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Nea presidential address: Political economy, race, and morals

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The Review of Black Political Economy

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Notes

  1. See Adam Smith,An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Campbell, R.H. and A.S. Skinner eds., Oxford, England (New York, NY: Clarendon Press, 1976).

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  2. Some historians of economic thought contend that Smith was less successful in achieving a full separation of morality and political economy than his followers. For Smith, according to Lewis Haney inHistory of Economic Thought (MacMillan, 1936), virtue for its own sake is a primary consideration. Moreover, Smith regarded the selfinterest of man as being entirely consistent with achievement of moral goodness. The reference to the view of morality that we make here is to the broader notion held among late political economists who sought a distinct limitation of government involvement in private affairs (and therefore in issues of private morality) except in the few instances of maintenance of the public good.

  3. Milton Friedman,Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

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  4. See Milton Friedman, and Rose Friedman,Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York, NY: Avon, 1981).

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  5. One of the dominant views of the origins of social policy towards the poor in the United States is that almost every effort to help, whether public or private, was constrained by the desire to instill a middle-class set of virtues or morals, particularly as these values relate to the respect for work. See Critchlow and Hawley’s provocative set of essays,Poverty and Public Policy in Modern America (Chicago, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1989).

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  6. See for example Reuter and Kleiman, “Risks and Prices: An Economic Analysis of Drug Enforcement,”Crime and Justice 7 (1986), pp. 289–340.

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  7. Elliot Liebow,Tally’s Corner (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1967).

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  8. Michael Piore, “Public and Private Responsibilities in On the Job Training of Disadvantaged Workers,” mimeographed (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968).

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  9. Samuel L. Myers, Jr., “The Economics of Bail Jumping,”The Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 10, No. 2 (June 1981).

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Myers, S.L. Nea presidential address: Political economy, race, and morals. Rev Black Polit Econ 18, 5–15 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02717881

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02717881

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