“Straight thinking,” says George Leland Bach in his Economics: An Introduction to Analysis and Policy (New York: Prentice-Hall. 720 pp. $6.50), “is hard work.” And he continues, “Straight thinking in economics is especially hard.”

Since Professor Bach, a most undogmatic man, writes for thousands of students, his opinion about thinking is especially important. But even more important is his illustration of his own precepts in the thousand-and-one ways that must eventually come to the surface in a long book on the principles and practice of economics.

In an excellent chapter on the subject of straight thinking Bach canvasses the various fallacies that lead people astray in the practice of economic generalization. He shows how the makers of economic policy can go wrong by careless or shoddy inspection of the minor premise in a syllogism, or by confusing the “one” with the “many,” or by using colored words, or by uncritical dependence on analogy or post hoc, propter hoc reasoning. If only because he gives his students the tools with which to refute much that is in his own work, I would call Bach’s book one of the better of the new economics texts.

But it is “better” in a field that leaves much to be desired. And there are some fallacies which Bach does not help his students to spot.

Consider, for example, the fallacy of judging something by comparing it with an “average” composed of dissimilar elements. This particular fallacy crops up in Bach’s friendly inspection of the British Welfare State. He doesn’t think Britain has “stagnated” under its socialist experiments. “Although British total production and per capita productivity have risen much more slowly than in the United States,” he says, “they have grown since the war at something like the same rate as the average of other western European countries recovering from the war.”

The meaninglessness of such a statement must become obvious when one reflects on the fact that a west European “average” must include the Free Enterprise Germany of Adenauer, the experiments in state-owned production in France, the extreme socialism of Norway, the orthodox comeback policies followed in Belgium, and the “middle way” of the cooperatives in Denmark. The “average” could have been rendered more meaningless by the inclusion of Poland or Yugoslavia or Greece, which have also been recovering from the war.

Another trap into which Bach falls is that of the relativism that makes mock of principles. “Every nation,” he says, “has its own ideals . . . . Perhaps the Russian and the British economic systems look terrible to us; but if they’re doing all right in the eyes of Ivan Ivanovitch and John Bull, who’s to say they’re worse than ours? Maybe they’ve only worse by our standards.”

Such a statement goes pretty far towards saying that there can be no science of economics. But its shallowness is exposed when one considers that the performance of an economic system can be judged by its use of land, labor, capital, and imagination to satisfy as many wants as is possible under the circumstances imposed by the fact of natural scarcity. The truth is that the British and Russian systems are almost infinitely worse than the system followed in the United States by any economic standard. The British system has wasted tremendous energy that has gone into such things as betting on soccer games or into cultivating a scornful “marginal utility” view of that extra hour of work that is performed primarily for the tax collector’s benefit. As for the Russian system, it has merely killed several million peasants who preferred death to farming in collectives.

Are such phenomena merely “worse by our standards”? To ask such a question implies a judgment that idleness and even death can be considered economic ends worth pursuing. But to argue this way is to graft the Freudian death-wish onto the science of economics. Maybe the Russians and, to a lesser extent, the British have the death-wish. But if so, it should not be allowed to confuse American students who are being taught the elements of economic thought.

Like other economists of the modern breed, Bach devotes a great deal of space to the subject of the “GNP,” or the Gross National Product. No doubt it is both interesting and instructive to know just what payments for goods and services go to make up the grand total of national production. But after one has set down all the facts about the output of carrots, machine tools, maid service, movies, and Buicks and translated them into money terms, just what does one do with them?

The answer of the modern breed of economists is that one uses the GNP as a guide to policy decisions about a number of things, the idea being to keep the national income rising by at least 3 per cent each year. But the facts about last year’s production can hardly tell the government what to do about next year or the year after. For example, if a million housing starts are made in one year, does this mean that a million should be the base line for every year thereafter? If Detroit turns out 7 million automobiles in 1955, does this imply that a drop to 5 million for 1956 is to be avoided at all costs? And if both housing starts and automobile production fall off despite government manipulation of credit, does this mean that the government should go into the market for other things just to keep the total GNP up?

In the old view of things economic, if any single component of the GNP were to diminish in volume, it was taken as a sign that the people were “voting” for a change. It was recognized as both inevitable and good that the factors of production should move from buggies to automobiles. But under the new dispensation, worship of the GNP results in all sorts of attempts to keep production up to last year’s standards for houses and hams even after the telltale signals have been wigwagged that people have other—and better—uses for their money. Thus the emphasis on the GNP can and does result in bad distortions of the economy. It tends to rivet marginal farmers to marginal farms and to keep unnecessary contractors in business as political policy makers strive to maintain the mixture of the GNP “as before.”

Bach’s preoccupation with national income analysis cannot be set down as a fallacy per se. But if he had applied “straight thinking” to the subject of the GNP, he might have asked some pertinent questions about the value of the whole national income approach. A little dosage of “So what?” in the GNP chapter might have done a world of good.

Bach warns his students against “colored” words. But his fondness for Greek derivatives—“oligopoly”—colors his treatment of the problem of monopoly. The fact that “oligopolies,” such as Ford and Chrysler, quote their car prices is taken to mean that “pure” competition no longer prevails in the field of supplying transportation to individuals. But this is making “oligopoly” into a bogy that doesn’t exist. As Burton Crane says in his Getting and Spending: An Informal Guide to National Economics (New York: Harcourt, Brace. 303 pp. $4.95), “If the price isn’t right, you don’t buy or you buy something else.” If this year’s Detroit six-cylinder car is too costly, the answer may be an imported Volkswagen. A growing number of people are giving exactly that answer. Again as Mr. Crane says, “You aren’t forced to have an aluminum roof on your barn. There are other materials . . . . If ten cents seems a lot for a New York Saturday-afternoon paper, you can wait a couple of hours and get ten times as much news, erudition and culture for twenty-five cents in the Sunday New York Times . . .”

No doubt straight thinking in economics is especially hard. But it shouldn’t be beyond anyone who has had some slight acquaintance with logic. Bach gives an excellent exposition of the uses of syllogistic thinking in economics. But he hasn’t pondered William Graham Sumner’s feeling that you get as much out of a major premise as you put into it.