1. Why might government be less capable than the market to do good?
2. The text makes it look as if maximizing output is the goal of society.
a. Is maximizing output the goal of society?
b. If the country is a Christian country, should it be?
c. If not, what should it be? (Religious)
3. It has been said that “capitalism robs us of our sexuality and sells it back to us.”
a. Does sex sell?
b. Is sex used to sell goods from Land Rovers to tissue paper?
c. Who, if anyone, is exploited in the use of sex to sell commodities?
d. Are both men and women exploited in the same ways? (Feminist)
4. Thorstein Veblen wrote that vested interests are those seeking “something for nothing.” In chapter 2, you learned how technology shapes the economy’s production possibilities over time so that a country becomes increasingly good at producing a subset of goods.
a. In what ways have vested interests used their influence to bias the U.S. economy toward the production of military goods at the expense of consumer goods?
b. What are the short-term and long-term consequences of that bias for human welfare, in the United States and abroad? (Institutionalist)
5. Writing in 1776, Adam Smith was concerned with not only the profound effects of the division of labor on productivity as your textbook notes) but also its stultifying effect on the human capacity. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith warned that performing a few simple operations
over and over again could render any worker, no matter his or her native intelligence, “stupid and ignorant.”
a. Does the division of labor in today’s economy continue to have both these effects?
b. What are the policy implications? (Radical)
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