Writing in “God and Man at Yale” (Regnery, 1951, 1986) William Buckley, then in his 20s, noted that Yale’s administration found it disturbing that so many undergraduates were becoming more concerned with job security than enterprise. William De Vane, dean of Yale College, had complained about the tendency.

Buckley attributed some of the trend to the fact that Yale’s economics department taught principally redistributionist Keynesian economics. Its professors were also increasingly turning to Keynesian texts such as Paul Samuelson’s then-new “Economics: An Introductory Analysis.” This was a big shift from the classical economics of the pre-war period. An excerpt from Buckley’s sarcastic analysis follows, with the italics in the text below in Buckley’s original:

What is the net effect of the textbook treatment of Elementary Economics on the thinking of the average young graduate of Yale and of the scores of colleges and universities that utilize one or more of the books in question?

The college graduate is a potential entrepreneur. If he decides to start a business of his own, he must bear in mind the warnings of the economists at Yale. The first of these is that to enter business is not a basic right. Whatever business he contemplates must be justified in terms of “social good.” He reasons that the social good, as seen through the price system, is determined by whether or not consumers will buy his products; and that seems reasonable, since if no one buys his products — if he isn’t therefore working for the social good — he’ll go broke anyway.

But that is not good enough for he must remember that money costs do not tally with social costs, and that therefore it is quite possible that the enterprise he is considering, regardless of its financial success, will militate against the social welfare. Since he already knows that private property and entrepreneurship, not being individual rights, must be justified in terms of the “social good,” and the social good cannot be affirmed by the existence of satisfied customers, he must proceed cautiously. For some planner, better equipped than the consumers to evaluate the social good, may order him to desist from his business, even though he may have invested time, thought and money in the enterprise.

Assuming however that he is an inveterate, dauntless gambler and decides to run all these risks and launch a business anyway, there are further considerations that his economists have enjoined him to keep in mind. There is the matter of profit. For reasons of justice and general social harmony he cannot allow the consumers to set his profits in accordance with their desire for his product and their satisfaction with it. This decision is for a third party to make, with an eye to something called the social good.

Those persons who are going to determine his profit are aware that absolute dollar income is not the only incentive to offer up to the entrepreneur. High relative income will do. That is, just so he makes more money than his neighbors before taxes, he will enjoy his prestige and continue to work hard, exploit his ingenuity and take risks. So he must determine, before he goes any further, whether or not this fits him. It may become a question of whether he will be satisfied with the knowledge that the money he might earn would be enough to buy a Cadillac before taxes. In other words, will he be satisfied with the knowledge that he earned enough to buy a Cadillac even though the government won’t actually let him go out and buy a Cadillac? Will the knowledge make his Ford any the less a Ford?

A major incentive might be that he wants to leave his children a sizeable nest-egg when he dies, perhaps so that they can enjoy opportunities he never had, perhaps so that they may enjoy the opportunities he himself had. But this is out of the question. The economists state unequivocally that there is no justification for sizable inheritances. Whatever incentive this sort of thing has provided for men must now be written off. Assuming then, that he is successful in the swing of middle age, his major concern will not be to maintain or increase his productivity but rather to call in the actuaries, to pore over statistics and attempt to calculate just exactly when he could stop working and die just about broke. Because it’s a cinch he is not going to work amass a sizable legacy for the government.

There is something else that as a civilized and educated human being he should realize; and that is that entrepreneurship is only dubiously humanitarian. He has read about the excesses of business, about the coldness of money costs, about the friction that arises out of unequal incomes. He must decide whether or not, if he decides to start a business, he can escape the consciousness which was so delicately refined at Yale.

So he finally decides to go down to Washington and get a job with some government bureau. Or maybe tie in with AT&T. (His first question to the personnel office of either place will be about pension provisions.)

And Dean De Vane was astounded, puzzled, and shocked in 1949 when he read that the graduating class seemed more interested in security than enterprise.