Why Jews Are Good with Money
This short book is not so much about the relationship between capitalism and the Jews as it is about ideas explaining the relationship between capitalism and the Jews. It is a work of intellectual history. The (apparently Jewish) author was educated at Brandeis and Columbia and is currently professor of history at the Catholic University of America. There is nothing sectarian about his take on the issues.
There are two main questions to be answered, or at least discussed. The first arises, as Muller says, because “the Jews have had a special relationship with capitalism, for they have been particularly good at it.” He goes on to add: “Not all of them, of course. But, whenever they have been allowed to compete on an equal legal footing, they have tended to do disproportionately well.” The obvious question is: Why?
The second question arises from what Muller describes as Milton Friedman’s paradox. In a 1972 lecture to the far-right Mont Pelerin Society (published in Encounter magazine 12 years later) Friedman argued that the Jews “owe an enormous debt to free enterprise and competitive capitalism,” but “for at least the past century the Jews have been consistently opposed to capitalism and have done much on an ideological level to undermine it.” The question, again, is: Why?
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Robert Solow is Institute Professor emeritus of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1987.
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