This paper by Thomas C. Leonard is making the rounds on Facebook (HT to Steve Horwitz, who started this fire); I don’t know how I missed it when it was published in 2005. It is making me revise my understanding of the debate over minimum wages, for example. I have always thought that it’s a question of understanding economics versus not understanding economics. As Leonard argues, however, many eugencists understood that minimum wages would cause unemployment but saw this as a feature of the policy rather than a bug. It would make it easier to identify “defectives.” In addition, according to some eugenicists, “compulsory education and child labor bans…were desirable because the unfit poor would be unable to put their children to work and thus would have fewer children, a eugenic goal” (p. 218). It’s a very accessible paper that is worth a careful read. It tells a very dark story about our intellectual legacy, and it helps me understand the urgency with which scholars like Mises and Hayek wrote.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/15808/labor-markets-and-eugenics/
Labor Markets and Eugenics
Previous post: Inflation: It’s Getting Crazy
Next post: This you won’t believe
{ 30 comments }
Tim Leonard’s work is excellent across the board and anyone interested in these issues or related ones from that period, especially his work on Social Darwinism, should be digging them up and reading them. Outstanding scholarship that destroys a number of harmful myths of intellectual history.
And I should add that it was a commenter on my Freeman column today who reminded me of the relevance of Tim’s work to some things I wrote there. http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/antipoverty-agenda/
Thanks for the credit, Steve.
Reminds me of a remark Guido Hülsmann once made about intellects. They have a hard time appreciating the concept of scarcity. Occasionally it strikes them – Ah..scarcity..then we must create a world without scarcity. And it is back to square one.
This is a remarkable article. Extremely revealing. It is nearly impossible to crawl into the brains of this generation and see what the heck they were thinking. Their creed was the most ill-liberal one can imagine, and it just chills us to imagine that such views were respectable and normal in a certain time. It certainly puts a completely different spin on the origin of these work laws. Really, it’s mind blowing and extremely important.
The author does note certain exceptions. Alfred Marshall (1897), Philip Wicksteed (1913), A. C. Pigou (1913) and John Bates Clark (1913) — all condemned the effects of labor restrictions as a social cost. It must have taken some guts to oppose eugenic policies in those days.
This is an example of very productive historical revisionism. Professor Leonard has really done the world a service. I would also like to look back at some of Rothbard’s writings about this generation and their promotion of war and prohibition as methods toward social perfectionism (as they defined it).
Yes, very interesting – and horrifying. Up here in Canada, there is a mid-century prairie politician named Tommy Douglas who is revered (by many, unfortunately) as the father of socialized medicine and the welfare state in Canada. There was a bit of a fuss a few years ago when it was discovered that he had flirted with eugenics in the late 1920s or early 1930s. This was generally dismissed as a misguided youthful enthusiasm which he later (as I recall) had disavowed. I remember at the time thinking of it, in my innocence, as a bizarre aberration. Bizarre definitely. Aberration, it turns out, perhaps not.
The more I learn about the intellectual origins of progressivism and modern statism, the more chilling an enterprise it appears to be. As Bryan Caplan argued in the introduction to the Mises Institute’s edition of “Pictures of a Socialist Future”, it is not that statism was a fundamentally well-intentioned and moral enterprise with bad consequences, it was “born bad” (really bad in this case).
To the extent that it can be argued that any of this sought to promote the general welfare, it shows the kind of concern for humans that is really more typical of that one might have for the well-being of one’s livestock than one’s equals.
Orwellian that progressives assume the mantle of social justice when advocating minimum wage and child labor laws.
Yeah get those kids down coal mines and up chimneys, pronto!
coal-fire heaters are so passé. get green.
Gil ~ Did you even read Leonard’s work?
Are you hater forcing kids into schools?
Instead of trying to destroy the bad genes, people should have the freedom to buy the health care and genetic improvement they want.
Instead of destroying the bad humans, we could engineer and improve mankind to a higher standard of quality and achievement.
Bio-ethics are the biggest threat to human potential in our time. They are not about ethics and they are absolutely not about bio. Bio-ethics is a socialist agenda disguised as a medical regulation.
If we could allow performance doping in olympics, then we could surpass what is humanly possible to do. Dumb chemicals would soon be replaced with genetic doping to increase endurance and muscle mass etc. and this would find it’s way in medical care treatments for the general population.
We should allow those with money and motivation to improve their genes and those of their offsprings. This would be a more effective way and a free market oriented way to improve mankind.
Plus, in this way, we would be master of our own evolution and propel it to new heights instead of gambling with nature and endure it’s evolutionary stagnation.
