Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

222 Laurence S. Mosssurvival of these groups in a given territorial area is an exception to the sociallyprogressive rule that “those races survive and predominate in which the bestqualities [virtues] are most strongly developed” (Marshall 1961 [1920]: 244). I shallhereafter refer to this as Marshall’s Exception to the Rule of Ethnic Survival(Marshall’s ERES).Marshall’s Principles went through several revisions in his lifetime and each timeMarshall would scour the text, rearranging sentences, changing words, and so on.Significantly, Marshall’s ERES remained more or less intact from edition toedition, despite the world outrage that was expressed in the 1890s condemningSultan Abdul Hamid II’s wholesale massacre of the Armenians living in what isnow called Turkey (Balakian 2003: 35). Marshall’s remark that “biology and socialscience alike show that parasites sometimes benefit in unexpected ways the race onwhich they thrive; yet in many cases they turn the peculiarities of that race to goodaccount for their own purposes without giving any good return” (Marshall 1961[1920]: 244) could be understood to imply that the brutal elimination of theArmenian population may indeed have been in the economic interest of the dominantgroup of Turks living in that region. At the very least, Marshall’s explicitremarks about the Armenian parasites in the context of the world politics of the daycan be described as both insensitive and crass. Even the leader of the entire BritishEmpire, Prime Minister William E. Gladstone, referred to the Sultan as “thebloody Sultan” and “the great assassin” (Balakian 2003: 35). Marshall’s referenceto Armenians as “parasites” living off the backs of the rest of the Ottoman populationsis shocking.Hayek’s views on the waning of tribal ethicsIn his last book, written in 1988, nearly a century after Marshall’s, Friedrich A.Hayek described the modern world as gradually abandoning the collectivist ethicsof the tribe for the cosmopolitan ethics of the extended (market) order. 2 Accordingto Hayek, those population groups that willingly adopt the ethical precepts andbehavioral rules of a market order will both multiply in number and enjoy everrisingliving standards (Hayek 1988: 25–8, 120–34). The ethical precepts of anextended order include honesty, fair dealing, respect for private property, and promise keeping. Hayek, like Marshall, saw a causal connection between a “correct”culture and social progress (Hayek 1988: 11–17). Unlike Marshall, Hayek did notcarve out an exception for any particular ethnic group. Both economists harkedback to older intellectual traditions in the social sciences, including the progressiveevolutionary ideas of Herbert Spencer (Hayek 1988: 27; see Moss 1982, 1990).According to Hayek, overall population density can be and often is a completelysatisfactory measure of material economic progress and national wealth, so long asthe population is growing within genuine market settings.Following the modern population optimist Julian Simon (1989, 1996), Hayekdeclared himself an anti-Malthusian, no longer fearful of expanding populationdensity as long as it occurred within the context of market institutions (Hayek 1988:125–6). More brainpower per acre – what Simon termed nature’s “ultimate