| Thomas C. Leonard |
TEACHING |
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Recent Writing
Abstract:
Of the several influences on early Progressive Era American political
economy, two stand out, evangelical Protestantism and evolutionary
science. Scholarly and popular accounts alike have tended to make
science and religion antagonists, no more so than with the conflict
they find between evangelical Protestantism and evolutionary science,
as exemplified by accounts of the 1925 Scopes trial. But evangelical
Protestantism and evolutionary science comfortably coexisted in
Progressive Era American political economy. Leading progressive
economists, not least the evangelicals attached to the Social Gospel
movement, readily and routinely assimilated evolutionary science to
their religiously motivated project of economic reform. The
progressive economists’ merger of evolutionary science and Protestant
belief was made possible by the fact that the Social Gospel was itself
already (in part) an accommodation to the implications of
post-Darwinian evolutionary thought, and that Progressive Era
evolutionary science was protean, fragmented and plural, enabling
intellectuals to enlist evolutionary ideas in support of diverse, even opposed positions in political economy.
Abstract: This essay explores the progressive beliefs other than human hierarchy
that inclined Progressive Era economic reform toward eugenics. It
argues that: the progressives believed in a powerful, centralized
state, conceiving of national government as the best means for promoting the
social good and rejecting the individualism of (classical) liberalism;
the progressives venerated social efficiency; the progressives believed
in the epistemic and moral authority of science, a belief which
comprised their view that biology could explain and control human
inheritance and that the still nascent sciences of society could
explain and control the causes of economic ills; the progressives
believed that intellectuals should guide social and economic progress,
a belief erected upon a two subsidiary faiths, a faith the
disinterestedness and incorruptibility of the experts who would run the
technocracy they envisioned, and a faith that expertise could not only
serve the social good, but also identify it; and, while anti-monopoly,
the progressives believed that increasing industrial consolidation was
inevitable, and desirable, consistent with their faith in planning,
organization and command.
Abstract:
The term “social Darwinism” owes its currency and its
association with free markets to an unresolved tension in Richard
Hofstadter’s (1944) influential Social Darwinism in American
Thought, 1860-1915 (SDAT). Hofstadter’s New Deal sensibility
condemned both free markets and the use of biological ideas in social
science; he championed economic reform and a social science purged of
biology. But the Progressive Era reformers Hofstadter celebrated in
SDAT – men like Lester F. Ward, Edward A. Ross, Thorstein Veblen,
Charles Horton Cooley, and John R. Commons – were enthusiastic
biologizers who often justified economic reform on biological grounds.
Because Hofstadter’s reform-good-biology-bad schema does not map
upon Progressive Era reform, there are two different Hofstadters in SDAT.
The first Hofstadter disparaged as “social Darwinism”
biological justification of free markets, for this was, in his view,
doubly wrong. The second Hofstadter acknowledged the biological
underside of what he called Darwinian collectivism: racism, eugenics
and imperialism. This essay documents and explains Hofstadter’s
ambivalence in SDAT, including its connection with the Left’s
longstanding mistrust of Darwinism as apology for Malthusian political
economy.
Abstract: Hostility
to commerce dates to the very beginnings of market exchange. Students
of commerce, economists for short, have also been attacked.
“Anti-economics” has a long history, too; indeed, criticism of
economics and criticism of commerce have tended to go together. Stephen
Marglin carries on both traditions— The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community discredits the market and economics alike. The Dismal Science belongs also to a third tradition, that of bending the history of economics to the purposes of heterodoxy.
Abstract: Prophet of Innovation
manages the Schumpeterian feat of synthesizing history, economics and
biography, all of which were needed to produce this fully realized,
beautifully drawn portrait of a complex man, and his great
subject, capitalism -- its economics, its social institutions, and,
first among equals, its historical record.
Working Papers
Abstract: Can
a rational-choice framework help broaden our understanding of anorexia
nervosa (AN)? We ask this question for two reasons. First, anorexia
is interesting in and of itself; it creates serious health risks for
those afflicted. We ask whether a rational choice approach, embodied in
a rudimentary economic model of dieting, can shed useful light on the
choice to maintain a dangerously low body weight. Second, anorexia
offers an opportunity to explore the boundaries of rational-choice
approaches to human behavior. In previous work on smoking and multiple
(or yo-yo) dieting, we investigated one such boundary, the rationality
of self-defeating choices. Our approach was to see how useful it might
be to model harmful behaviors with the rational choice assumptions
endemic to most mainstream economic analysis.
