Larry Moss and the Struggle Against
Racism by the Whately Professors of
Political Economy
By SANDRA J. PEART and DAVID M. LEVY*
ABSTRACT. In this note, we highlight an important consideration of
Larry Moss’s life’s work, the continual struggle within economics
against racism. Larry initiated and supported the symposium on
eugenics published by the American Journal of Economics and Soci-
ology in July 2005. He edited the volume Social Inequality, Analytical
Egalitarianism and the March Toward Eugenic Explanations in the
Social Sciences in August 2008. These constitute obvious signs of
Larry’s concern.
He conjectured that the Trinity College Dublin political economists
who held the Whately professorship should be thought of as a school.
*Sandra J. Peart is Dean and Professor of the Jepson School of Leadership
Studies at the University of Richmond, and was president of the History of Economics
Society from 2007–2008. Her work includes the wide-ranging contributions of W. S.
Jevons, the use of the time preference as a stigma in economics, and the theory of
leadership. A graduate of the University of Toronto, she is the editor of the forth-
coming volume of F. A. Hayek’s writings on J. S. Mill in the Collected Works. David
M. Levy is Professor of Economics and Research Fellow of the Center for Study of
Public Study at George Mason University. A graduate of the University of California
(Berkeley) and the University of Chicago, his work includes the motivated economist,
the impact of government-financed R&D, statistical ethics, and robust institutions as
well the history of the debates between the classical economists and the racialists.
Levy and Peart contributed the articles on George Stigler and the Socialist Calculation
Debate to the New Palgrave’s Dictionary of Economics. They are currently working
on a book on the role of experts in an exchange economy. The prize-winning
Peart and Levy (2005) Vanity of the Philosopher and analytical egalitarianism was the
subject of a 2008 volume of the AJES. Also in 2008, Peart and Levy organized a
symposium on econometric ethics for the Eastern Economic Journal. Peart and
Levy’s Summer Institute for the History of Economics has now completed its first
decade with papers and conversations from the first five years collected in their
Street Porter & the Philosopher: Conversations on Analytical Egalitarianism from
Michigan.
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 69, No. 1 (January, 2010).
© 2010 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.