LITERATURE AS THE SOUL OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT

Kunal Panda

“If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.”

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb

         Discourse always finds itself structured around a priori assumptions that encircle the foundations of linguistics that support it. Such foundations also include socio – economic assumptions of the actors involved and a temporal landmark that they identify with. The grandeur of Economics as a ‘dismal science’ serves as a daring bridge between liberal arts and the world seen through Mathematics. Epochs of dynamic epistemological changes have rendered this subject under a constant lens of equations and quantitative aptitude, marking its departure from the traditional tenets of the Humanities. Economics primarily aims to study the human condition and the choices that he faces in his world. His world, described by Art and Literature aims to serve the purpose of providing the environment that he is surrounded by. There have been numerous attempts to rekindle and reconcile these two worlds to better understand what each means to convey, and to prove the interdisciplinary feature of Economics which is often ignored. 

      Literature aims to describe the reality that Economic models often phase out as part of key assumptions and exogenous variables. The economic agent under such models is practically isolated from extraneous variables. Literary works have the potential of revealing and corroborating the socio - economic conditions surrounding the economist, his theories, and the time he wrote under. Similarly, the evolution of literary works can be seen through changes in material conditions and economic relations. Such works describe and also criticize the setting. Jane Austen’s women provide us with the best stories that serve to exemplify this criticism, where economic circumstances put them at a disadvantage in the marriage market, often forcing them to choose between social acceptance and individual preference. Spatial boundaries have led to landmarks in the literary world from Leo Tolstoy’s pre-revolutionary Russia to Mahasweta Devi’s Naxalite backdrop of post-independent India. Proponents of Political Economy describe literature as an economic activity heavily condensed under the writer’s subjectivity, a product being produced and consumed. 

         The first instance of the coagulation of Art, Literature and economic thought was brought on by Marx and Engels. Marxist Aesthetics found a place in the establishment of scientific communism, with its founders heavily incorporating stories, analogies, and metaphors in their writings. Marx and Engels gave a materialist explanation of the origin of the aesthetic sense itself. They noted that man’s artistic abilities, his capacity for perceiving the world aesthetically, for comprehending its beauty and for creating works of art appeared as a result of the long development of human society and were the product of man’s labor. As early as in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx pointed to the role of labor in the development of man’s capacity to perceive and reproduce the beautiful and to form objects also “in accordance with the laws of beauty”. This development of human society through labor found a dynamic shift with the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of Romanticism, a critique for mass produced individuality. The wave of Keynesianism after the economic slump of 1928 and the rise of Post Modernism has led to outstanding growth in the way economic theories are being proposed. The rise in empirically flexible theories have taken precedence over abstract ideas. Robert Schiller’s Narrative Economics serves as a new frontier, challenging the overuse and over reliance on econometric and statistical testing. The heavy usage of positive economics has deviated attention from the reality under which such ideas fail to prove their mettle empirically. Milton Friedman and his permanent income hypothesis finds resonance in Munshi Premchand’s 1936 short story Kafan, where the main protagonist rationalizes spending his wife’s burial money on food and drink for himself. His spending is dominated by satisfying immediate needs rather than reflecting confidence in the future. The usage of the Indian epic Mahabharata is often used to instruct Game Theory in Business Schools. Extraneous and exogenous variables find solace in Behavioral Economics, which is a widely popular attempt at describing economic thought as multi and interdisciplinary. This novel field of logical enquiry, coupled with Literature, has a vast potential of surpassing the effectiveness of all existing curricula of students being instructed in this subject. 

           Economists and authors are looking at the same phenomena from different perspectives. While the former looks at cause and effect from an aggregate scale, literary thought puts a face to this idea and brings to life mathematically explained conditions of human activity. Understanding the material dimensions of literary texts, and the poetic symmetry of economics, can make development policies more robust, by incorporating a better, more nuanced understanding of human behavior. 

References

1. Meet & Narayan, Literature and Economics – Connections and Leverages (2017). Asian Journal of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities

2. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1976), On Literature and Art Moscow