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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Negro Science Of Exchange: Classical Economics And Its Chicago Revival, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
The Negro Science Of Exchange: Classical Economics And Its Chicago Revival, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
For analytical purposes, are economic agents—humans—the same or not? In this chapter, we argue that, historically, the debate between those who trusted in markets and those who did not followed logically from different answers to this questions. Starting with Adam Smith, classical economists held that humans are the same in their capacity for language and trade. They concluded that since markets are useful for some agents, they are beneficial for all of us. But the supposition of homogeneous competence was widely questioned in the nineteenth century but those who held that significant differences exist among humans, only some of whom …
"Not An Average Human Being": How Economics Succumbed To Racial Accounts Of Economic Man, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
"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 …