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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Theorizing About Human Capacity: A View From The Nineteenth Century, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
Theorizing About Human Capacity: A View From The Nineteenth Century, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
Discussions of eugenic policy of the nineteenth century are too often isolated from the larger debates in political economy over human capacity. These debates centered on two questions. First, do all people have roughly the same capabilities, or do some groups have a lower capacity than others? Second, capacity for what? In the nineteenth century political economists in the tradition of Adam Smith through John Stuart Mill argued that, as Gordon Tullock would later put it, “people are people” and there are no racial or other distinctions to be made about our capabilities for labor market, family formation, or other …
Group Analytics In Adam Smith's Work, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
Group Analytics In Adam Smith's Work, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
The link between occupation and character began with David Hume and extended by Adam Smith in service to their attack on the doctrine of innate national character. Worker's awareness of the relative approbative rewards to occupation is central to Smith's competitive labor market equilibrium. When the division of labor is extended by growth, the variance of character increases. With this insight Smith was able to offer a race-blind theory of civilization, something that escaped even Hume. 19th century anthropological focus on the variance of character can be seen as a racialization of Smith's work.
Attitudes Toward Race, Hierarchy And Transformation In The 19th Century, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
Attitudes Toward Race, Hierarchy And Transformation In The 19th Century, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
Using the debates between Classical political economists and their critics as our lens, this paper examines the question of whether we're the same or different. Starting with Adam Smith, Classical economics presumed that humans are the same in their capacity for language and trade ; observed differences were then explained by incentives, luck and history, and it is the "vanity of the philosopher" incorrectly to conclude otherwise. Such "analytical egalitarianism" was overthrown sometime after 1850 , when notions of race and hierarchy came to infect social analysis as a result of attacks on homogeneity by the Victorian Sages (including Thomas …
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 …