Adam Smith Lives!

Economics and Cartoons

Tomorrow, I head to the ASSAs.  I've come to like going to this conference, though the job market aspect of it always overwhelms me -- everyone trying to impress anyone who might pay attention.  I'll spend tomorrow afternoon at a 3 to 4 hour Executive meeting for the History of Economics Society.  I'm sorry to have to miss what will surely be a terrific anniversary session on Robbins' Essay on the Nature and Significance of economics tomorrow at 8 am.  Sue Howson, Roger Backhouse and Steve Medema, Gary Becker, and William Baumol will present.  I opted to stay home with my family for an extra day.  On Saturday, there are at least 2 sessions of interest for Historians of Economics. One is on Chicago economics in historical perspective.  Dan Hammon and Phil Mirowski will comment on papers by Levy and Peart (on George Stigler), Deirdre McCloskey, Eric Schliesser, and  Ross Emmett.  Then, in a session on teaching ideas for History of Economics, Levy and I will present a paper on the economist in cartoon.  This is a new project -- we hope to do a book-length treatment.  Here's a paragraph from the introduction:

Though they have rarely been studied by economists, cartoons and caricatures reflect a great deal of economic controversy.  There is, most obviously, the issue of whether an economist is portrayed favorably, or not, by the artist.  But the images below do a great deal more than simply criticize the economist; in addition, they serve as models opposed to the analysis of economists.  When the political economist and MP, John Bright, addresses Irish people who are caricatured as apes, the artist asserts that the Irish are incapable of self-government.

We suggest that the images, spanning over a 100 years in the popular press, are mostly concerned with attacking the economists' notion of scarcity.  You can see a (very) rough copy of the paper here: 

cartoons_assa.pdf .  I'll report on the reaction we get.

A reminder that the HES is hosting its first (!) ASSA reception tomorrow evening at 6!

The inscription on Mill's grave

Huei-Chun Su, a graduate student working on JS Mill at the University of Exeter, sent this to me today:

Standing in the grave yard and staring at Mill’s last words, I was really moved by this old man’s earnest love to his wife. For a moment, I couldn’t speak. (At the end, I took a picture with Mill with a very serious face. If you ask me why my face in the photo is completely different from the one I took in front of the map outside the grave yard. That’s why. Even if you are a fan of Mill, you won’t want to be excited, which makes you frivolous. You will only want to respect him and show your compassion for him.)

Su will present some of her research on Mill and Hayek at this year's Summer Institute.  She was a Young Scholar at the History of Economics Society annual meeting last year.

Here's her photo of the inscription:

Avignon, France

The grave of Harriet Taylor Mill and JS Mill in Avignon, France. 

Almost 200

20 May is approaching.  I'll have more to say about the importance of JS Mill.  I've noted before that he was a frequent target of the popular press, including Punch magazine.  Here, Mill is featured holding the cup of logic alongside the pugnacious Quaker, John Bright.

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.

Mill and the Ladies, or a historical look at the "feminist critique"

One of the liveliest debates I've seen continues to rage on the HES list.  For the most part, the focus is "Feminist critique" -- it began as a result of a post about anniversaries in which Becker's Economics of the Family was mentioned.  The issue, initially, was whether and how Becker's innovations then generated the Feminist Critique. But it's since moved on to encompass just what, precisely, the critique entails, as well such as less apparently related questions as whether economics is by-and-large characterized by utilitarian presumptions. 

Here's a post by Sumitra Shah, who began the "thorny thread":

Having started this thorny thread, I would like to send one last post on the subject: Becker did not design his economics for men or women. The criticism is not that it is ideological banter. He rigorously developed it based on the concept of the neoclassical economic agent, who is devoid of any socio-cultural characteristics. Hence his work misses the important dimensions that must be examined to come up with a meaningful theory of an institution such as the family. And he is an important economist, so the consequences of his work do matter. For feminist economists, the economic status of women is always a pressing concern; I am simply awed by their commitment.

Here's part of a posting by Nicholas J. Theocarakis: 

What is perhaps the most important aspect of the Beckerian project is the claim that the most important part of the different treatment of females in our economy and society is the result of rational decisions and that social norms and discriminatory perceptions do not matter.  ...  If social norms do not matter it is the objective characteristics of sex (e.g., fertility) that bring about different outcomes. Considerations of gender, i.e., the social construction of sex, according to this view, are irrelevant.  But perceptions of traits as "feminine" or "masculine" *are* important and this affects the acquisition of productivity-related traits during socialization and the assessment of individual productivity in the workplace.

