In last week’s Insights, Oliver Hartwich talked about the dismal science but did not note the origins of the term. Economics came to be known as the dismal science because, during the mid-1800s, they worked with the Christian philanthropists of Exeter Hall to call for an end to British accommodation of foreign slavery. Essayist Thomas Carlyle believed that slavery was necessary to make Africans fully human. Because economists like John Stuart Mill argued that all people have the same fundamental character and rights, and that slavery was consequently abhorrent, Carlyle reasoned that we economists were stopping Africans from becoming human. Unlike the “gay sciences” of poetry and literature, to use Carlyle’s terms, the dismal science of political economy denied Africans the purported benefits of the lash.

David Levy and Sandra Peart’s examination of the secret history of the dismal science is well worth reading. Economic analysis is sometimes accused of being too value-ridden rather than scientific. Where economists’ most fundamental value judgement is that we all count equally as moral and choosing agents, that is something about which we can be proud.

A few of us from the NZ Initiative team have been at this year’s Mont Pelerin Society meetings in Hong Kong. I was particularly impressed with a plenary session on corruption.

New Zealand ranks at or near the top of the world’s rankings of least corrupt countries. The University of Chicago’s Luigi Zingales explained the importance of staying clean. In honest states, whistle-blowers are protected. They can expect that turning in corrupt officials will yield substantive action rather than a shoulder-shrug. And so it is very hard to be corrupt in a place that is clean. But the same calculus can make it almost impossible to clean up corrupt states: where whistle-blowers neither are protected nor can expect that corrupt officials are punished, nobody bothers trying.

New York University’s William Easterly then turned to the West’s complicity in foreign corruption. Where aid agencies have a hard time operating if they’re also critical of a corrupt government, and where academics cannot run field trials if they say too much, they all have an interest in keeping quiet. It’s pragmatic, and it can seem fine in the short run. But in the long run, it enables corrupt regimes. This is especially damaging when foreign aid forms only a small part of cash flows into developing countries relative to money sent home by migrants and normal business transactions. But foreign aid spending is especially attractive to the public intellectuals who might otherwise help build the climate for reform. We should not be reluctant to speak out against abuse.

William Easterly and Luigi Zingales continue in Mill’s fine tradition.