From: Robin Hanson (hanson@hss.caltech.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 21 1997 - 23:18:52 MST
Max More writes:
>I always heard that economics was referred to as "the dismal science"
>because it was associated early on with Malthus's doctrines of increasing
>scarcity of resources and the inevitability of poverty.
That is the common misconception.
>From the above quote, it's not clear that even from the racist's
>viewpoint economics would be "dismal" unless the word meant something
>different then.
I think "dismal" meant what we now think. I will try to get the full
quote on Monday, but the basic idea is "killjoy" I think.
Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/
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