Well, despite good intentions, I did it again the other night. But the mild guilt involved is as nothing to the pleasures involved. So although I might abstain again for quite a while it would be unwise to expect that I won't slip again.
From time to time I make an informal promise to myself that I won't start looking at a book in mid-evening and then read into the wee hours – especially when I have to get up and go to work in the morning. But my resolve weakened this week when I decided it was time at least to take a look at Russell Roberts' new book, "The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance" (MIT Press, 271 pp, 22.95). After a few pages I was undone, and I kept reading until I had finished the darned thing.
I think both Register and WorldNetDaily readers had suggested to me that I should read this book, so I got a copy a few weeks ago. Since the last several weeks of my life have been pretty busy, what with promoting my own book and all, I kept it in my briefcase, figuring I might get to it on a plane ride or something. But Tuesday night, I had some free moments.
Russell Roberts, who teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and has taught at the University of Rochester, Stanford and UCLA, has said that "Story telling is highly underrated as a way of economic communication. Stories remain vivid in a way that a linear essay rarely is." So he sweetens what turns out to be a vivid exposition of the lessons an understanding of economics can bring to public policy with a nice love story.
Sam Gordon and Laura Silver are young teachers at the fictional Edwards
School, an exclusive private high school in Washington, D.C. Sam teaches economics and believes that the best results for society come about by relying mostly on the marketplace, voluntary interactions among people and an understanding of the power of self interest to benefit others. Laura teaches English and is eager to have her students appreciate the deep truths in the line from a William Wordsworth poem: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers."
Philosophically, the two are oil and water. But they meet as Sam gives a bit of money to a beggar and are intrigued by one another. Laura is at first repelled by what she perceives as Sam's defense of greed and selfishness, his carelessness about the devastation she believes capitalism inflicts on the poor and disadvantaged. Sam is entranced by this lovely lover of poetry who comes from a family of lawyers and is thinking about law school soon herself – and torn between trying to win her favor and explaining why he thinks in the apparently cold and clinical way he does.
The two meet, part, meet again, and talk. Sam undergoes a crisis in his employment brought on by a powerful liberal Senator whose daughter is in his class and is in the process of rejecting the government intervention her father has supported and practiced all his life. As they discuss the policy issues that divide them and go through the usual ups and downs of young love – Sam offends Laura's entire family at a polite dinner party when he just can't help saying what he thinks, which is that government lawyers almost invariably do society more harm than good – they become closer.
In a parallel story, Erica Roberts, head of a young federal agency called the Office of Corporate Responsibility, campaigns to bring down Charles Krauss, the ruthless CEO of the thoroughly nasty pharmaceutical company HealthNet.
The story was good enough to keep me turning pages, although Roberts may not have in full measure the novelist's gift of showing why, beyond intellectual fascination, the two young teachers are so drawn to one another. During their discussions a good deal of sound economics is imparted almost painlessly to the attentive reader.
It doesn't stretch credulity too much that a couple of high school teachers still young enough to be excited by the clash of ideas and the importance of helping younger people to think, understand and deal with important questions would be so talky. Once in a while, however, the chapters verge on the didactic.
(Publishers Weekly, in a generally favorable review, betrayed the way most literary types think of economics by calling the novel "a dissertation on big business vs. the consumer." In fact, as Sam makes clear, big business and big government are natural partners, not the adversaries some romantically see, and Sam's sympathies are with freedom of process and innovation rather than with bigness in business.)
Roberts has his characters unleash some helpful metaphors. Sam says he sees society and the economy in terms of a rain forest, in which both diversity and stability are best achieved by allowing it to exist in its natural state and thrive through natural processes. Laura is more inclined to see society as like an English garden that needs pruning, trimming and shaping to override its tendency toward unruliness. Over time Laura makes more concessions, but both come to see the viewpoint of the other as honorable disagreement rather than an occasion for personal criticism or disparagement of the other's motives.
Eventually, Sam explains (or is pushed to elucidate) that what really gets his motor running is not so much economics or capitalism as such but "what the American dream is all about. Not the dream of riches, but the dream of the pursuit of happiness as the individual perceives it. I love sitting here (near the Jefferson Memorial) and thinking about that."
Russell Roberts, who in 1994 wrote "The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protectionism," (which I haven't read, though I suspect I will ere long) also does economic commentary for NPR. I remember listening to NPR one day earlier this year and hearing the announcement that an economist was going to do a commentary. My first reaction was to cringe at the thought of the kind of economist NPR would be likely to give air time to, but I was pleasantly surprised when I heard what he actually had to say. And to have a sensible voice on NPR from time to time can hardly be a bad thing.
Anyway, thanks to the readers who recommended this book to me. I certainly recommend it to you. It's hardly required that you emulate my foolishness and stay up all night reading it. But I suspect you'll finish it quickly once you've started.