Crossing Boundaries, Displacing Previous Knowledge and Claiming Superiority: Is the Economics of Discrimination a Conquest of Economics Imperialism?

Discrimination has been a continuous concern in economics, originally focusing on wage inequalities and segregation. Gary Becker’s (1971b) work on discrimination is commonly viewed as an expression of “economics imperialism.” In this work Becker makes racial discrimination fit in a trade model, applying price theory to an object previously perceived as “owned” by other social sciences – providing an example of transgression in terms of “property rights” (Becker 1971b, 10). After a contrasted reception of The Economics of Discrimination (Swedberg 1990, 27–28; Fleury 2012), analysis of racial discrimination was quickly integrated within labor economics textbooks and academic curricula. Taken as an imperialist conquest, the integration of the economics of discrimination today seems complete: the whole Beckerian project – the “economic approach to human behavior” – considerably changed the study of economics over the past 50 years. This chapter aims at recasting the traditional understanding of economics imperialism by proposing another historical narrative of the economics of discrimination.