Research Highlights Podcast
February 11, 2026
W.E.B. Du Bois and the history of marginalism
Daniel Kuehn discusses key insights in marginalist wage theory developed by W. E. B. Du Bois when he was a Harvard graduate student.
W. E. B. Du Bois seated at his desk in Atlanta, Georgia.
Source: W.E.B Du Bois Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries
W.E.B. Du Bois is remembered as a civil rights leader, sociologist, and author of The Souls of Black Folk. But before he became famous for his empirical studies of Black life in America, Du Bois was a graduate student at Harvard studying cutting-edge economic theory. In 1891, at age 23, he submitted a 158-page manuscript entitled A Constructive Critique of Wage Theory to a Harvard prize competition. The manuscript sat in the Harvard archives for over a century, largely unexamined by trained economists.
Author Daniel Kuehn recently requested that Harvard digitize the manuscript so that he could analyze its contents. In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, he explores how Du Bois anticipated the application of marginalist ideas in economics to the determination of wages.
Kuehn recently spoke with Tyler Smith about Du Bois’s contributions to wage theory, why these contributions went unrecognized, and how his time in Berlin redirected him toward the historical and empirical work for which he is known.
The edited highlights of that conversation are below, and the full interview can be heard using the podcast player.
Tyler Smith: W. E. B. Du Bois is often thought of as a sociologist and not really as an economist. Why did you think it was time to reassess his place in economics?
Daniel Kuehn: People have been interested in Du Bois’s work in the German Historical School of Economics, his empirical work, and then his work later in life, in the 1930s, when he picked up Marxism. So certainly people before me recognized his economic training and contributions in those areas. What I was surprised to discover in the archives and thought needed some elaborating, was his time at the very beginning of his career at Harvard. This is the early 1890s, when he was studying marginalist economics and neoclassical economics. And I think that's what's genuinely new, what people haven't really appreciated or written about Du Bois before. He didn't continue that work. When Du Bois left Harvard for the University of Berlin in 1892, after that point, he didn't continue his work in neoclassical and marginalist economics. But it was training that he had, and he wrote quite a bit about it at Harvard and made some advances in wage theory in particular.
Smith: At Harvard, Du Bois studied under an economist named Frank Taussig. Who was Frank Taussig, and what role did he play in shaping Du Bois's economic thinking?
Kuehn: In the early 20th century, Taussig was a household name among American households and economists. He was called the American Alfred Marshall. He was a prominent textbook writer and economist at the time, and he worked on a lot of public commissions so that the public knew him as a contributor to tariff policy and things like that. When Du Bois met him in the early 1890s, though, Taussig was just starting his career; he was a relative unknown, primarily working on tariff policy at that early stage in his career. When Du Bois started studying with him, he had started to turn his attention to wage theory, and eventually, in 1896, he wrote a book called Wages and Capital on the wages fund theory and how wages are determined. That's the context in which Du Bois met him. He was working on these problems at the same time that Du Bois was working on neoclassical wage theory and published this manuscript, which was a constructive critique of wage theory.
Smith: In 1891, Du Bois submitted this book-length manuscript, critiquing the prevailing wage theories of the time, to a prize competition. What was Du Bois's critique?
Kuehn: Actually, it wasn't highly critical in the sense that he recognized that all of these authors had their hand on the elephant, so to speak. They had a piece of the puzzle, and he recognized the value in all of them. He reviewed classical wage theory, the wages fund theory that he learned from Taussig. He reviewed Marx as well, but what he was most impressed by was the Marginalists, particularly the Austrian school. Just to remind listeners, in the early 1870s—this was about 20 years prior—there was a simultaneous discovery of the marginal principle by Walras, Menger, and Jevons. Du Bois reviews all of those. And he's particularly interested in how the Austrians are starting to apply marginalism to factor price determination. What determines the interest rate? What determines the wage rate? Those sorts of things. It was a slow process to apply marginal principles to factor price determination, and Du Bois thought that the Austrians were really where most of the advances in wage theory were going to go in the future. The first two-thirds of this manuscript is what we call a literature review. And he's looking at very current stuff such as work published that year or the year prior in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He's on the cutting edge of the literature. And then the last third of the manuscript is developing his own theory, starting with Menger and the Austrians. He builds a wage theory from that. What's interesting is he applies marginal principles to labor demand—marginal productivity of the worker—and to labor supply. Neither of those pieces had been fully developed at that point. We usually think of marginal product theory as being associated with John Bates Clark in his 1899 book. People had hinted at it throughout the 1890s, but Du Bois was understanding how these principles apply to both labor supply and labor demand in a way that hadn't been laid out before and certainly hadn't been included in Taussig's book in 1896. He was on the frontier of this kind of work.
