will literally die to get into.
David Henderson
Nov 23 2023 at 11:56pm
You ask:
I thought the answer would be obvious but apparently it’s not obvious to you. Given that it’s one of the freest and most dynamic in the world, that would suggest that it has fewer faults than most other countries.
You write:
It doesn’t to me. People wanting to get into this country will compare it to the countries they’re leaving. It’s obvious to me that this country is so much better than Venezuela and Cuba, to name two countries that people are risking dying to leave.
I have a question for you:
Do you ever make choices, think you made a good choice, and see that the thing you chose has faults?
Mark Barbieri
Nov 24 2023 at 9:02am
This site is on my list of things that I’m thankful for. Great information provided for free. Thanks.
David Henderson
Nov 24 2023 at 9:37am
Thanks, Mark.
Monte
Nov 24 2023 at 1:21pm
I hadn’t heard this term, but I like it. I refer to these types as energy vampires.
I’m thankful for a great many things, but what tops my list (and is so easy to take for granted) is American informality. Most of us respect one another regardless of what station in life we occupy. Arrogance is the surest path to failure (William Butler Yeats).
In that same vein, I’m thankful to Econlog for indulging our comments, no matter how eccentric they might sometimes be. Happy Black Friday!
David Henderson
Nov 24 2023 at 3:33pm
Thanks, Monte.
I think I’m the one who came up with the term. It sounds like the kind of term Ayn Rand would have come up with, but I couldn’t find it in her work. Energy vampires is good.
I like your point about American informality. I remember, when Rex Tillerson was chosen as Trump’s first secretary of state, reading an article (or blog post) somewhere about someone who had served on a jury with him. Here he was, CEO of ExxonMobil, but the juror said that you wouldn’t know it from his behavior.
I’m glad you’re thankful for EconLog. I’m thankful for commenters such as you, eccentric or otherwise.
James Anderson Merritt
Nov 27 2023 at 7:14pm
I had a good chuckle at that one. “Wonder Robber” should be one of the Kronies, or at least a major sidekick!
Comments are closed.