Economics got the nickname 'the dismal science' from an essay defending slavery

Thomas Carlyle coined "the dismal science" in an 1849 essay, not, as is often assumed, to mock Malthus's grim population predictions, but to attack economists like John Stuart Mill who argued that free labor, not slavery, should govern the West Indies. The insult outlived its ugly original target and stuck to the entire field.

— Thomas Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question — Fraser's Magazine, 1849