The question we propose to address is how did economics move from the classical period characterized by the hardest possible doctrine of initial human homogeneityall the observed differences among people arise from incentives, luck, and historyto become comfortable with accounts of human behavior which alleged foundational differences among and within races of people? (Darity 1995) In this paper, we shall argue that early British eugenics thinkers racialized economics in the post-classical period.

In The Ultimate Resource (1981, 1996), and in many other publications over the last several decades, Julian Simon put forth controversial views regarding the connection between natural resource scarcity, population growth, and economic progress. Simon argued, in contrast to those espousing the limits to growth, that natural resources were not getting scarcer, but more abundant, and that a large and growing population was an asset rather than a liability in the pursuit of economic growth.

The developments in macroeconomic theory in the 1930s had far-reaching theoretical implications for the attitude towards fiscal policy. In the following decades numerous articles and books analyzed the effects of fiscal policy on the economic activity. The analyses were often closely related to the Keynesian macroeconomic framework and the multiplier. The object of this paper is to draw attention to a book which analyzed fiscal policy from a different perspective.

Emil Lederer (18821939) was exposed to diverse influences. In Vienna he was a student of Eugen von Bhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, and Eugen von Philippovich, but when Hilferding and Otto Bauer spoke in those Viennese seminars Lederer must often have taken the side of the Marxists believe Jakob Marschak et al. (1941, p. 80). In Berlin, Lederer attended Gustav Schmoller's lectures. His supervisor in Munich, where he received a second doctoral degree, was Lujo Brentano. Lederer's habilitation submitted to the University of Heidelberg entailed the first comprehensive analysis of the working conditions and political attitudes of salaried employees (Dickler 1987, p. 157). As much as his last work, on the State of the Masses, published posthumously in 1940, it was an important contribution to sociology.

In the period of the marginal revolution in England, utility was traditionally defined in reference to either desire or pleasure. William Stanley Jevons, for example, referred to pleasure. According to Jevons, utility was actually identical with the addition made to a person's happiness, that is to say to the sum of the pleasure created and the pain prevented (1871, pp. 5354). Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Marshall's spiritual father and mother, criticized this Benthamist perspective (Sidgwick 1883, p. 63) and introduced another definition at Cambridge. By utility of material things, Sidgwick stated, we mean their capacity tosatisfy men's needs and desires (1883, p. 84, emphasis added). Marshall, for his part, repeatedly moved from one meaning to another. In the first edition of his Principles of Economics, the term utility alternatively designated desire or pleasure. Few commentators have noted this double meaning of utility (Homan 1933, p. 224; Stigler 1950, p. 384; Guillebaud 1961, pp. 23637; Aldrich 1996, p. 211). Only Arthur Cecil Pigou (1903) and Jacob Viner (1925, p. 64749) have actually brought out its theoretical implications. No explanation as to the prevalence of this duality or its status in Marshall's welfare economics seems to have been proposed. Such is the intention of this article.