Ever since the writer Thomas Carlyle coined his rude epithet about economics, the world of letters and the “dismal science” have circled each other warily. But in his new book about the history of the Nobel Prize, Avner Offer, a professor of economic history at Oxford University, says economics actually has more in common with literature than, say, physics. 

It isn’t an obvious pairing. Literature’s understanding of economics is, at best, patchy and simplistic. Polonius’s advice in Hamlet to “neither a borrower nor a lender be” is well-meaning. But, taken too literally, it would undermine the entire global financial system.

Yet the literary canon, in all its vastness, does occasionally, almost accidentally, brush up against economics.

The monetary principle known as Gresham’s law, which states that “bad money drives out good”, is said to have been prefigured by Aristophanes in The Frogs. King Lear, who thought that “distribution should undo excess/and each man have enough”, was clearly a bit of an old Marxist. And when Levin isn’t mowing in the fields or moping after Kitty in Anna Karenina he’s voicing Leo Tolstoy’s slightly warped views on agricultural reform. 

But those novels that really try to grapple with economic issues – like George Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier, which discusses why many of those that might best benefit from socialism are most implacably opposed to it – either date quickly or – like Ayn Rand’s paean to capitalism Atlas Shrugged – are borderline unreadable. 

There are rare exceptions. The second part of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust is essentially an extended treatise on fiat money (currencies that are deemed legal tender by governments) and the perils of expansionary monetary policies. 

Mephistopheles (the devil), disguised as a court jester, advises an indebted emperor to issue promissory notes against his country’s yet-to-be-discovered gold, saying: “Such paper’s convenient, for rather than a lot / Of gold and silver, you know what you’ve got. / You’ve no need of bartering and exchanging, / Just drown your needs in wine and love-making.”

David Fuller's view

Alternatively, enjoy the Royal Opera’s production of Gounod’s Faust – one of Bryn Terfel’s best roles. 

Here is a PDF of Ben Wright’s column.