Smith: It seems like Du Bois is putting his finger on some really important concepts and ideas for the economics profession and how it will develop in the future. Why do you think he hasn't gotten much credit for these insights?
Kuehn: I think, in this particular case, it's because the manuscript was hard to access. I mean, this is an archival problem that touches a lot of areas of the history of economics. It's currently digitized because I requested that Harvard University digitize it for this project. But before then, it was sitting in the archives at Harvard. If you showed up, you could read it. But it just wasn't there to exploit. A lot of Du Bois's papers and letters have already been digitized at the University of Amherst. They're just not from this period of his career. They don't really cover his Harvard experience. So that's the main reason that this hasn't been appreciated in the past.
I think another obstacle was that the biographers and historians who had mentioned this manuscript before weren’t trained economists, so they didn't really appreciate what they were looking at to a certain extent. There's one, for example, that referenced this manuscript before I wrote about it, and he said Du Bois talks about Marx in 1891. We knew that Du Bois became a Marxist in the 1930s, but this shows that he was reading Marx in 1891. And that's true and sort of interesting. But it completely misses the point of the manuscript and what was new about it. I think a lot of historians just don't have the eye to pick out the marginalism in this to understand what was cutting edge about this work. And I think that's been an important obstacle in understanding it as well.
Smith: In 1892, Du Bois went to the University of Berlin. Why does he decide to further his studies there?
Kuehn: Because Berlin was just the hot spot for studying economics, and all of the best economists, especially American economists, made their way through there, either as students or visiting faculty. It was one of the principal areas for economic study at the time. In fact, Taussig is associated with neoclassical economics in the United States, but he went through Germany and studied there as well. A lot of economists at this time were influenced by the German Historical School and German economists generally. So, for the same reason he went from Fisk to Harvard—it was the best in the United States—he knew he had to be there. And once he was at Harvard, Berlin was the place to be internationally, so he had to be there.
Du Bois was one of those guys that shaped his own legacy. He wrote three autobiographies, and they provide an amazing picture of his time in Berlin, especially, but also on his time at Harvard. If you're interested in his intellectual pursuits and studies, read Du Bois.
Daniel Kuehn
Smith: This period seems to be pivotal for determining his later intellectual trajectory. How did the German Historical School of Economics reshape his views of the social sciences?
Kuehn: A lot of the difference between the German Historical School and the neoclassical economics that we're used to is in the name. It was historically grounded and empirically grounded. They didn't teach these universal laws of optimization and marginal analysis, these universal laws that govern economic activity. They believed that to understand how the economy worked, you needed to understand the legal history. You needed to understand norms and cultural practices and everything about society that shaped how people truck, barter, and exchange. It's understanding the cultural context that gives you the understanding of economic activity. It also means that different national contexts can have different economic laws, so to speak. It was very empirical in that sense. They also believed that economics and all social sciences should be marshaled to improve society. There was a strong sense that economists should be participating in government. Many members of the German Historical School were involved in public policymaking and various governmental positions. And they believed it was important for economics to be bent toward social reform. Because of his status as a Black American and his limited educational opportunities, he had a lifelong concern for civil rights and social reform, which is what people typically remember him for. That all fit in perfectly with the German Historical School's understanding of the role of social science in society at large.
Smith: We are focused in this discussion on a pretty short period of Du Bois’s life. For those who want to engage more deeply with Du Bois and his thinking, where would you recommend they start?
Kuehn: Guy Numa and Sammy Zahran have an article coming out in the Journal of Economic Literature on Du Bois and stratification economics. It puts his work in the context of the modern theory of stratification economics. That's a great place to start. Du Bois has some amazing biographies written about him. David Levering Lewis has several books that I'd recommend. And Du Bois was one of those guys that shaped his own legacy. He wrote three autobiographies, and they provide an amazing picture of his time in Berlin, especially, but also on his time at Harvard. If you're interested in his intellectual pursuits and studies, read Du Bois. He's a beautiful autobiographer and a beautiful writer, so I'd recommend going to that as well.
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“Retrospectives: W. E. B. Du Bois, Harvard Economics, and Marginalist Wage Theory” appears in the Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Music in the audio is by Sound of Picture.