Adam Smith Lives!

Eugenics resurfaces

David Levy and I recently wrote this in the wake of James Watson's recent resignation:

Watson’s remarks call to mind debates in the 19th Century over Ireland and the West Indies. There, too, the debate centered on the seemingly simple question of whether the Irish (or the former slaves in Jamaica) were as intelligent as the English. In “What is to be Done with Ireland” and other articles, the philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill argued that the Irish were inherently no different from the English. The soon-to-be forgotten co-founder of eugenics, W. R. Greg, argued that the Irish were inherently different, “idiosyncratic.” For Greg, different meant inferior.

 

On the policy side, the debate fits with Watson’s statement as well — if the Irish were inferior to the English, then English social and economic policy wouldn’t work there. Something else had to be devised.

 

Eugenics was one answer that gained currency for well over a century. Not surprisingly, Watson has also come out in favor of eugenics.

Though we don't say this in the article (see the link below), it is interesting to note that Watson's reputation apparently survived his earlier remarks on eugenics. 

You can see the full article from the Providence Journal Bulletin, here.

"Vanity" at EconLog -- Analytical Egalitarianism Baffles Bryan Caplan

Bryan Caplan has a series of blogs in which he attacks Levy and Peart on analytical egalitarianism.  Caplan's main point is that people in fact differ and Levy and Peart are wrong because they fail to recognize this.  Read his argument here.  We use the opportunity to try to summarize our position on analytical egalitarianism.

As we defend it, analytical egalitarianism [AE]  is a claim about model construction. There are a class of objections to AE which presume the modeler is guided only by the desire for the truth. These are variations on the theme that

        “E isn’t true so AE can be rejected.”

We challenge this inference because we don’t believe the philosopher is guided only by the public good of truth.  Without AE, we wonder whether truth-seeking is incentive compatible.

Obviously, we are indebted to the early work in public choice which applied the homogeneity insight to those in politics: if selfish agency is assumed in markets, then selfish behavior ought to be assumed in politics.  If, conversely, selfishness is not presumed in markets, we ought not to presume it in politics.

Suppose we call this motivational homogeneity.  The step we take that others haven’t (yet) taken, is to suppose that those who model economics and politics have the same structure to their preferences as the people they model. We wish to get beyond the idea that the public choice theorist is motivated by the truth, or some statistical equivalent to the truth, from which the theorist has a vantage to look at people’s behavior.

What if the modeler has the same mix of selfish and sympathetic desires as anyone else? Then, immediately, we run into incentive compatibility issues in the space of models. AE is an attempt to block a class of issues in which the incentives seem to get in the way of truth. Consider models with agents of different fixed types.  Suppose a modeler proposes to pick who is in the “better” and who in the “worse” class.  If the modeler can do this and policies follow from the exercise, the modeler may benefit.  That’s one incentive issue.  We consider rewards from both material sources and applause.

How do we get evidence about how modelers actually work?  The history of economics and statistics seem reasonable data bases.  One case we consider at length in The 'Vanity of the Philosopher' is how Galton and Pearson obtained their “results” that Jews were inferior. The history of statistical practice in the eugenic period is full of episodes in which one “race” was treated differently than another “race.”  Impartiality might suggest that there is really only the larger group, but the partial sympathy we all feel suggests that “our group” will be viewed differently than “their group.”

Our point isn’t so much about whether “malevolent conclusions” “follow from the premises” of difference or hierarchy.  Instead, our case is that once we allow for difference to creep into the analysis, the incentives are asymmetric: the theorist gains more by showing difference than similarity.  And despite what Caplan thinks about the usefulness of knowing what such real giants in economics past or present as Adam Smith and J. S. Mill wrote about incentives and truth seeking, the past provides a rich set of data for us to examine their hypothesis of incentive incompatibility. 

One source of approval is adherence to the standards of the community as articulated in the textbooks.  So, getting closer to truth brings approbation.  In our work on statistical ethics we make the case that a temptation to deviate from these standards comes from the interaction between an expert and “his client” which offers a second source of approbation.

Ordinary people fight temptation by moral constraints.  Like Lionel Robbins, we see AE as the philosopher’s moral constraint, a constraint against the temptation from heterogeneous sources of approbation.

Though we are most interested at the moment in AE as a presumption of motivational homogeneity – of the theorist and subjects, the street porter and the philosopher – Caplan seems more interested in whether all people are really the same or different.  We have been asked several times, first by James Buchanan and more recently by David Warsh (in a review that is quite friendly to Vanity, overall), what we would say if Plato were correct, that there are fundamental differences among humans?  Setting aside the question of whether Plato’s politics are consistent with Platonism, we would look first at the history of statistical studies of human capacity to see what variation in results have been obtained. The Galton and Pearson work on the Jews is technically fascinating. Is there anyone in the Platonic camp of natural differences who defends these pieces or the general thrust of Jewish “inferiority”? If not, why not? One is unlikely to find more skilled statistical workers than Galton or Pearson. 
      
Suppose we pre-commit to some inheritable sort of capacity – which Pearson and Galton clearly did not do – and we find that one group is less capable than another. Then what? If capacity is a vector of characteristics we need to consider the various dimensions.  If there are characteristics in which groups persistently excel and characteristics on which they fall short, then it is a simple prejudice to call them less capable in some scalar sense.  If the  group is less capable in all dimensions then we are close to Hume’s other rational species problem which we talk about a good deal.  We obviously accept Smith’s answer that our capacity for sympathy equalizes; and A. R. Wallace’s answer that “natural” selection stops at the doors of such unfortunates.

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.