CLASSICAL ECONOMICS AND THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE: A STUDY IN LIMITS by Edward J. O’Boyle, Ph.D. Mayo Research Institute This paper was published in the Forum for Social Economics, Volume 35, Number 2, Fall 2006. For more information about the Forum, go to http://www.social economics.org/forum.htm Questions and comments should be directed to: Edward J. O’Boyle, Ph.D. Mayo Research Institute 1217 Dean Chapel Road, West Monroe, Louisiana 71291 USA Tel: 318/396-5779 E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract The Great Irish Famine resulted from two massive failures: the blight which destroyed the potato crop and the non-interventionism of the English government. The first failure which also occurred in other European countries was devastating for the Irish who depended on the potato as their main source of nourishment. The second failure was a human failure because English government policy was instructed by classical economics to let the market clear the surplus population from the land and was reinforced by the anti-Irish racism common in England at the time, even among classical economists, notably Senior and J.S. Mill. It is commonplace in economic research to assume that the investigator has removed all traces of personal values from his/her work. As Becker (1961, p.10) implies, that could be a serious error. For that reason, let me state at the outset that I am a first-generation Irish-American, holding dual citizenship in the United States and the Republic of Ireland. My mother and father both were born and raised in County Mayo -- the poorest county in western Ireland where the toll in human lives lost during the Great Famine was staggering.