3 - Are Families Immoral Because They Are Poor, or Poor Because Immoral? The Early Lausanne Economists

Summary

Compared with Britain, industrial transformation occurred more slowly in nineteenth-century France and Italy, forcing two early marginalists from the Lausanne school to pay continued attention to family poverty among the agrarian masses. Although Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto wanted to explain and resolve family impoverishment by securing a market whose outcomes correlated with what families deserved, the two economists diverged on the causes of family impoverishment, and on the best ways to respond. Walras’s ‘social economics’ rejected a popular view that family ‘immorality’ was the cause of family impoverishment, instead identifying badly designed government policy as the key factor. Pareto’s studies of population suggested the opposite position. Assuming government corruption and protective policies had been dismantled, Pareto assigned primary responsibility for poverty to egoistical parents, who should have anticipated cyclical economic decline before having children. Describing Malthus’s rejection of contraception as ‘not very scientific’, Pareto studied ‘people as they are’, finding families to be already limiting fertility through delayed sexual union or contraceptive knowledge. This suggested to Pareto that poverty would disappear spontaneously. Neither Walras nor Pareto explained how to manage existing family destitution or unanticipated economic crisis, and they did not problematise the many structural impediments to escaping one’s class.