Whether the source was fiction or true crime, the main element in melodrama was the black-and-white nature of the characters: good was good, evil was evil… it was Dickens, with his exaggerated characters, who was most frequently the source of melodrama (Flanders 2011, p. 156).
Morality fascinates us. The stories we enjoy the most, whether fictional or real, are tales of good and evil (Bloom 2013, p. 2).
To tell a story is inescapably to take a moral stance, even if it is a moral stance against a moral stance (Bruner 1990, p. 51).
Abstract
This paper considers differences in how economists and novelists view the importance of good and evil in determining social outcomes. As opposed to novelists, economists see the possibility of achieving desirable outcomes through the pursuit of self-interest in markets with good and evil having little influence on that achievement. However, the paper also considers problems with relying on self-interest alone to generate publicly desirable outcomes through markets and points out limits to self-interest in markets. It is argued that novels and literature are a time-tested way of promoting the moral education necessary for well-functioning markets. Attention is turned to the similarities between Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments and the novels of Jane Austen on the means by which people are able to transcend narrow self-interest in ways that improve both economic and social outcomes.
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Notes
Heyne’s definition of the “economic way of thinking” has many antecedents. Wicksteed (1910, p. 173) pointed out that whether one’s motives are selfish or unselfish, they are often achieved best by engaging in market transactions, with the same concern given to the marginal costs and benefits as reflected in market prices. Keynes (1922, p. v) argued that economics “does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking, which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.” Perhaps the most definitive early expression of this view was articulated by Robbins (1932) who argued that economics was primarily about the best means of attaining desired ends in the presence of scarcity.
There are exceptions. Novels often consider the struggles between good and evil within an individual (Crime and Punishment) and economics does not rule out some people being predisposed toward evil (Chapter 10, "Why the Worst Get on Top," in Hayek (1944)).
Oatley goes on to add that “(a novel) had better not be about moralizing or it will seem clunky” (p. 50).
Read’s story was modeled on Adam Smith’s example of the woolen coat in Wealth of Nations (1776, pp. 40–41) where Smith emphasizes that the coat “is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen.” (p. 41).
The literature on the prisoners’ dilemma and its application in a wide range of social sciences is voluminous. For a general exposition of the prisoner’s dilemma, see Poundstone (1992), Dixit and Nalebuff (2007), Caplan (2008) and Kuhn (2017). For an application to political theory, see the work of Axelrod (1981, 1984). For applications in economics to public goods and externalities, see Ostrom (2005) and Cowen (2007). A classic application in natural resource economics is found in Hardin (1968).
Interestingly, Marx (1875) argued that such a principle would only hold “In a higher phase of communist society” (p. 11). Numerous social experiments have either explicitly or implicitly tried to operationalize the principle with disastrous results. Here are references to two such social experiments. See Prentice Jr. (1959) for the case of English settlers in Massachusetts. See Johnson (1988, pp. S226–S228), Dollar (1990, pp. 91–93) and Perkins (1988, pp. 602–608) for analysis of individual incentives and market signals in China during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s.
See Davies (2010, p. 21). The article chronicles and critically analyzes jokes in centrally planned economies of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. Another example: “A new food store has opened—everything is sparkling clean and there is an attractive shop assistant in a neat white coat. A customer comes in and says: ‘Wrap me up half a kilo of meat please.’ The shop assistant takes out a sheet of paper and says: ‘Certainly, give me your meat.’” (p. 22).
The point that the Soviet economic system was morally corrupt as well as economically inefficient was often reiterated by the Nobel Literature Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, see (1981). “The state system (of the U.S.S.R.) is terrible…because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us the total surrender of our souls, continuous participation in the general conscious lie. (emphasis in original) To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent” (pp. 24–25).
Examining Amazon Top 100 books for 2017 reveals that 24 are Novels, Poetry or Prose, 27 are Children’s books, 49 are nonfiction. The only economics book that was on this list at number 56 is Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel economic laureate Daniel Kahneman (2011). As 13 fiction books outsold Kahneman, we can say that fiction outsold economics by a factor of more than 13 as a lower bound. https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/2017/books/ref=zg_bsar_cal_ye.
The emergence of behavioral economics does not reflect a departure from the assumption of “economic man” as much as a demonstration of its inadequacy in explaining actual behavior. As Chetty (2015, p. 29) pointed out in his Richard T. Ely lecture “…behavioral economics is better viewed as part of an economists toolkit (like other tools in applied theory) rather than as a separate field.” Behavioral economist do not argue people don’t try to maximize utility, rather they simply argue people are not that good at doing it. Or as Morson and Schapiro (2018, p. 264) have pointed out in “we suffer from cognitive confusion, which we would do well to counteract. This is the model adopted by behavioral economists.”
Casual evidence that most people want to improve themselves can be found in the Amazon top 100 book list: a full 15 of the 49 nonfiction best sellers can be classified as “self-help” books. See Weisbrod (1977) for an exception of an economist who does consider in a least a theoretical way choosing “better” utility functions.
According to Otis (2018), “On Margarita Island dozens of people waded into the ocean and forced their way aboard a fishing boat, making off with its catch of sardines. In the city of Maracay, just west of Caracas, thieves broke into a veterinary school, stole two pregnant thoroughbred horses and slaughtered them for meat.” Of course, most all economists point out that this collapse of the moral order was predicated on the destruction of the economic institutions by government policies of hyperinflation and unworkable price controls.
When an interest group hires and lobbyist, it is almost always to obtain more political benefits for its members, not to reduce the political benefits others are receiving.
In his Nobel Prize lecture, Buchanan (1999) considers the importance of taking a constitutional perspective in understanding the political process.
Quoted in Muller (1993, p. 99).
Bruner (1990) calls for psychologists to analyze and understand folk psychology rather than dismiss it as prescientific primitivism. Interesting for this paper is his insistence that a key to understanding folk psychology is to understand the role of narrative in human culture.
Of course, novels are much more than simplistic morality tales; in fact, good novels are anything but a simple morality story. A good novel is based on contingencies and vicissitudes, evokes both empathy and sympathy and raises moral questions more than gives moral answers. Moreover, they are enjoyable, suspenseful and entertaining. For an interesting (and enjoyable) analysis of novels, see Oatley (2012)—It is notable that he indicates “(the novel) brings into our focus the nature and consequence of human action and emotion—it brings into focus, too, our human propensity to evaluate action and its implications…we find ourselves thinking in terms of struggles between right and wrong” (p. 48).
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Lee, D.R., Bohanon, C. Economics and novels: good, evil and becoming better people. J Cult Econ 43, 527–544 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-019-09362-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-019-09362-3