Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

"Not An Average Human Being": How Economics Succumbed To Racial Accounts Of Economic Man, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

In this chapter, we shall show how the attacks on the doctrine of human homogeneity succeeded—how, late in the century, economists came to embrace accounts of racial heterogeneity entailing different capacities of optimization.¹ We attribute the demise of the classical tradition largely to the ill-understood influence of anthropologists and eugenicists² and to a popular culture that served to disseminate racial theories visually and in print. Specifically, W. R. Greg, James Hunt, and Francis Galton all attacked the analytical postulate of homogeneity that characterized classical economics from Adam Smith³ through John Stuart Mill. Greg cofounded the eugenics movement …