Are Economists, in Fact, the Unacknowledged Poets of the World

An anecdote in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, if a single worker were tasked with manufacturing a pin, he could perhaps at best hope to produce ten in a day, but if the labor was divided across ten men with specialized tasks, they “could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins” in the same time span.” That Smith never visited that particular fabled pin factory didn’t prevent him from marveling at its cooly rational efficiency: “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head,” with “eighteen distinct operations” distributed across the employees.

This example was drawn verbatim from the French philosophe Dennis Diderot’s 1755 Encylopedie, the entry itself written by contributor Alexandre Deleyre, who in turn based these notes on the observations of engineer Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, director of the Royal Office of Designers, the only person in this chain of influences to actually visit a pin factory.

Perronet visited the factory in 1739, when the pin industry had established itself through Normandy, with gold mined from the Pyrenees or silver imported from Saxony molded into the humble device of sewers and tailors which affixes badges and holds hair in place. Despite his contemporary fellow Scotsman James Watt inventing the steam engine the same year that The Wealth of Nations was published, Smith was strangely oblivious as to the coming Industrial Revolution, as there was nothing yet automated in this pin factory. And yet, as a prophet of capitalism, in the regimented ballet of the pin-makers Smith intuited Henry Ford’s assembly line, of how the entire world would become subservient to manufacturing and finance.

Economists are the unacknowledged poets of the world.

The Wealth of Nations conceived of every individual soul as merely Homo economicus, as chillingly self-interested and competitive, with the ideal organization of society meant to emphasize those qualities. This eighteenth-century opus not only served to bury the mercantilism that dominated fiscal policy, but also supplied a kind of poetry of money, a series of terms that for good (and more often for bad) came to dominate the Western consciousness, from the free market to wealth creation, division of labor to rational self-interest, with no metaphor more arresting than the “Invisible Hand,” which has become the veritable dark lord of our age.

Economists are the unacknowledged poets of the world. There is a prosody to those mysterious terms bandied about in The Economist or The Financial Times, of liquidity and derivatives, operational profitability and capital expenditures, credit default swaps and enterprise value. Novelist John Lanchester, in his invaluable guide How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say – And What it Really Means admits that the “language of finance is obscure, and has the effect of hiding the truth,” whereas poetry is perhaps also obscure but is intended expresses the truth. And yet, as implacably financially illiterate as I might be, and more than vaguely aware of the injustices and inequities promulgated through those very terms, I can’t help but appreciate the rhythm and melody of Laissez-Fair, supply side, even the fluxing imagery of “trickle down,” regardless of the avarice these words embody. No image more so than Smith’s Invisible Hand, with its spooky, occult, and gothic connotations that strike me as precisely appropriate.

Smith, who only used the phrase once in Wealth of Nations, and not even with the definite article, describes how an entrepreneur may “intend only his own gain, and he is in this,” nonetheless, “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention,” namely an overall improvement of a nation’s wealth. Smith has never been the indefatigable champion of free enterprise imagined by his acolytes.

When critiquing the division of labor, Smith sounds positively Marxist when he castigates the alienating “torpor of the mind” that can result, the threat to “generous, noble, or tender sentiments.” The soft-spoken, absent-minded bachelor economist who lived with his mother, noted for his twitchy demeanor and his speech impediment, is far from Ayn Rand’s John Galt, a thinker who despite his popularity among the ghoulish fellows at the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute advocated for positions ranging from regulation to progressive taxation.

No doubt Grover Norquist may fantasize about the Invisible Hand drowning the state in a bath-tub, but Smith was genuinely concerned with the question of societal happiness. He was, in his own way, a profoundly moral thinker; and yet, there is more of Norquist than Smith in the Invisible Hand, this operative god of modernity. Economist Friederich Hayek meant it admiringly, but when he writes in The Fatal Conceit how the market guides us because “we do not know the needs which we satisfy nor the sources of the things we get,” I can’t help but read a literalization of Smith’s metaphor, of this force accessible only to the priests of finance, an  omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent surrogate for the murdered God. Thus, it’s a happy coincidence of history for an essayist such as myself that Wealth of Nations was published only four months before the Declaration of Independence established the country where rampant capitalism became synonymous with culture itself.

[/pullquote]For the uber-wealthy, finance is a kind of competitive fiction played amongst each other; for everyone else, money is an issue of if you will go bankrupt over medical bills, be able to make rent, to ensure that your children are afforded food.[/pullquote]

The American experiment is often conceived as an Enlightenment project, but we’re less the children of the French salons of Voltaire and Diderot than the classrooms of Edinburgh, of Scottish Common Sense philosophy (the movement’s actual name) embodied by Thomas Reid, David Hume, Watt, and Smith. Where liberty, equality, and fraternity matter less than productivity, efficiency, and optimization. Thomas Jefferson wrote that Wealth of Nations was the “best book extant” while Benjamin Rush, a signee of the Declaration, claimed that commerce was greater than “religion in humanizing mankind.” A view amply on display in our national literature, for if the subject of the great British authors is class and manners, for French love and romance, and among the Germans reason and emotion, then for Americans it’s money. 

