COMPARING THEORIES OF MILL & MARX

Comparing Theories of Mill & Marx

Comparing Theories of Mill & Marx

Introduction

Over the long term the processes of rapid economic growth seem to be strongly correlated with improvements in the prosperity and health of a society. Hence derives the commonplace notion that economic growth results in development. This essay argues that, contrary to this widely held opinion, economic growth entails critical challenges and threats to the health and welfare of the populations involved and does not, therefore, necessarily produce development. This paper discusses if Mill or Marx produce a theory better suited to "progress" or nort. It considers Mill's account of utility and its role in social change, and Marx's account of history and its role in social change.

Discussion

Since the 1940s economic and demographic historians, social scientists, and policymakers have broadly accepted that each national trajectory of sustained economic growth has always been attended by a "demographic transition," (. Waller 2004) a process in which a pronounced fall in national mortality levels (and also fertility levels) occurs as a result of the gains to national wealth. In fact the idea of a demographic transition, both as a theory and as a general historical model, has been subjected both to fundamental conceptual criticism and to empirical refutation. Important counter-examples have been uncovered, such as historic France with its fertility decline occurring before either rapid economic growth or mortality decline, and contemporary states, such as Kerala, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, and China, where mortality has declined in advance of rapid wealth creation. Although there has been significant dissent, a glib post-World War II consensus has remained largely unperturbed: that economic growth causes mortality decline, principally through an epidemiological transition - a decline of infectious and communicable diseases.

Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Robert Malthus, Alexander Hamilton (architect of the American Republic's successful protectionism for its infant industry against American competition), John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx premised their diverse ideas primarily upon their understanding of the American economy.

Within the terms of reference of this centuries-old debate, this essay concurs up to a point with Marx and Engels, in arguing that there is indeed something intrinsically dangerous and socially destabilizing in the wake of economic growth. However, it does not view the relationship between capital and labor as being purely antagonistic nor as being of overwhelming significance in determining the historical outcomes that are possible (though the relationship of "competitive interdependence" between capital and labor is certainly a condition of primary importance in market-oriented economic systems). This report focuses instead on the importance of the politics of the public health movement in determining historical outcomes. It is argued that Britain's historical evidence indicates that rapid economic change necessarily brings widespread and pervasive disruption. Of all the dimensions of disruption mentioned above, the most important in influencing possible health outcomes is the scale and nature of political disruption. For it is this that critically determines the capacity of the society, the state, its citizens, ...