Career

Marglin started out as a neoclassical economist, as well as was regarded, even while still an undergraduate, as the star of Harvard's economics department. Arthur Maass, the Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government, Emeritus, at Harvard, once remembered how Marglin, "when he was just a senior, wrote two of the best chapters in a book published by a team of graduate students and professors." His exceptional early contributions to neoclassical abstraction led to his becoming a tenured professor at Harvard in 1968, one of the youngest in the history of the university.

Since the late 1960s, Marglin, following the lead of people such(a) as Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Arthur MacEwan, rejected orthodox economics and began expressing dissenting views in his academic work. According to his former teacher, James Duesenberry, Marglin's career subsequently "suffered" because of his department and the university authorities in general taking a negative picture of this change. Economist Brad DeLong talked in a similar vein that the wider community of "Ivy League economists" took a rather dim view of Marglin's post-tenure "deviancy", something that has "not been pretty" to observe.

Marglin has published in areas including the foundations of macroeconomic adjustment.

He wrote the widely discussed 1971-1974 paper "What shit bosses do?", first published in France by his friend André Gorz, followed by a series of others, in which he argued that

the nearly important innovation of the Industrial Revolution was not technological, but organizational: the linear hierarchy master–journeyman–apprentice typical of crafts in the premodern era was replaced by the pyramidal hierarchy boss–foreman–worker of the modern, capitalist enterprise. How did this happen? What realise did the capitalist defecate on the worker that permitted this new form of agency to thrive and eventually to dominate?

The conventionalis superior efficiency, a better mousetrap. whether the capitalist enterprise comes into existence because of its superior efficiency, then the boss can entice the worker by offering him more money than the worker could earn on his own. [...] By contrast, thein "Bosses" is that the capitalist organization of work came into existence not because of superior efficiency but in consequence of the rent-seeking activities of the capitalist.

Elsewhere, Marglin argued: "The obstacles to liberating the workplace lie not only in the controls of classes in whose interest it is for to perpetuate the authoritarian workplace, but also in the control of the cognition system that legitimizes the authority of the boss. In this perspective, to liberate the workplace this is the hardly sufficient to overthrow capitalism. The commissar turned out to be an even more formidable obstacle to workers' control than the capitalist."

His highly cited and influential work "What do bosses do?" came as component of Marglin's disagreement with fellow Harvard professor David Landes over aspects of the Industrial Revolution; years later, Landes wrote "What do bosses really do?" in reply.

Marglin is critical of those who explicitly line out to deny the normative aspect of economics—something that he believes "really started with the British economist Lionel Robbins"—arguing that opposing ideology is "a methodological error":

What is ideology, after all, but the unproved assumptions, beliefs, and values that must underlie any intellectual inquiry, or for that matter, any form of contemplation or action? [...] As long as we deny the ideological component of our theories, we shall never transcend it.

Marglin's 21st-century research has specified analysis of the foundational assumptions of economics, concentrating on whether they symbolize universal human values or merely "reflect western culture and history." The Dismal Science 2008 looks at, amongst other things, the vintage in which community is steadily gutted as human relations are replaced with market transactions.

Marglin's latest book, Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First-Century General Theory, is scheduled for publication by Harvard University Press in June, 2021. Raising Keynes rescues the central insight of John Maynard Keynes's great work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, that capitalism left to its own devices has no mechanism for guaranteeing full employment, and that consequently the government must dispense a visible hand to work in tandem with the invisible hand of the market. "Rescues" because the mainstream view today is just what it was in the 1930s when Keynes wrote the General Theory: namely, that the problem is imperfections that impede the working of markets, warts on the body of capitalism rather than the body itself. Over the years the radical, heterodox Keynes was transformed by the mainstream into a super-sophisticated theorist of warts, specifically, a theorist of how capitalism can get stuck if wages are insufficiently flexible. The wart theory makes economists to accept some of Keynes's policy insights, in particular the limitations of monetary policy and the necessity for countercyclical fiscal policy in extremis, while rejecting the idea that there is all more serious flaw than the warts themselves. And, supremely important, restricting the role of government to alleviating the warts is a strictly short-term, limited, endeavor.

Raising Keynes shows how and why the orthodox reading of Keynes is wrong and substantiates Keynes's insight that, even if you strip capitalism of its warts, you still have a system which has no mechanism for reliably producing enough jobs. We need the government, not on an occasional, intermittent basis, but all the time, in the long run as well as in emergencies.

In line with his view of economics teaching as "extremely narrow and restrictive," for some years Marglin featured an pick to Greg Mankiw's course in introductory economics.