Americans admire the rugged individualist who goes his own way, who stands alone. The problem is that standing alone at social gatherings is…lonely. And, frankly, pathetic. But that’s what usually happens to me, off in a corner, trying to pretend to study the wallpaper for clues. The problem is that I am, both by training and by temperament, an economist, and therefore dismal company. The “dismal science” appellation came originally to our profession for a different reason, though, as has been shown by David Levy in his terrific and surprising account. The tl;dr version is that the cool kids of the 18th and 19th centuries — and their intellectual heirs and assigns, the Progressives of the 20th and 20st centuries — were dismayed by the idea that common folk, servants, and even slaves, were fully formed moral beings and were better off being autonomous than they were being ordered around by the cool kids. Thomas Carlyle, one of the coolest kids, proposed (satirically, to be fair) in his appalling “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”, that chattel slavery of Africans be expanded to create lives of ease for the more civilized white race.
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