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Race and Eugenics in the History of Economics: Some Contributions in JHET

Many voices have risen in Economics to condemn the recent expressions of racism and commit to rooting out all possible racist and discriminatory practices within the discipline. Not surprisingly, the links between economics and racism go far back in the discipline’s history. Acknowledging this history must be part of raising awareness and dealing with racism and any other form of discrimination today.

The Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET) has published several articles that analyze race and, especially, the role of the eugenics movement in the history of economics. In this virtual issue we bring together these articles with a twofold intent: first, as a contribution of historians of economics to grapple with this history, and, second, a contribution of JHET to promote the discussion and research tending to foster diversity in our own community.

The first in this set is Levy’s (2001) article on “How the Dismal Science got its Name:…” reconstructing “the consequences that follow from our ignorance fo the role of classical political economic theory in the anti-racial slavery coalition of Biblical literalists and utilitarians”, and “[t]he fact that [Carlyle’s characterization of economics as the ‘dismal science’] was for bringing forward facts which would make the black and white equals has somehow slipped out of memory” (p.31). Levy traces the origins of the term “dismal science” to the Carlyle-Mill debate about property. Whereas John Stuart Mill and “classical British economists, generally speaking, favored property in things and opposed property in people” (p. 6). A position that is directly in line with the idea, dating at least from Adam Smith, that behavioral differences among people can be attributed to “variation in incentives and histories” rather than to any intrinsic characteristic that could differentiate human nature (p.6).  

But this episode contrasts with the tight link between economics and eugenics. Peart and Levy (2003) argue that “early eugenic thinking emerged in direct opposition to the classical account of economic decision-making entailing homogeneity” (p.262). In this article we find how Eugenics changed early competition models to include intrinsically differences due to race and influence the policy recommendations economists advanced. Their research then developed in their 2005 book "The Vanity of the Philosopher":  From Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics

In a series of articles Fiorito and co-authors  (Fiorito 2013, Fiorito & Orsi (2016), Fiorito & Foresti 2018)  trace eugenics during the Progressive Era in the United States. Following Thomas C. Leonard’s seminal 2016 book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era  (reviewed in JHET by Cavalieri (2017), and in the History of Political Economy (HOPE) by Bateman (2018)), these articles retrace the connections of several figures in economics with eugenics. Albert Benedict Wolfe, President of the American Economic Association in 1943, who, among others, supported minimum wages but, as a way to eliminate inefficient workers from the labor markets, but did not, as other economists at the time, associate these workers with “women, immigrants, and blacks” (Fiorito 2013, p.450). John R. Commons, according to Fiorito & Orsi (2016) also supported minimum wage legislation but, in his case, to counter Jewish immigration. Chasse (2018) contests this portrayal of Commons as having a “broad and xenophobic framework”. Finally, Fiorito and Foresti (2018) analyze the work of another figure of the Progressive Era, but this time a socialist, James Medbery MacKaye, to show the influence of Eugenics across ideological boundaries.

Though not in the pages of JHET, but in another journal in the history of economics, HOPEPhillip Magness and James Harrigan (2020) recently discussed the importance of eugenic ideas beyond the US in the Progressive Era, pointing at an eugenic dimension in the intellectual dialogue that led to John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 article "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren". The authors argue that Keynes’s ideas parallel the utopian message in an obscure novel by H. G. Wells: they shared a view of "“scientific” ordering of society, and in particular a vision of the future that relied heavily upon proactive eugenic planning."

Race has certainly played a role in modeling economic theory and policy through its history and this set of articles show how. The problem nowadays could be associated with the hypothesis of the homogeneity of humans which, in the beginnings was in line with an ideal of equality among all, but nowadays makes all differences and all diversity invisible. Some progress is being made in the history of economics by making visible and telling the stories of individuals, especially women, who made brilliant contributions to economics. Interested readers will also find articles published in the JHET recovering these stories.

References in JHET (in chronological order):


On Women (in chronological order):