The ancients had fate and the Medievals their God, but for a modern American fortune and fall are dictated by the all-seeing and conscious Market. “I mean the things that we have and that we think are so solid – they’re like smoke, and time is like the sky that the smoke disappears into” writes Booth Tarkington in The Magnificent Ambersons, his 1918 Pulitzer Prize winner about a wealthy Midwestern family’s downwardly mobile fortunes, sounding ever so much like Marx who warned us that in capitalism all which is solid seemingly melts into air. Money, like sin, may have always been with us, but in capitalist modernity it serves a different function than mere symbolic evidence of exchange.

Theodor Dreiser, in his 1912 novel The Financier, describes the motivations of his eponymous character the ruthless investor Frank Cowperwood, explaining that his class may “want money, but not for money’s sake… the financier wants it for what it will control – for what it will represent in the way of dignity, force, power.” A free market has always been an idealized fiction where nothing much is actually free, but in Dreiser’s explaining we’ve moved into something darker, where elites amass imaginary numbers for their own purposes, not just as a kind of power unaccountable to democratic control (though it is that), but as a type of poetry, though this poetry very much makes things happen.

Tarkington and Dreiser lived through the twilight of the Gilded Age, and in that they understood the rapaciousness of capitalism, but money is king in America for prince and pauper alike. John Updike in his mid-century “Rabbit Series,” which follows the middle-class ascent of Reading, Pennsylvania high school basketball star turned into part-owner of a Toyota dealership, describes in his 1990 Rabbit at Rest how his protagonist had “realized the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money.”

That even a comfortable millionaire is closer to being homeless than they are to being Elon Musk (though they’ll never admit it) is indicative of Updike’s point. For the uber-wealthy, finance is a kind of competitive fiction played amongst each other; for everyone else, money is an issue of if you will go bankrupt over medical bills, be able to make rent, to ensure that your children are afforded food. “The only way not to think about money,” said Edith Wharton in her 1905 The House of Mirth, “is to have a great deal of it.”

Writing may happen on Mount Helicon, but publishing is for Wall Street. Somewhere there is a Great American Novel about the history of U.S. publishing, from the rickety printing presses first assembled in Boston and Philadelphia to the monopolistic leviathans of the Big Five, of how finance and capital, bankers and entrepreneurs supplied the funds for national literature but decided what that literature could express. For what brilliant and challenging novels are not chosen by agents, editors, and the Invisible Hand, what authors are forever mute since they didn’t match market expectations?

We were promised by Smith that the market ever leads towards a kind of truth, but in late capitalism the crucial values are mediocrity and enshitification. Today, 80% of trade publishing is controlled by corporations that you could count on one hand – Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan – who generate nearly twelve-billion in annual revenue. All of the venerable old firms, your Alfred A. Knopf or your Farrar, Straus & Giroux, consumed by the hydra-headed beasts of the Big Five. Only antitrust laws prevented Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster from merging, though whenever a Larry Ellison or a Mark Zuckerberg chooses to buy one of the Big Five in the future, who will there be to stop them (and little needs to be said here about Jeff Bezos). Because literature is a distillation of our loves and fears, of supposedly beauty and truth, its relationship with Mammon is at least distasteful and at most tragic, but the story of writing’s association itself is certainly an engaging story.

For Smith, in his hopes and oversights, was a fabulist as much as a scientist, a man doing theology as surely as economics. Nothing is inherently natural about self-interest, deregulation, or capital accumulation, even if Smith phrased it as such. They are values encouraged by a society like any other, but their prioritization is an act of faith adhered to be the supply-side cult that is our globalized, interconnected aristocracy with its churches in every Chase Manhattan Bank and Bank of America, with a liturgy in the stock numbers published by The Wall Street Journal. The believers, whether we like it or not, are all of us, constrained by credit scores and debt. For we are all the “unknown citizen” that W.H. Auden wrote an epitaph for in a 1940 poem, asking “Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd.” Yet we write on.

If Wyatt and Surrey could pen brilliant sonnets under Tudor tyranny, then certainly great art can be produced under capitalism despite its particular degradations. Maybe scant consolation in the waning days of the Anthropocene as it feels like the Invisible Hand is around our throats, but capitalism was still able to produce a Tarkington, Dreiser, Updike, and Wharton not just in spite of it itself, but in part because of it. Where the danger lay is in the idolatry of totalizing an abstract metaphor, especially for anything that is ineffable, be it either god or the Market, whether benevolent or its opposite.

Now the Invisible Hand appears to be replaced by a new deity in the Algorithm, a similarly ethereal and invisible creature that nonetheless we cede our individual sovereignty towards, though arguably it will wear a dual-crown alongside profit. Now that it’s 250 years after the Wealth of Nations, the actual scripture of America’s civil religion, there need be a reckoning about the great national addiction for money.

Earlier this year I saw a production of Lucy Prebbles’ brilliant 2009 play Enron. In the final scene, the villain Jeffrey Skilling, who through adrenaline-and-cocaine-fueled hubris gambled away Enron employees’ pensions by using the financial shell-game of Special Purpose Entities, delivers a chillingly moving monologue about how money, its gains and losses, tells a story about our aspirations, our endeavors, our hopes. In imitation of St. Paul, Skilling ends by saying how our humanity is defined by “joy, faith, hope… and the greatest of these is… money” before the audience was plunged into darkness.