----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]