Your link goes to facebook, not Leonard’s article. Some of us haven’t signed away our privacy yet. Would you mind changing it? Thanks.
If you click the link, you can download it anyway. I don’t use facebook either but it goes directly to the download.
Not to panic, the real link is here.
I don’t belong to Facebook. Can I read this paper anywhere else?
Thank you.
You don’t need to belong to Facebook to get the PDF. I don’t, but got it anyway. Just click the link.
progressives of our era don’t seem to have any problem with the state discriminating along racial lines (affirmative action, bilingual schooling, etc.). progressives seem relaxed about state subsidies for amniotic testing, and prophylactic abortion.
the paper’s a great springboard for discussion. i agree that the nazis’ racial policies cast a pall over darwinism. as a reaction, boasianism and lamarckism dominated anthropology, scientific rigour be damned. as genetic science matures, it seems likely that darwinism will make a comeback.
if race doesn’t exist, people sure act as though it does. blacks voted 24 to 1 in favour of obama in the presidentials. jews have overwhelmingly voted democrat (see block for one rationalization: http://mises.org/resources/1161).
michael levin shows there are merits to acknowledging racial differences so as to avoid unwarranted state compensatory programmes. http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=117
I’ve been both amused and irked to find articles declaring there’s no such thing as race. And lawsuits about discrimination against blacks in the same paper. Seems there’s a problem here.
leukemia-sufferers are wise to pay more attention to their oncologists than to their humanities professors when it comes to race.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1993074,00.html
race is real to sufferers of sickle-cell anaemia and tay-sachs disease. the giraffe didn’t grow a long neck of its own volition.
His website has copies of his other papers that may be of interest: http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/research.htm
Also, it appears that he is working on a book titled “Excluding Inferior Workers: Eugenic Influences on Economic Reform in The Progressive Era”. On his website there is an introduction to the book (http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/bookintro2.pdf) and a PowerPoint presentation (http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/Excluding.ppt).
Wow, you take Willaim H. Hutt’s “Politically Impossible?”, Franz Oppenheimer’s “The State”, Mises’ “Human Action”, Rothbard’s “For A New Liberty” and this article it is hard to believe any human being alive could sympathize (let alone condone) statism in any shape, size, or form. I think the Mises Institute should have a “So you like the Government ?” series. Watch all those statist mouths hang open in the shear horror of it all lol.
What should never be underestimated is the lengths to which the current elite will go to maintain their position in society. ‘Dysgenics,’ the opposite of ‘eugenics,’ is the policy: a vast, stupid underclass barred from market participation, whose members the elite can continually wave around in front of the bourgeois to keep them paying their taxes and wringing their hands. (Absent income taxes and workplace regulation, a number of middle class families could afford to provide marginal individuals with gainful employment).
Everywhere and always, the intent is not so much to keep the underclass down as it is to hamstring the middle class, to keep them from becoming new money and, from there, new old-money.
isn’t it interesting how women find witty guys attractive? could it be that sense of humour is a proxy for intelligence, something that might have an advantage in the evolutionary jungle, or is it just that shopping/doing dishes is twice as boring with a dullard alongside?
to the anti-gnostic:
child support could be seen as a form of dysgenics. in many countries of the west, having babies can be more attractive than working for a living, especially if the work skills or aptitude are lacking. this doesn’t bode well for the future, as the better-skilled often limit their families to compensate for the heavy burden of taxation they shoulder. “race suicide” indeed.
Fascinating article. I talked about it here:
http://zatavu.blogspot.com/2011/02/eugenicist-foundations-of-progressivism.html
hoppe doesn’t exclude race (specifically intelligence) as an integral part of the west’s unique economic success.
http://mises.org/media/4691/Necessary-and-Sufficient-Causes-of-the-Industrial-Revolution-Some-Critical-Remarks-on-Mises-and-His-Explanation
and the science behind hoppe’s analysis gets firmer ever day.
http://is.gd/BU86Zu
hayek certainly doesn’t sound like an open-borders booster:
“Nobody who has lived through the rise of the violent anti-Semitism which led to Hitler can refuse Mrs. Thatcher admiration for her courageous and outspoken warning. When I grew up in Vienna the established Jewish families were a generally respected group and all decent people would frown upon the occasional anti-Jewish outbursts of a few popular politicians. It was the sudden influx of large numbers of Galician and Polish Jews [during World War I]…which in a short period changed the attitude. They were too visibly different to be readily absorbed.”
- Letter to The Times after Thatcher claimed that British people were afraid of being “swamped” by people of a different culture. (11 February, 1978).
Comments on this entry are closed.