Obligatory historical note. Many people today think that economics is called “the dismal science” because the subject is dull to many people, or because they think that economic analysis reduces too many serious moral or cultural considerations to dehumanized number-crunching.
Well, maybe both these things are true, I don’t know. But the actual, historical reason that economics is called a “dismal science” is because Thomas Carlyle was an appalling racist, and he objected to the fact that English political economists recommended the abolition of black slavery in the Caribbean colonies.
The “dismal” bit was a joke by inversion: “gay science” was a common phrase at the time for skill in poetry, and he thought people who focused on the injustice or the brutal wastefulness of slavery just couldn’t appreciate the poetry of life, which required slavery, sugar and a huge string of racial slurs. What he specifically found “dismal” was the suggestion that Caribbean blacks might be left alone or paid for the work they chose to do (**) — instead of forcing them to be “civilized” by growing sugar-cane under the lash on hell-hole slave plantations. http://ift.tt/1eqDOT5 (*)
(* content warning: Really, really fucking racist.)
Thomas Carlyle (1849) “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”
THE following occasional discourse, delivered by we know not whom, and of date seemingly above a year back, may, perhaps, be welcome to here and there a speculative reader. It comes to us — no speaker named, no time or place assigned, no commentary of any sort given in the hand-writing of the so-ca…
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