JD Vance and the Dismal Science

Ryan Bourne

In a strange chapter of his new book, Communion, Vice President JD Vance laments how the “technocratic cost-benefit analysis” of economics can “crowd out your sense of right and wrong.”

Vance recalls how, during a law school seminar he attended, economic reasoning was used to debate whether chattel slavery had damaged the Southern economy or instead provided output fueling the Northern states’ growth.

To Vance, that discussion exemplified an economic discipline so absorbed by efficiency and output considerations that it could only examine an obvious moral abomination as though the decisive question were whether it raised GDP. He dubs this ostensible moral apathy the “hallmark of the dismal science.”

In truth, it’s difficult to envisage him choosing a worse example of economists’ supposed moral blindness. For the Victorian author Thomas Carlyle coined the very term “the dismal science” in 1849 to attack the economists of his day, not because economists were insufficiently horrified by slavery, but because he disliked economists’ association with the cause of black emancipation and free labor.

Writing after slaves were freed in the British West Indies, Carlyle attacked economists for believing social order could emerge through supply and demand and for reducing the government’s role to “letting men alone.” He wanted formerly enslaved people to be compelled to work under white authority. John Stuart Mill answered him by defending emancipation and rejecting his racial hierarchy. Economics was branded dismal by Carlyle, in other words, because its presumption of equal agency cut against Carlyle’s own thirst for coercion.

That history does not prove that economists possess uniquely sound morals. But it does demolish Vance’s chosen illustration of their moral obtuseness. He is right that whether slavery was evil does not depend on whether it enriched the South. Slavery was evil because human beings were owned, brutalized, and denied liberty.

But asking who gained economically, who lost, and whether slavery retarded development remains useful as a matter of inquiry, not least because it helps us understand how the institution operated and why powerful interests fought to preserve it. That was the significance of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s controversial 1974 study Time on the Cross. Their argument that slavery was profitable and that large plantations were unusually productive did not morally vindicate the institution to them. It challenged the comforting belief that slavery was an economically doomed relic that would eventually disappear by itself. If slavery remained lucrative, moral opposition had to be converted into political action.

Economic analysis can therefore strengthen the indictment against slavery. Showing how enslavers accumulated wealth by appropriating labor while imposing enormous costs on enslaved families, other workers, and future generations exposes the material interests concealed beneath grand rhetoric about tradition and social order.

In the same chapter, Vance complains that economics has occupied the moral space vacated by declining religion. The deeper irony is that many political economists stood alongside Britain’s evangelical abolitionists in fighting slavery. The evangelicals saw humanity as brothers and sisters before God. The classical economists began from the secular premise that black people possessed the same agency, rationality, and right to choose as anyone else.

Economics earned the “dismal” epithet that Vance now repeats, in other words, not by calculating away human freedom but by taking it seriously.