Debate on Race and Genetics at the History of Economics Society

At the HES list, a discussion has been running on the issue of race and genetics.  I won't review the positions laid out -- you can see it in the HES archives -- except to say that it was triggered by Leonard Carlson's review of Fogel's The Slavery Debates 1952-1990:  A Retrospective.  An attempt followed to make a case for genetically-determined superiority and inferiority.  It's been hard for me to read.  The discussion hasn't been as historical as I might have wished, and so I've written the following reply.  I'm posting it here because some of you may not subscribe to the HES list (but you should!):

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I've hesitated to reply to this thread, in part not wanting overly to promote the research that David Levy and I have spent a great deal of time and energy on these past 5 years.  But I feel compelled to respond for 2 reasons, first once more to try to make the case to the list that history matter.  Second and more substantially, I wish to point you to the awful history of this idea of "race", which, as Evelyn Forget argued, has been socially constructed.

In our book, The Vanity of the Philosopher, David Levy and I make the case that "race" is in fact so much a social construct, that we should think instead in terms of "hierarchy" and "equality".  Hence our subtitle is "From Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics".  Perhaps the most ludicrous example of how "race" is conflated with economic choices, comes in the image by Charles Bennett that has a woman who leaves the household (to enter the labour market), transformed into a negro.  The artist is making a point that, in the late nineteenth century, was not uncommon:  market transactions deform us.  Whether you are entirely happy with markets or not, the key point to take away is that "race" was supposedly studied "scientifically" in the nineteenth century by anthropologists, social scientists and biologists.  The texts are hard to read because they are so flagrantly "racist", making whatever "scientific" case the "scientist" held dear.  So, it was the Irish, women, Jews, former and existing slaves, the Red Indian, and, later, east Europeans, who were "scientifically" shown to be inferior.  All of this, with the supporting texts, is the subject of Vanity.  The very sad result is that the "science" fed directly into eugenics, with such reputable persons as Karl Pearson "demonstrating" the "inferiority" of Jewish immigrants into England.  Our chapter 5 in Vanity, "Statistical Prejudice:  From Eugenics to Immigration", shows how results can and have been manipulated to make the case for "inferiority".  I urge us all to learn from this awful history, to take these texts seriously, and to recognize that the incentives for showing "inferiority" are such that "inferiority" (or "superiority") can and will be found, when in fact it simply doesn't exist.