[BITList] The potato famine

[FA]

Then we wonder why they dislike the English
frank

In today's selection -- in 1845, a potato famine began in Ireland that 
would eventually lead to the deaths of a million people, and force 
another million to leave Ireland's shores resulting in a decline in 
Ireland's population of almost twenty-five percent. Yet the British 
government offered almost no assistance, since it was fully under the 
sway of Adam Smith and his landmark book of 1776 titled/The Wealth of 
Nations/ which stated that markets were led by an invisible hand and 
government interference in markets was harmful:

"In 1845, Ireland had been a full [but poor] constituent nation of the 
United Kingdom for more than four decades, and an accessory of the 
British economy and polity, if often by force, for several centuries 
before that. ... The most telling evidence of its poverty was the 
near-total reliance of the rural economy and population on a single 
crop: the potato. So when the first reports of a disastrous failure of 
the Irish potato crop began to emerge in September 1845, they were 
brought at once to the attention of the government in Westminster.

"The government's initial response was quick. A scientific fact-finding 
mission was dispatched, the gravity of the situation was ascertained, 
and a Relief Commission established. ... [But] those praying for a 
merciful policy from [Britain]'s Treasury should, however, have been 
forewarned by the very first sentence of an editorial shot across his 
bows from /The Economist/ magazine in late November 1845. It opened with 
a chilling warning: '[C]harity is the national error of Englishmen'. 
There was no question that the impending Irish famine was an economic 
disaster and a human tragedy. But simply sending aid was absolutely the 
wrong way to help. It would violate two central principles of economic 
theory. The first was the need to avoid moral hazard. Send aid, and one 
might alleviate the immediate problem -- but at the cost of reducing the 
Irish to a state of permanent dependency. The second was the hallowed 
principle of non-intervention in the operation of the market. Adam Smith 
had proved that it was allowing private self-interest to operate as 
freely as possible that most efficiently achieves the social good. For 
the government to interfere with the operation of the market in solving 
the crisis would therefore be a foolish error.

"A second editorial in /The Economist/, published in March 1846, 
captured the consensus which dominated the views of the British 
Establishment. Proactive intervention by the government, the editors 
warned, would be futile: 'To feed the Irish, to attempt which it is now 
practically driven, . . . is for the legislature physically impossible. 
To attempt it therefore risked jeopardising the authority of government: 
it would 'only damage the interfering, unthinking lawmaker ... arms 
against him all the unsatisfied desires of the people, and must in the 
end destroy his power'. Ultimately, it would do more harm than good: 
'The legislature therefore cannot effectively help Ireland . . . [I]t 
can no more relieve the wants of the Irish, than a man can cure 
/delirium tremens/ by swallowing daily increasing quantities of ardent 
spirits. Above all, to deny these self-evident truths was proof not of 
an alternative political or moral disposition -- but of willful 
ignorance of objective, scientific fact. Appealing to the British people 
to send assistance to Ireland, the editors of /The Economist/ wrote, 
'appears like calling on us to unlearn the first rules of arithmetic, 
and do our sums by the assertion that two and two make five'.  Within 
seventy years of its publication, Adam Smith's theory of monetary 
society had attained the status of scientific -- indeed, mathematical -- 
truth.

"Since virtually every official and politician dealing with Ireland was 
a devoted acolyte of these doctrines, they dictated British policy. Sir 
Robert Peel managed to have Parliament authorise a lone consignment of 
£100,000-worth of American maize before his government collapsed and 
with it any further hope of significant relief. The consequences of this 
inaction were catastrophic.

"Throughout the winter of 1845 and the spring of 1846 there was famine 
on a scale unprecedented in Ireland's history. By the summer of 1846 
large bands of the poor were to be found roaming the countryside, living 
off weeds and nettles. The country was close to a breakdown of civil 
order: military rule was installed in all but name. Yet worse was to 
come. In August, to universal horror, the potato crop failed for a 
second year. None of this was secret; all of it was widely and vividly 
reported -- on 2 September, a leader-writer in /The Times/ of London 
described the situation simply but clearly as 'total annihilation'.

*Potato Famine Memorial, Dublin*


"Incredibly, the policy debate in London continued at the level of 
abstract principles. Smith and his followers had proved that 
interference with the natural operation of monetary society can only be 
bad: it was essential not to heed the siren song of those calling for 
government intervention. 'We have no knowledge of any theoretical or 
scientific deduction whatever, so amply confirmed as this of Smith: 
thundered the editors of /The Economist/ on 2 January 1847. Morality had 
nothing to do with it: it would be a travesty of reason itself if the 
government were to 'turn back to the old discredited principles of 
interference, and adopt practices the most unscientific and the most 
decried'. ...

"The new discipline of economics boldly claimed to reduce what had once 
seemed vital questions of moral and political justice to the mechanical 
application of objective scientific truths. The complicity of this new 
world-view in ethical disaster was not lost on all contemporary 
observers. It was Nassau Senior -- the Drummond Professor of Political 
Economy at Oxford and one of the government's chief advisers on Irish 
economic policy -- whom Benjamin Jowett, the great Master of Balliol 
College, Oxford, had in mind when he said years later: 'I have always 
felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them 
say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more 
than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good."

Author: Felix Martin
Title: /Money: The Unauthorized Biography/
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