Abstract: The
Progressive Era economic reformers we call the progressives permanently
changed the relationship of the American state to the economy. In
blueprinting and beginning construction of the welfare state, the
progressives faced a foundational tension: the expert-led
administrative state the progressives imagined was at odds with other
progressive goals for expanding and promoting democracy. Paradoxically,
the progressives proposed to redeem American democracy via the
undemocratic substitution of their own judgment for that of the people.
Abstract: This
essay takes issue with critics who claim that the size of a
transactor’s choice set is sufficient to show coercion. It argues,
following Wertheimer (1987), that coercion cannot be read off the
structural properties of (coercee) B’s choice set alone. Coercion,
rather, concerns how B’s choice set comes to be delimited. Second, this
essay argues that an overly expansive conception of coercion also works
to elide an important distinction, that between coercive exchange,
which unambiguously makes B worse off, and non-coercive but unfair
exchange, which can make B better off. The key question here: is it
ethically worse for A to neglect B (not trade) or for A to exploit B in
mutually beneficial fashion? Lastly, mistaking unfairness for coercion
also begs an important ethical question: on whom should the social
burden of remedying unfair background conditions rightly fall? If
there is an argument that justifies making A, who wishes only to trade
with B, bear the social burden of remedying the unfairness of B’s
pre-trade situation, that argument must be made, not assumed. In the
absence of A having market power, it is not clear why the social burden
of redistribution should fall upon those who happen to trade with the
poor.
History of Economics
Abstract: The influence of
eugenics upon Progressive Era economics has been neglected in the
history of economic
thought. Why? Without rejecting other historiographic explanations,
this essay argues that an influentual strand of Progressive-Era
historiography -- one with its origins in Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American
Thought --
has misled with respect to the influence of
biological thought upon the Progressive-Era sciences of society. It has
done so by treating eugenics as social Darwinism and by making "social
Darwinism" into a synecdoche for what, in retrospect, progressivism is
seen to oppose -- individualism, laissez-faire economics, racism and
imperialism. Though neither social Darwinism nor eugenics are quite
what this influential strand of historiography makes them out be, and
though eugenics and social Darwinism are as different as they are
alike, the influence of the Hofstaderian interpretation has, among its
several consequences, obscured the influence of eugenics on Progressive
Era American economics.
Abstract: In the Progressive Era, reform-minded economists argued that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers—whom they labeled “unemployables,” “parasites,” "low-wage races," and the “industrial residuum”—so as to uplift superior, deserving workers. Women were also frequently classified as unemployable. Leading progressives, including women at the forefront of labor reform, justified exclusionary labor legislation for women on grounds that it would (1) protect the biologically weaker sex from the hazards of market work; (2) protect working women from the temptation of prostitution; (3) protect male heads of household from the economic competition of women; and (4) ensure that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as “mothers of the race.” What united these heterogeneous rationales was the reformers’ aim of discouraging women’s labor-force participation. Abstract: Distribution concerns who gets what. But does “who” refer to the personal distribution of income among individuals or the functional distribution of income among suppliers of productive factors? For nearly 150 years, Anglophone distribution theory followed the Ricardian emphasis on functional distribution – the income shares of labor, land, and capital. Only beginning in the 1960s, and consolidated by a research outpouring in the early 1970s, does mainstream economics turn to the personal conception of distribution. This essay documents Anglophone (primarily American) economics’ move from functional to personal distribution, and tries to illuminate something of its causes and timing. Abstract:
John Bates Clark was not a laissez-faire
apologist for capital, as his contemporary critics (such as Thorstein
Veblen) sometimes claimed, but neither was he a progressive, as some
revisionist history has lately claimed. Clark is better regarded as a
pioneering neoclassical economist. He rejected laissez-faire, which he
believed would sometimes fail to realize competitive prices (including
wages), but, as a champion of competition, he also rejected progressive
theories of wage- and price-determination, which judged competition to
be economically and morally destructive. In labor relations and
anti-trust, Clark argued, the state should remedy departures from
competitive pricing. Clark’s conception of the
state’s role in the economy -- market failure remedy -- is
not laissez-faire, for it justifies intervention, but neither is it
progressive, for it regards competition as the end rather than as the
cause of intervention.
