Why Is Economics Called the “Dismal Science”?

Why is economics called “the dismal science”? Is it because it’s no fun? Is it because economists make depressing predictions? Is it because economists are always saying “on the other hand”? No, no, and no—economics is a lot of fun, and while we do sometimes make depressing predictions and are constantly saying “on the other hand,” neither of these are how economics became the dismal science. For that, we need to look back to the person who coined the term and the essay in which he coined it. As David Levy and Sandra Peart explained over two decades ago, the term’s origins are anything but dismal.

Economics was first called the “dismal science” in the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s 1849 essay “An Occasional discourse on the Negro Question.” Carlyle criticizes economists for their connection to the abolition movement. Levy and Peart direct their readers to this striking (and disturbing) paragraph:

“Truly, my philanthropic friends, Exeter Hall Philanthropy is wonderful; and the Social Science—not a ‘gay science,’ but a rueful—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!”

In short, Carlyle called economics a “dismal science” because, as Levy and Peart put it,

“In the fight against slavery, Christian evangelicals such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Macaulay were joined by political economists, such as James Mill, Harriet Martineau, J.S. Mill, Archbishop Richard Whately and John Bright. The two sides agreed that slavery was wrong because Africans are humans, and all humans have the same rights.”

It’s a radical vision of equality and liberty memorably expressed by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”

Carlyle’s distress emanated from his racism and from his conviction that surely economics could recommend something for governors to do besides “letting men alone.” It’s a theme that comes up again and again through the history of economic ideas and in the ideas of development economists like Lord Peter Bauer in the twentieth century and William Easterly in the twenty-first.

Every so often, I revisit Levy and Peart’s work because it reminds me that economists have (and should embrace) a noble and righteous heritage. “Subverting and dismantling structures of oppression”? Our intellectual ancestors were doing that since before it was cool—and if that’s what it means to be a “dismal scientist,” I embrace the name proudly.