Wesley Clair Mitchell and the “Illiberal Reformers”
评估制度经济学家米切尔是否像进步时代改革者那样关注个体生物质量并信仰优生学，发现他虽受时代影响但更接受人性可塑性，对后来改革有启示。
The aim of this article is to assess whether Wesley Clair Mitchell, as a reformer, ever expressed concern over the biological quality of individuals and whether he did somehow share the Progressive Era faith in eugenics as an instrument for improving American society’s health, welfare, and morals. Using both published and unpublished evidence, we argue that, as an institutionalist, Mitchell was free from the paternalistic and antidemocratic bent of the progressives and was ready to accept the new faith in the plasticity of human nature that sustained interwar reformism. At the same time, as someone who had been exposed to the Progressive Era cultural milieu, he could not completely divorce himself from the earlier decades’ preoccupation with the biological quality of individuals.