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On racism outside of economics ... 
 
There is an absolutely huge literature on "scientific" racism which 
can be located by the usual methods. My piece in this (last?) 
issue of JHET looks at a narrow slice of the "scientific" racism in  
British anthropology of the 1860s which found itself at war with the  
economics developed by Adam Smith and J. S. Mill.  
 
Scholars have a lot of fun with this period because such people 
as James Hunt, the owner of the *Anthropological Review*, are such 
transparent quacks. And they are easy to read. 
 
Things get rather more serious when the heavy-duty mathematical 
statisticians, Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and R. A. Fisher, get 
into the racism business. Pearson's *Annals of Eugenics* is a 
very serious magazine as befits a *Biometrika* spinoff. [I remember 
the first thing I read in *A of E* was a report on conditions 
under which ML estimation was not consistent.] It is really easy 
to see how Hunt "gets" his results. How about Pearson on Jewish 
immigration, a study which is spread over six or so articles in the  
first issues of *A of E*?  
 
In a paper which Sandra Peart and I gave at HES last year, we find 
that Hunt influenced Galton about the distribution of characteristics  
of the the "Other." This shows up in Marshall's "strange uniformity"  
doctrine. Eugenics is a big deal in early neoclassical economic policy. 
 
Now that I've got a working Acrobat, I can send anyone a copy of the  
Peart-Levy paper in PDF format. I don't have a PDF of the JHET piece 
but I can send a copy by snail mail. Peart and I have a web "column"  
amusingly entitled by the management "Secret history of the dismal  
science" at www.econlib.org. This is basically about the war between  
classical economics and racism. We're up to the Eyre Controversy. I  
think we'll be doing "paternalism" next-- we've just figured out how  
the cartoons about the Other as ape in *Punch* work --  and then  
getting around to the "science" of racism after that. There are lots of  
pictures which won't be much of a surprise from friends of Carlyle for  
whom genocide is a policy option. 
 
David Levy 
 
 
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