I don't wish to comment on feminist economics.  Nor have I read the entire set of posts carefully.  You can find them here. But I do want to add that there is a broader historical dimension that has yet to be considered.  The treatment of "masculinity" and "feminity" -- from which Becker and others abstracted in this century -- has a rather dark side.  In the nineteenth century, political economists of such stature as J. S. Mill were "diminished" intellectually, by the claim that they were overly sentimental and "feminine", and therefore less-than-fully rational.  Their ideas were consequently also diminished in stature.  And when Mill defended the right of women to vote, he was criticized.  Two examples from the press are pasted in below. 

The point that sometimes gets lost as we think about cultural determinants of this and that is that, historically, the idea of difference was about "nature".  And, as David Levy and I have argued in The "Vanity of the Philosopher", "natural difference", historically, has meant "inferiority" (of gender, race, religion), with the awful policy results that followed -- paternalistic looking-after and denial of suffrage, direction, eugenics, slavery.  The return to homogeneity in this century denied these possibilities.

 

I used the Logic cartoon, by the way, for last year's Summer Institute t-shirt!  Am taking suggestions for this year's...!

I should add, as well, that a Judy cartoon -- reproduced in Mill's CW -- has Mill as a lady.  I don't have a scan of that one but will post it when I do.

Homogeneity in Fleeming Jenkin's Exchange Diagram

Time for another picture.  I've posted examples of how homo economicus was attacked visually.  Classical economists recognized the attacks and responded in print.  Supposing they knew of the visual attacks, racial or gendered caricatures of inferiority, was there a visual counter-response as well?  How do we show similarity visually anyway?  Our friend, Dan Hammond, asked that good question years ago when he hosted the HES annual meeting at Wake Forest University. 

Fleeming Jenkin came up with the diagram that answers Dan's question. It's from an explicit attempt to defend economists' theory of exchange from the critics, notably John Ruskin.  Here it is.  It's a drawing of barter exchange.  The participants are the same, there's no hierarchy, no one tells anyone what to consume or what to trade.  Very graceful.  David Levy and I like it so much we had Michigan use it on the cover of Vanity.

   

(From: Fleeming Jenkin, Papers, literary, scientific, &c., London, New York, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1887, volume 2, p. 150.)

Terrific, isn't it? 

IQ and social engineering --

Writing on Bryan Caplan's argument at Econlib about the significance of IQ for policy matters, Tyler Cowen notes

The historical correlation between IQ research and anti-egalitarian social engineering is not a complete accident. 

I have the same worry; much of the work that David Levy and I did for The Vanity of the Philosopher is about the anti-egalitarian (we call it hierarchical; sometimes we call it racist) social engineering that became so important in late in the 19th and early in the 20th centuries.  David Levy and I have an article in the European Journal of Political Economy on how prejudice infected statistical much of the statistical analysis that was used to support eugenic policy.  Here's the abstract.

We have so many eugenics images that it's hard to choose what to post.  This one's unusual and speaks volumes for later eugenic policy.  (Sir) Francis Galton, who founded eugenics (along with W. R. Greg), conducted early work on composite photography, trying to identify (say) a "criminal" or a "Jewish" type.  Here's an example:

Sympathy for the Irish

One example of many 19th century images of the Irish in Punch.  The open question is how successful these were in changing sympathy via perceptions of blameworthiness.

Sympathy -- the debate in visual terms

Here's the picture that in my mind best illustrates the opposition to unrestrained sympathy.  Suppose we all felt great sympathy for those in New Orleans and Biloxi, but someone had another idea in mind for how we should spend our resources.  They might spend time telling us -- and showing us -- how those folks didn't deserve our charity. They might say "charity begins at home" and criticize us for spending time and energy on folks who couldn't be civilized anyway, folks who perhaps couldn't adequately appreciate the subtleties of religion or art. 

Unbelievable as it may sound today, this line of argument was used in the nineteenth century.  Then, it was argued that it was a waste of time to send resources to Africans with whom people like Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens' Bleak House might sympathize.  Mrs. Jellyby is the object of Dickens' criticism.  In the picture above, the cover of Bleak House, she's got two African children in her care.  The nearby sign -- Exeter Hall -- is the center of the Anti Slavery movement. (For more on Dickens and illustrators, see this.)