Why is economics called the “dismal” science?
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 knowledge”. This was a familiar expression at the time, and was later adopted as the title of a book by Nietzsche (see The Gay Science). 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 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
Economics, the science studying the allocation of limited resources which have alternative utility, is often referred to as the “dismal science” because it deals with the inherent, inescapable limitations and realities of the human condition. Scarecity relative to demand will always exist. Personally I find it quite facinating.
