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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:57 2006 |
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----------------- HES POSTING -----------------
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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