The dismal science is another, often derogatory, name for economics devised by the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle. The term is an inversion of the phrase "gay science", meaning "life-enhancing skills". This was a familar expression at the time, and was later adopted as the title of a book by Nietzsche. Economics (deriving from the Greek words οίκος [oikos], house, and νέμω [nemo], rules hence household management) is the social science that studies the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited wants. ... Queen Victoria (shown here on the morning of her Accession to the Throne, June 20, 1837) gave her name to the historic era. ... The most familiar view of Carlyle is as the bearded sage with a penetrating gaze. ... Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a highly influential German philosopher. ...

It is often stated that Carlyle gave economics the nickname 'dismal science' as a response to the writings of Thomas Robert Malthus, who grimly predicted that starvation would result as projected population growth exceeded the rate of increase in the food supply. Carlyle did indeed use the word 'dismal' in relation to Malthus's theory in his essay Chartism (1839): The Rev. ... 1839 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ...

"The controversies on Malthus and the 'Population Principle', 'Preventative Check' and so forth, with which the public ear has been deafened for a long while, are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next, is all that of the preventative check and the denial of the preventative check."

However the full phase "dismal science" first occurs in Carlyle's 1849 tract entitled Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, in which he was arguing for the reintroduction of slavery as a means to regulate the labor market in the West Indies. Developing a deliberately paradoxical position, Carlyle argued that slavery was actually morally superior to the market forces of supply and demand promoted by economists, since, in his view, the freeing up of the labor market by the liberation of slaves had actually led to a moral and economic decline in the lives of the former slaves themselves. 1849 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... The Caribbean or the West Indies is a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea. ... The supply and demand model describes how prices vary as a result of a balance between product availability at each price (supply) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand). ...

Carlyle's view was attacked by John Stuart Mill and other liberal economists. John Stuart Mill (May 20, 1806 – May 8, 1873), aka JS Mill, an English philosopher and political economist, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. ... In politics, the term liberal refers to: an adherent of the ideology of liberalism —an ideology espousing liberty. ...

External links

• The Secret History of the Dismal Science, by David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart.
• The Origin of the Term "Dismal Science" to Describe Economics, by Robert Dixon
• Online text of Carlyle's essay An Occassional Discourse on the Nigger Question