Economists and eugenics The latest

Economists and eugenics

The latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives came today. Bernard Saffron's column "Recommendations for Further Reading" has this interesting item:

"Thomas C. Leonard has published a fascinating article, “‘More Merciful and Not Less Effective’: Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era.” He includes an argument for the minimum wage that is new to me. “More surprising than Progressive support for legal minimum wages was the fact that Progressive economists, like their marginalist interlocutors, believed that binding minimum wages would result in job losses. What distinguished supporters of minimum wages from their marginalist opponents was how they regarded minimum-wage-induced job loss. . . . .[M]inimum-wage advocates regarded minimum-wage-induced disemployment as a social benefit—a eugenic virtue of legal minimum wages.” Leonard also includes a coda about Gunnar Myrdal, a Nobel-winning economist, “both Myrdal and his wife Alva were themselves eugenicists who promoted an expansion of Swedish-coercive sterilization laws during World War II. More than 60,000 Swedes, over 90% of them women, were sterilized from 1941 to 1975. The Myrdals’ eugenics was not racist. They saw forced sterilization of the unfit, says Daniel Kevles, ‘as part of the scientifically oriented planning of the new welfare state.’” History of Political Economy, 2003, 35:4, 687–712.