Economists and the Shadow of “The Other” Before 1914

Abstract

This paper examines how economists from David Hume to Irving Fisher have struggled with the applicability of their analyses to those who differed from them in gender, ethnicity, class, or race. Particular attention is paid to how Fisher's discussion of racial and ethnic differences in capital accumulation and time preference changed between The Rate of Interest (1907) and The Theory of Interest (1930), and how it drew on earlier work by John Rae (to whom Fisher dedicated both those books).

Finding Deficiency

“…Marrying too early, drinking too much, and not saving enough were signs of deficiency to a variety of thinkers, from Adam Smith to William Stanley Jevons, and, according to Professors Levy and Peart, Spencer, too (Peart and Levy 2005: 863-864). While Fisher and others were prone to read improvidence, ill-discipline, and lack of foresight into national, ethnic, and racial categories-so that, for example, southern blacks, Russian peasants, the Chinese, and South American Indians were especially likely to have these tendencies-the gradual shift, at least in Fisher's thinking, "toward environmental rather than hereditarian explanations of attitudes towards saving" (Dimand 2005: 839) demanded a fine tool for locating the truly deficient. One couldn't simply point to a racial or national or ethnic group-or even a class or gender-and tar that group, wholesale.…”

Between Pigou and Keynes: Champernowne on Employment and Expectations

“…W.S. Jevons's (1871) opinion about the inability of the working class to make intertemporal choices was representative of economists' widespread exclusion of "The Other" from their economic principles (see Dimand 2005). Lavington (1922) argued that isolated "impulses" are "propagated" to the rest of the economy through cumulative "contagion of confidence".…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2005

“…Hayek’s work is reconsidered by Barkley Rosser among others, in a special issue of the European Journal of Political Economy celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Road to serfdom (1944). Dimand considers how economists tackled the tricky subjects of race, class, and gender before 1914; and Perlman and Morgan compare early developments in national income accounting in Britain, Germany, and the US.…”