The Dismal Science

In a message on his blog, Gavin Kennedy makes the point that Malthus Was Not the Author of the 'Dismal Science'. Most people seem to believe that the term "Dismal Science" was applied to economics because of the writings of Thomas Malthus. In particular his gloomy prediction that population would always grow faster than food, resulting in mankind suffering unending poverty. This is not so, as Kennedy points out

As for the allusion to Malthus and the ‘dismal; science’ that too is a matter of ignorance (wilful or accidental). It qualifies as an ‘urban myth’.

The notion of economics as the dismal science comes from a pamphlet written by Thomas Carlyle attacking John S. Mill in 1849, not Malthus or Ricardo in the early 19th century.

The cause was a slave rebellion in Jamaica of which Mill advanced the perfectly respectable notion that black slaves were every bit as human as their white slave masters and should be treated as such.

Carlyle was enraged at such a notion and railed against economists for purveying such notions in what, can only be described, as the most disgusting of terms. I leave it to readers to Google Carlyle on slavery to read his words, which was published in his pamphlet, ‘On the Negro Question’, an edition of which was published as ‘On the Nigger Question’.

The full title of the Carlyle essay is "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" and it appeared in Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country 40: 670-79, 1849. A reply to Carlyle was made by John Stuart Mill under the title "The Negro Question". It was published as an anonymous letter in Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country 41: 25-31 in 1850. A slightly expanded and revised version of Carlyle's 1849 Fraser's Magazine essay was published in 1853 as a separate pamphlet entitled "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question".

David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart summarise the story of the naming of the Dismal Science as

Everyone knows that economics is the dismal science. And almost everyone knows that it was given this description by Thomas Carlyle, who was inspired to coin the phrase by T. R. Malthus's gloomy prediction that population would always grow faster than food, dooming mankind to unending poverty and hardship.

While this story is well-known, it is also wrong, so wrong that it is hard to imagine a story that is farther from the truth. At the most trivial level, Carlyle's target was not Malthus, but economists such as John Stuart Mill, who argued that it was institutions, not race, that explained why some nations were rich and others poor. Carlyle attacked Mill, not for supporting Malthus's predictions about the dire consequences of population growth, but for supporting the emancipation of slaves. It was this fact—that economics assumed that people were basically all the same, and thus all entitled to liberty—that led Carlyle to label economics "the dismal science."

Their longer essay on the story is available at The Secret History of the Dismal Science. Robert Dixon discusses the subject in his essay, The Origin of the Term "Dismal Science" to Describe Economics, while the most comprehensive telling of the story is the book How the Dismal Science Got Its Name: Classical Economics and the Ur-Text of Racial Politics by David M. Levy.

Given the true origins of the term, most economists are proud to be members of the Dismal Science.