Emily Woltkamp

Political Science
August 6 2015
Compare and Contrast/Teach a Classmate
Group A:
Gordon Bigelow Let There be Markets
Orlando Patterson A Poverty of Mind
In Gordon Bigelows article, he talks about how evangelicals believed that God built a
logical and orderly universe and saw the new industrial economy as a fulfillment of God. He also
talks about how they believed that original sin was set up by economics. If someone was born
into a life that was poor, thats what they deserved for being sinful. In that case no one should
help out the poor. Later on, evangelicals lost their social power after the idea to close down
cornmeal farms to get the workers into manufacturing jobs boosting the economy. Instead this
decision led to the death of roughly a million people due to starvation. According to Bigelow
however, economics exist because human beings created them. By buying certain things, it
makes us who we are and we believe it will make us into something different. Bigelow finishes
his article by saying in order to understand economics we must understand the human race as a
whole.
In Pattersons article, the deep-seated dogma he talks about is this idea that rejection of
any explanation that invokes a groups cultural attributes and the relentless preference for relying
on structural factors. Education is very important and without it, blacks will turn towards other
things. Some misconceptions include that the reason for higher crime rates are due to lack of
education, that they end up having more children. or that poor schools are the reason for those
who are illiterate. Instead Patterson says we need to look at ones environment and multiple

generations back. Patterson calls a multidisciplinary approach in order to better understand why
the black youth act the way they do se we can fix the ideas/stigmas in the world.
Both articles agree that economics comes from the idea that people are trying to please
other people in the since of social approval. Human beings created economics and pass it down
from generation to generation.