The Forgotten Godmother of Economic Literature

00:00:02 Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. 00:00:18 Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots Podcast. 00:00:21 Speaker 3: I'm Tracey Alloway. 00:00:22 Speaker 1: And I'm Joe Weisenthal. 00:00:23 Speaker 2: Joe, something I like to think about is how ideas, specifically economic ideas... go viral, how they get popularized. And so you think about something like the invisible hand. 00:00:36 Speaker 1: Sure. 00:00:37 Speaker 2: A lot of people will recognize that phrase and have a sort of basic understanding of what it means, even if they've never actually read the works of Adam Smith. Yeah. 00:00:46 Speaker 1: I'm actually very fascinated by the concept of pre-internet virality. 00:00:51 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:00:51 Speaker 1: It's like someone says something online and everyone retweets it. Like, all right, I get how, I get how that works. 00:00:55 Speaker 2: Or says something on a podcast. 00:00:57 Speaker 1: Or says something on a podcast, whatever. But, like, how did ideas spread back, I mean, especially before electronic media? But they did. I mean, they did spread. You know, I always think about, like, it's a little different, but, like, school children, like, rhyming games and stuff like that. And how, like, all around the world and all around the country, children will be, like, doing roughly the same, like, sort of, like, games and stuff. Like, how did they get around so far? 00:01:22 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:01:22 Speaker 1: It's, like, really, I'm fascinated by this question. 00:01:24 Speaker 2: It's a good question. And before there was social media, before there was podcasts, one of the ways that ideas would get spread around is through fiction, basically, through novels, through stories, as you just pointed out. Right. 00:01:38 Speaker 1: And it's interesting because we think of ideas, particularly economic ideas, as you said, you referred to the invisible hand. We think of ideas as being like, okay, I'm going to read some ideas. It's going to rationally make sense to me, and then I'll either adopt this idea or I will discard it, etc. But a very powerful way of spreading ideas is through things that are fun or things that make us feel good to read, etc. And to your point, I think people forget that the transmission of ideas is not just a sort of calculation. It's through art, it's through stories, it's through poetry, it's through music, etc. And this almost never gets discussed. in a sort of intellectual context. 00:02:17 Speaker 2: No, and Adam Smith never wrote a novel to popularize his ideas, but someone who did write about economics through the medium of fiction is going to be our subject for today. We're going to be talking about Maria Edgeworth, who was a very successful novelist in the early 1800s, I guess during the Regency era, who was also very, very involved with shaping the future of economic thought. And she …