Marglin started out as a neoclassical economist, and 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 theory 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 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 view of this change. Economist Brad DeLong noted 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 cost–benefit analysis, the workings of the labor-surplus economy, the organization of production, the relationship between the growth of income and its distribution, and the process of macroeconomic adjustment. He wrote the widely discussed 1971-1974 paper "What do bosses do?", first published in France by his friend André Gorz, followed by a series of others, in which he argued that Elsewhere, Marglin argued: "The obstacles to liberating the workplace lie not only in the dominance of classes in whose interest it is to perpetuate the authoritarian workplace, but also in the dominance of the knowledge system that legitimizes the authority of the boss. In this perspective, to liberate the workplace it is 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 part 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 set 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": Marglin's 21st-century research has included analysis of the foundational assumptions of economics, concentrating on whether they represent universal human values or merely "reflect western culture and history." The Dismal Science looks at, amongst other things, the manner in which community is steadily gutted as human relations are replaced with market transactions. In 2016, he published "Raising Keynes: A 21st-Century 'General Theory". In that "book length" essay, Marglin argued that Keynes’s central point about no self-regulating mechanism existing that could guarantee full employment has been distorted by "mainstream Keynesians" to mean that the problem lies with "the warts on the body of capitalism" and not with capitalism itself. Marglin posted that Keynes was unable to convince the economics profession that the problem is capitalism because Keynes lacked the mathematical tools to substantiate his vision, whereas "Raising Keynes" deploys tools unavailable to Keynes that lay the "foundations of a Keynesian macroeconomics for the 21st century." In line with his view of economics teaching as "extremely narrow and restrictive," he offers, every other year, an alternative to Greg Mankiw's course in introductory economics.
Partial publications list
Books
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Articles, papers, and chapters
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"Origines et fonction de la parcellisation des tâches. À quoi servent les patrons?", in André Gorz, Critique de la division du travail, Paris, Seuil, 1973, p. 41-89.
Political and other views
A liberal in his earlier years, since the mid-1960s Marglin has been a Leftist, and has even been labelled a Marxist, though he describes himself as Marxist "only in the sense of not being anti-Marx." He identifies as a cultural Jew and a secular humanist, and maintains his practice of Judaism for the sense of community it provides. Marglin was arrested in 1972 while demonstrating against the Vietnam War. He supported the Occupy movement, and contributed to a teach-in at Occupy Harvard.
