Kaletsky's ignorance

Anatole Kaletsky inserts a factual claim into his string of opinion - and gets it wrong:

Almost since its inception in the late 18th century, economics has been nicknamed “the dismal science”.

Error one - the study of economics did not begin in the late 18th century. Has Kaletsky forgotten William Petty, Francois Quesnay or Richard Cantillon, not to mention late Scholastic thinkers?
More scandalously, he's forgotten that John Locke was an economist - sufficiently a good one to come up with the quantity theory of money, MV = PT:

This shews the necessity of some Proportion of Money to Trade: But what Proportion that is, is hard to determine; because it depends not barely on the quantity of Money, but the quickness of its Circulation. The very same Shilling may at one time pay Twenty Men in Twenty days, at another, rest in the same Hands One hundred days together....
The lowering of Interest will raise the value of all other Things in proportion. For Money being the Counter-ballance to all other Things purchasable by it, and lying, as it were, in the opposite Scale of Commerce, it looks like a natural Consequence, that as much as you take off from the value of Money, so much you add to the price of other Things.

Error two - the phrase "dismal science" was not used soon after the late 18th C. It's thought that it was coined by Thomas Carlyle in this essay in defence of slavery written in 1849:

Not a "gay science," I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the  dismal science.

So, even if we date the "inception" of economics to 1776, the subject went 73 years - an entire human lifetime - before getting the nickname "dismal science." That's 31.7% of the history of post-Wealth of Nations economics.
This is no mere pedantry. Any educated economist knows that economics did not begin in 1776. And all good economists know the origin of the phrase dismal science. And we're proud to use it, as it identifies us with the friends of liberty and logic such as John Stuart Mill against obscurantists slavers like Carlyle.
That Kaletsky is ignorant of this suggests he is not a proper economist.

Comments

[angry economist]

I buy the times every day and read AK's column usually

And I can tell from that, it suggests he's not a proper economist

Would a proper economist ever become a full blown journalist?

[calmo]

Nice "full blown" note, angry. I mean juicy poetry.
So AK is blowing fully but pissing away his opportunity of becoming a proper economist?

Ok, Stumbling, I'm totally improper and proud, damn proud, of it. That little taste of scholarly dissection wherein it was shown that some properly recognized philosophers had an occasional foray into the field of economics has me amused. Not properly of course, but amused nonetheless.