D. Friedman:
I believe you're missing the point of the below response. No comment was made that infers the previous author is demonizing eugentics. No normative statement is made in my opinion, merely the curious fact (once again brought to the academic world's attention by David Levy and Sandra Peart) that at the origns of the study of economics lay the phrase "dismal science" coined by Carlyle in reference to the belief that economics assumed that people were basically all the same, and thus entitled to liberty.
The statemnt below is in reference to the aforementioned, not a normative statement on the morality of eugenics. It serves well in response to the previous email pertaining to the question of race.
Perhaps I have missed the point?
RE
| david friedman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/19/2001 02:20 PM
|
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject: Re: Growth, Wealth, and Race |
>Thinking and writing analytically about race is certainly a good and
>important thing to do.
>As far as I know, the "race problem" has been analytically treated in
>two ways. One, to consider human homogeneity (there is one human race).
>Two to consider human heterogeneity (there are different human races).
>The father of economics and his followers fall in the first group. It is
>indeed the idea of radical human homogeneity that made economics dismal,
>attracting the furies of who believed in human heterogeneity.
>
>I think it is therefore surprising to see economists abandoning their
>original analytical framework. Especially since, historically, the
>analytical and scientific research on races was called eugenics....
Let me disagree on two points:
1. While it is true that Smith thought innate variation of humans to
be low, that isn't a defining assumption of economics, it is a
conjecture that is capable of being tested.
2. "Eugenics" wasn't "the analytical and scientific research on
races." It was a particular policy program--to improve the world by
breeding better human beings. Currently, the term seems to be used
mainly as a way of demonizing any serious thought about human genetic
diversity.
Not only is there nothing inherently wicked about studying genetic
diversity, there is nothing inherently wicked about trying to breed
better humans--only about the means that some people proposed for
doing it.
Consider Heinlein's eugenic proposal, based on a technology that did
not exist when he was writing (it was in a work of fiction) but is
now coming into existence. There are many different children that a
given couple could have. Find a way of making it possible for the
couple to choose among them--to produce their child from a fertilized
egg known not to contain the genes that give the father his bad heart
or the mother her tendency to diabetes. That is a eugenic proposal in
the ordinary meaning of the word--do you see anything wrong with it?
--
David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
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