Alex Tabarrok on "How the Dismal Science Got Its Name"

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution University explains how the dismal science got its name.


Fans of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin will not happy to learn this story, but the dismal science no longer looks so dismal.

Proudly dismal

The master of the letter to the editor, Don Boudreaux, is at it again, this time in the New York Times Sunday Book Review section:

To the Editor:

Reviewing “American Dreamers,” Michael Kazin’s paean to the country’s radical left, Beverly Gage echoes Kazin by including the abolition of slavery among the great achievements of leftists — an example of their “utopian spirit” (Sept. 18). Such radicals did call for abolition, but radicals of a very different sort — thinkers who offered a new understanding of how societies hang together and prosper without the centralized commands that Kazin’s leftists so extol — also lent their influential voices to the cause of abolition. These radicals were classical economists.

It was economists’ prominence in the abolition movement that led Thomas Carlyle, in an 1849 essay, to defend slavery and ridicule economists as “rueful” thinkers, each of whom “finds the secret of this universe in ‘supply and demand,’ and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone.” Economists’ advocacy of freedom, even for slaves, so incensed Carlyle that he gave it, in the same essay, a nickname that — considering its provenance — economists should forever wear proudly: the “dismal science.”

Tapu Misa on the "Dismal Science" (updated)

In an article in the New Zealand Herald Tapu Misa asks

Since the global financial crisis, I've wondered if even economists understand what Thomas Carlyle called "the Dismal Science".

I would ask, Does Tapu Misa understand why Carlyle called it the "Dismal Science"? It seems strange to me that Misa would invoke Carlyle. There are a any number of errors in Misa'a attack on economics contained in the Herald article  but what I find particularly weird is that Misa, like so many people who wish to attack economics, quotes Carlyle.

This comes from Professor David Levy, writing in The Freeman magazine, who does understand why economics is the dismal science:

In December 1849 Thomas Carlyle published “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” in the London monthly Fraser’s Magazine. In it he labeled the economics of his contemporaries “the dismal science.” In the next issue of Fraser’s, the greatest British economist of that era, John Stuart Mill, responded. That brief exchange—it counts less than 20 pages—is at the very heart of the nature and significance of classical British economics.

While everyone has heard that economics is the “dismal science,” almost no one in economics these days seems to know what aroused Carlyle’s ire. The failing is not Carlyle’s; he is as clear as can be as to what exactly is the problem with economics. It stands opposed to racial slavery. In the passage I quote next—which contains the first use of “dismal science” in the language—the only fact that a modern reader lacks is that Exeter Hall was the heart of organized Evangelicalism, the moral center of the British antislave movement:

Truly, my philanthropic friends, Exeter Hall Philanthropy is wonderful; and the Social Science—not a “gay science,” but a rueful [one]—which finds the secret of this universe in “supply-and-demand,” and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is also wonderful. Not a “gay science,” I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science. These two, Exeter Hall Philanthropy and the Dismal Science, led by any sacred cause of Black Emancipation, or the like, to fall in love and make a wedding of it,—will give birth to progenies and prodigies; dark extensive moon-calves, unnameable abortions, wide-coiled monstrosities, such as the world has not seen hitherto!*

* [Thomas Carlyle], “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, December 1849, pp. 672-73.

Much of the rest is unprintable in this respectable periodical; it reads like the vile racist screed it is. Nonetheless, if one can bear the racial pornography, Carlyle makes a point of vital importance: the economics of his contemporaries in its idealization of market relationships among equals stands in opposition to his dream of slavery’s hierarchical obedience.

Too often soft-pedaled by those who admire his attack on economics, Carlyle was the premier theorist of the idealized slave society. In opposition to the economists’ supply-and-demand model of human society, he put forward the doctrine of obedience to one’s betters. While he had been making such arguments through the 1840s, it wasn’t until the “Negro Question” that he realized that all white people are “better” than all black people. This certainly made the idealized slavery more attractive for white Britons than one in which they might be on the cutting end of the “beneficent whip”—a phrase in “Negro Question” that Mill singled out for particular attention.

Carlyle idealized slavery in the same way economists idealized markets. To match the economists’ claim of mutual gain from exchange, Carlyle put forward the doctrine of the joys of service to one’s betters. And according to the way things were supposed to work, the common religion would give the details of the hierarchy. (This is why Carlyle and his admirers often had “problems” with Jews; in particular, why we find the Anglo-German writer H. S. Chamberlain cited in Mein Kampf for his rants on the subject.)

Carlyle's article was reprinted in pamphlet form in 1853 under the title "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question". The rest of Levy's article is well worth reading. For a book length treatment of the subject try Levy's book "How the Dismal Science Got Its Name: Classical Economics and the Ur-Text of Racial Politics". I'll guess Tapu has not read Levy's book.

Update: I see Eric Crampton made this point before me.

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.