We’ve had a lot of race relevant posts here at F & S here recently, which has inspired me to explore the meaning of one of our (infrequently used) tags. The phrase is “The Dismal Science,” which, as we all know, refers to the really exciting academic discipline known as economics.

In modern times, the phrase has been used by economists to refer, in a mood of self-deprecating good humor, to themselves. The joke is that sitting around a faculty office and spending all of one’s time working on regressions and supply curves is considered nerdy and boring, so some of those scienticians have ruefully characterized their careers as “dismal,” according to the old phrase. The truth, as always, is much more interesting.

The phrase, long known among academics, actually comes from English historian and semi-pro racist Thomas Carlyle. It turns out that Carlyle was such a bastard that even some of his fellow Victorian Brits thought he was an immoral shitbag. Trust me, you had to be a real hard core dick to earn that reputation in the 1890s.

So anyway, one of the points of Carlyle’s phrase was that modern economics treats all human beings, in analysis, as equal. When we calculate supply and demand, the racial or ethnic background of the people doing the supplying and demanding makes no difference. One can rightly say that ‘I am a human being with certain abilities and resources, and that is the only thing that matters.’ He considered that dismal. In other words, sad and disappointing. A white man is equal to the dusky heathens of the uncivilized world? Dismal!

Among other things, Carlyle argued that slavery was superior to free trade in labor. Even worse, he argued that that was true not just for the slave owners, but worse even for the human beings who found themselves enslaved by force. He put Orwell to shame, really. Slavery = freedom? His theory was that, (for some people, anyway) slavery > freedom. What a fucking cock.

So the next time you find yourself mired in an endless conversation with some boring nerd who can’t stop talking about his dissertation on post-mercantilist theory, just sigh and remember that free market economics gave one of the most repellent intellectuals of the 19th century perpetual headaches.

P.S. - Suck it, Carlyle. We won.

Filed under: The Dismal Science