Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era.

• Author: Carden, Art
• Position: Book review

Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era

Thomas C. Leonard

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 264 pp.

Thomas C. Leonard's Illiberal Reformers tells a story that captures the mind, breaks the heart, and turns the stomach. Today, many economists argue that minimum wage laws are bad policy because they reduce employment opportunities for low-skilled workers. Leonard recounts the ways in which Progressive Era economists argued that minimum wages were good policy precisely because they reduced employment opportunities for those workers. Social scientists in the thrall of the eugenics movement enthusiastically endorsed policies that excluded "unfit workers" from the labor market lest those workers' earnings enable them to continue polluting the gene pool. Leonard shows how policies like minimum wages and prohibitions of child labor were not victories for oppressed laborers under the thumb of rapacious capitalists. Instead, they were explicitly intended to limit competition.

Illiberal Reformers is a detailed, but compact, intellectual history of American economics during its separation from "political economy" and its emergence as a separate profession guarded by a new scholarly organization, the American Economic Association. Leonard notes that many early American progressive economists were trained at German universities, where they were inculcated with the views of the German Historical School and its contempt for English economics and its classical-liberal bent. Progressives admired the emerging German administrative state and were taken with the idea of a society run by experts trained in scientific research and blessed with superior insight into the human condition. They rose to intellectual and political prominence with their conviction that laissez-faire was no way to run an industrial society. Armed with their new understanding of the science of economics, they would run an administrative state that would eliminate the waste and inefficiency endemic to capitalism.

Motivated by a curious combination of, in Leonard's words, "compassion and contempt" for the poor, progressive reformers were vain in their own conceit, thinking that they could arrange the members of a great society with the same ease with which their visible hands would move pieces about upon a chessboard. They were, in short, Adam Smith's classic "Men of System." While Smith stressed the importance of local knowledge--and...