Within the Nineteen Eighties, an intermediate microeconomics textual content that I used to be a giant fan of was Donald N. McCloskey’s The Utilized Idea of Worth. It’s very “Chicagoan” in the most effective sense of that phrase. When you mastered that guide–I imply actually mastered it–you would plausibly name your self a microeconomist and never only a scholar.

Right here’s a hyperlink to a pdf of the textual content, which McCloskey affords at a zero value.

My good friend Rick Geddes of Cornell College got here throughout correspondence in 1988 between McCloskey and the president of Penn State College. I received’t quote the entire thing as a result of McCloskey’s letter was prolonged. He confirmed extra respect for the outrageous president than I might have.

Right here’s the related part of the textual content: it’s about racial discrimination within the labor market:

Q: If employers, to a various diploma, have a distaste for hiring black employees reasonably than white employees on the similar wage, then an increase within the proportion of blacks to whites will probably be accompanied by a fall within the relative wages of blacks.

A: Because the proportion rises, the blacks should be paid the identical wages (assuming that blacks and whites are an identical apart from coloration), or else the low-wage particular person will undersell the high-wage one. So the black wage is set by the wage differential that simply compensates probably the most discriminatory employer hiring any black for hiring “the” marginal one. Subsequently, true.

On October 21, 1988, President Bryce Jordan of Penn State College wrote McCloskey, then a tenured professor on the College of Iowa, asking McCloskey to alter the textual content. Jordan wrote:

I’m writing on behalf of involved college students at Penn State who’re distressed about sure language in your textual content, The Utilized Idea of Worth. I perceive that Jim Rodgers, head of Penn State’s Division of Economics, has mentioned these considerations with you in that phrases exist within the textual content which might be perceived to be offensive to college students of African-American descent. We refer particularly to web page 451 of the textual content the place it cites: “(assuming that blacks and whites are an identical apart from coloration).” It will be my hope that you’d work along with your editors to see that this specific passage is deleted from forthcoming editions of the textual content.

In McCloskey’s lengthy reply, he tried to determine what Jordan meant and responded to every potential that means. In my opinion it was a good-faith effort.

Then McCloskey turned to the broader difficulty, writing:

Let me be completely clear that I’m not going to accede to your demand. I might actually reasonably go to jail. I need to resist after all any such request for censorship, nevertheless politely expressed–and yours is clumsily and insultingly expressed–or nevertheless influential the requestor–and you’re very influential. I might have thought that the president of Penn State would know this, however these are dangerous occasions at no cost inquiry, when those that are purported to defend it shirk. I received’t. Your request for revision is politically motivated and wholly unreasoned, and I need to resist it with all my tiny energy.

McCloskey ended the letter with the next:

I’ve wider considerations. My concern is that you simply signify a brand new breed of directors with a feeble understanding of educational freedom
(which isn’t “bestowed” by anybody; it’s a fragile social customized, simply taken away, by such actions as yours). My concern is that you simply and your college students have in some way gotten the concept democratic life is a matter of constructing calls for and issuing orders. My concern is that your rhetoric of “sensitivity” is a canopy for attacking probably the most susceptible elements of the society, the conversations of great individuals. Most of all my concern is that we school professors are in some way not educating individuals to what actual sensitivity to ethical points is about, one thing past Dr. Feelgood “considerations” unarticulated and backed by threats of boycott and makes use of of authority. However I can’t threaten you in flip to get you to answer my considerations. I can solely motive with you.

Word that second sentence within the above quote. Man, was McCloskey ever on to one thing. The rot was there no less than 35 years in the past.

For extra on labor market discrimination, see Linda Gorman, “Discrimination,” in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.