Adam Smith Lives!

Summer Institute -- Looking for good students!

This is to ask  for your help in identifying bright upperclass undergraduates or graduate students with an interest in the History of Economic Ideas.  The Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economic Thought, now in its 7th year, offers a week of lively discussion, unusual topics and good research.  Participation is free and open to all.  The institute will be held at George Mason University, July 10-15, 2006.  This year, thanks to the generosity of the History of Economics Society and George Mason University, we are pleased that we can support the participation of up to seven students with up to $500 each.  Please let your students know about this opportunity and have them email me within the next 3 weeks if they are interested in obtaining support.  If you know of any particularly good prospects, please email me so that I may contact them (speart@bw.edu).   

The Institute offers a forum for distinguished scholars and graduate students to present work in progress or more polished papers to a lively audience.  Past speakers include myself (!),  Brad Bateman, James Buchanan, Dave Colander, Dan Hammond, Samuel Hollander, M. Ali Khan, David Levy, Deirdre McCloskey, Phil Mirowski, Leon Montes, Warren Samuels, Eric Schliesser, Gordon Tullock, Anthony Waterman, and Roy Weintraub.

For more information about the SI, click on the button to the right.  Thanks.

Doingasyoulike

Continuing on the transformation theme:  in the nineteenth century, a series of attacks on political economy made the case of transformation (downwards --> devolution) as a consequence of (wrong) choices.  Perhaps the best example of this transformation message comes in the seemingly innocent tale by Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies:  A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby.  In it, a fairy tells Tom (the chimney sweep) and Ellie this story of the Doasyoulikes, who fail to work for a living:

and there were the remnant of the Doasyoulikes, doing as they liked, as before.They were too lazy to move away from the mountain; so they said, If it has blown up once, that is all the more reason that it should not blow up again. And they were few in number: but they only said, The more the merrier, but the fewer the better fare. However, that was not quite true; for all the flapdoodle-trees were killed by the volcano, and they had eaten all the roast pigs, who, of course, could not be expected to have little ones. So they had to live very hard, on nuts and roots which they scratched out of the ground with sticks. Some of them talked of sowing corn, as their ancestors used to do, before they came into the land of Readymade ; but they had forgotten how to make ploughs (they had forgotten even how to make Jews' harps  by this time), and had eaten all the seed-corn which they brought out of the land of Hardwork years since; and of course it was too much trouble to go away and find more. So they lived miserably on roots and nuts, and all the weakly little children had great stomachs, and then died.

“Why," said Tom, " they are growing no better than savages.”

“And look how ugly they are all getting,” said Ellie.

“Yes ; when people live on poor vegetables instead of roast beef and plum-pudding, their jaws grow large, and their lips grow coarse, like the poor Paddies who eat potatoes.”

Having chosen not to work, the Doasyoulikes first become "Irish".  In the next 500 years, they devolve more and lose the ability to reason and speak (which, as Adam Smith argued, are requisite for exchange).  Kingsley's readers would not miss the Man and Brother reference:

      And in the next five hundred years they were all dead and gone, by bad food and wild beasts and hunters; all except one tremendous old fellow with jaws like a jack who stood full seven feet high; and M. Du Chaillu came up to him, and shot him, as he stood roaring and thumping on his breast. And he remembered that his ancestors had once been men, and tried to say, “Am I not a man and a brother?” but had forgotten how to use his tongue; and then he had tried to call for a doctor, but he had forgotten the word for one.  So all he said was “Ubbobboo!” and died.

transformation and choice

Here is the transformation image I mentioned earlier -- late in the 19th century, the now ludicrous case was made by some that economic choices, the market, might cause a person to become less, to devolve. This Charles Bennett image has a woman who leaves her household to work (as a maid).  As a result, her "race" is transformerd.  It's from Shadow and Substance (my edition is -- Shadow and Substance by Charles H. Bennett and Robert B. Brough; London:  W. Kent & Co. 1860). You can see an online description here.  Though the case that market choices cause us to change "race" is patently silly, today, claims of hierarchy persist.

Slavery apology

The Church of England has voted to apologize to descendents of victims of the slave trade.  Read more about this here. 

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!):

____

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.