Abstract: David Card and Alan Krueger’s influential 1995 book, Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, created controversy when it argued, among other claims, that moderate increases in legal minimum wages do not lead to adverse employment outcomes for low-wage workers. An examination of the history of minimum-wage economics suggets that today's controversy is a modern-dress version of two old (and related) methodological quarrels within economics: (1) can a general theory of markets be applied to wage and employment determination, that is, is it the case, as Adam Smith said, that the market for men is like the market for goods, and (2) what should be the role of empirical evidence in testing theories and their implications? The disemployment effects of minimum wages are recognizable at least as early as John Stuart Mill's (1848) text, and the question of how labor-market structure determines the employment effects of wage floors is present in the century-old debate between H.B. Lees Smith and Beatrice & Sidney Webb. The occasion for the mid-20th century methodological dispute known as "marginalist controversy" was Richard Lester's evidence that firms do not profit maximize and that labor markets are not competitive. Economics
of Science
Abstract: My remarks concern why it
might be the case that some historians have been reluctant to embrace
with open arms Sociology of Scientific Knowlegde approaches to the
history of economics. Broadly speaking, I see four impediments. Call
them (1) the what-is-it problem, (2) the bundling problem, (3) the
problem of authority, and (4) the anti-realism problem.
Abstract: The economics of science treats the process by which scientific knowledge is created as a market process, that is, as one where scientists respond to incentives that promote (or hinder) the creation of scientific knowledge. Science retains its epistemological distinction, but economics depicts the process of producing scientific knowledge as no less partisan, grubby and shallow than the market processes that produce breakfast cereals or broadcast television. The sociology of science, especially Critical Science Studies, denies science its epistemological distinction by denying that empirical evidence plays any substantive role in science. Science-Studies epistemology -- the Position -- asserts that non-evidential considerations determine which among rival theories will prevail. In the history of economics, the radical skepticism of the Position arrived bundled with the wholesome injunction that historical writing in the history of economics should be thicker, richer . . . and creamier -- Betty Crocker historiography. But critical perspectives on the history and organization of science not only don’t require the Position—they cannot go forward when burdened with the Position.
Ethics and Economics
Abstract: Critics of commodification object to sales but not gifts of some goods, such as human blood or human organs, on grounds that such trade wrongly coerces, morally corrupts, and crowds out altruism. This essay takes issue with each of these claims. It disputes Michael Sandel’s claim that voluntary exchange coerces, arguing that he confuses what is unfair with what is unfree. It argues, where trade does create moral costs, that these costs should be weighed against the moral costs of trade bans, such as the loss of human life, and the harms endemic to illegal markets. The essay also quarrels with Richard Titmuss’s The Gift Relationship, arguing that compensation for blood need not crowd out blood donation, that compensation does not preclude a charitable impulse, and that some important gift relationships (e.g., philanthropy) possess elements of both altruism and exchange. Abstract:
Professor New rightly distinguishes
paternalistic policies from policies that remedy market failures, but
then argues that paternalism is justified when the state is better
placed to know what is in the paternalized person's best interest. We
argue that this is a necessary but not sufficient condition for
paternalism. In addition, the state should be better placed than
alternative interveners. Sophisticated actors (Ulysses) may already
have made provisions that enable self-restraint or provide expertise.
And, naive actors, those who do not know they will need self-restraint
or expertise, will be very difficult to distinguish from others who do
not require paternalistic intervention, but whose behavior is
identical. As such, the
benefits of a paternalistic policy must be weighed against the costs
imposed on non-targeted persons, costs imposed on targeted persons, and
enforcement costs. Philosophy of Economics/Economic Methodology
Abstract: Some empirically minded philosophers of science argue that the evidence should choose the best theory from among theoretical rivals. However, the evidence may not speak clearly, a problem of ‘underdetermination of theory by data’. We examine this problem in a concrete setting, rival theories of smoking behavior. We investigate whether several uncontested pieces of empirical evidence allow us to choose between two competing theoretical perspectives on smoking, rational choice and non-rational choice, respectively. Next, we develop a more refined taxonomy of smoking theories, and consider the consequences for theory testing. Finally, we examine some normative aspects of theory choice involving the appropriate scope of government action. Foundations of Rational Choice Theory & Addiction
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