Why economists need Tolstoy
Economists can tell you that sanctioning a market for kidneys would raise the supply — maybe save lives — but someone else has to weigh the moral implications of auctioning body parts to the highest bidder.
.. why practice economics if not to try to improve people’s lives?
.. Many of the questions that economists study, such as why birthrates are higher in some places, or why some countries developed earlier, or why some high school students do not apply to the best college they could get into, could be better understood through a cultural lens.
.. They skewer Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize winner, for postulating that all human behavior is “maximizing” — that is, the product of a rational, self-interested calculation. And that, therefore, economics is “a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behavior,” including whom to marry and divorce, whether to have kids, whom to befriend.
.. Literature develops a feeling for how people will behave in ways that economic models cannot.
.. You don’t need a narrative to explain the orbit of Mars (Newton’s laws will do just fine), whereas to assert that a shortage of bread caused the French Revolution, you do.
.. At Stanford, about 45 percent of the main undergraduate faculty are in humanities, but only 15 percent of the students.
.. Then why read Shakespeare? If the reason (as the academy espouses) is simply to deconstruct the authorial “message,” why not just teach the message? Thus, “Les Miserables” could be reduced to “Help the Unfortunate.” And “Hamlet”: Stop moping and do something! No, the reason we read novels is for the experience that the words inspire.
.. History sadly mimics economics in an attempt to systemize, to discover immutable laws. Explanations must be scientific and universal. Contingency or chance — a famine, the timely arrival of a genius or madman, a scientific discovery — are presumed irrelevant. Humanities, ideally, should wrestle with uncertainty. It is a discipline of contingent truths,