 So perhaps you joined me last time for a short video about the portrayal of race and slavery in the works of Adam Smith. Now I'd like to move over to the neoclassical economists and discuss race in the work of William Stanley Jevons. So Jevons along with Karl Manger and Leo Valras is one of the founders of the so-called marginal revolution with its associated marginal utility theory of value. Broadly speaking, the classical economists have a labor theory of value and the neoclassical economists have a marginal utility theory of value. But we're not talking about value theory today. No surprise that Jevons uses race in the phrase human race, and I don't think that's very interesting, so I won't read these quotes. Sometimes he looks like a textbook racist. For example, in this passage he says, A man of lower race, a negro for instance, enjoys possessions less and loathes labor more. His exertions therefore soon stop. A poor savage would be content to gather the almost gratuitous fruits of nature if they were sufficient to give sustenance. It is only physical want which drives him to exertion. The rich man in modern society is supplied apparently with all he can desire and yet he often labors unceasingly for more. Now I happen to be reading John Stuart Mills essay The Subjugation of Women and ran across this passage which I think nicely characterizes the attitude that we see in Jevons. John Stuart Mills is a classical economist. So here John Stuart Mills is pointing out that some people like Jevons understand as natural the behavior that people do because of the social circumstances they find themselves in. Mills says, Because a caught ear deeply in arrears to his landlord is not industrious. There are people who think that the Irish are naturally idle. I think this passage is nice because although he doesn't explicitly have Jevons in mind. Jevons is clearly an example of this tendency to ignore the immediate social circumstances of someone's behaviors and attribute their their behaviors to some kind of innate predisposition on their part. So we saw that Smith often used race just to mean a category of people like race of scholars and there are examples that seem like they might fit into this category in Jevons. For example, this one, the power of anticipation must have a large influence in economics for upon it is based all accumulation of stocks of commodity to be consumed at a future time. The class or race of men who have the most foresight will work most for the future. So now we think this might just be some component of people's character. But if we continue, it becomes clear that he doesn't mean it like Smith. In the same passage we get the untutored savage, like the child is wholly occupied with the pleasures and the troubles of the moment. The morrow is dimly felt. The limit of his horizon is but a few days off. The wants of a future year or of a lifetime are wholly unforeseen. But in a state of civilization, a vague though powerful feeling of the future is the main incentive to industry and saving. So it seems then that race doesn't mean just a class of people with a shared characteristic, but is instead at least tied here to the social economic system that characterizes a particular society. So is race biological in Jevons? There are examples that seem to suggest this. Here's one. Now, between the actual amount of feeling anticipated and that which is felt, there must be some natural relation, very variable, no doubt, according to circumstances, the intellectual standing of the race, or the character of the individual, and yet subject to some general laws of variation. By juxtaposing the intellectual standing of the race with the character of an individual, there's a strong suggestion here that this is a innate quality. It's referred to after all as natural. This implies a biological understanding of race. Nonetheless, I can't find a passage in Jevons where he's unambiguous that he thinks of race as an inherited biological characteristic. So overall, I'll conclude that Jevons is clearly a cultural chauvinist, seems to be a textbook racist, but by and large his racism is still pre-Darwinian, and that makes sense in terms of his dates. He would have already been mature and a working scholar when Darwin came out. Yeah, so that's race in Jevons.