ABSTRACT
Parallel to the growth of economics as a rigorous social science, with the generation of theorems, theory testing and increasingly more abstract reasoning, there has existed an underworld of literature that addresses many of the same topics as the professional economist but using different heuristic and rhetorical devices. Typically this literature consists of fiction, poetry, drama, editorializing in the media, and reflective essays of various kinds. Usually, from the professional economists’ perspective, these nonscientific works are judged to lack seriousness and standing in debates over principle or public policy. Frequently they are greeted with anger or derision for confusing their audience and for distracting attention from the central issues of economics. Sometimes this literature has been produced by prominent economists themselves through the back door as it were (for example, in the early period by Bernard de Mandeville and in the twentieth century by Kenneth Boulding and John Kenneth Galbraith) but usually it comes from writers variously described as “humanists” or “moral critics.” Sometimes the underground writers set out to popularize the principles and policy conclusions of “economic science,” as for example Harriet Martineau in her short didactic novelettes. More often they reflect policy dissent, and use a kind of reasoning given relatively little weight in the conventional economic analysis: this is reflected in the attention to human suffering caused by agricultural depopulation in Oliver Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village,” the concern for environmental pollution and urban degradation of early British industrialization pictured in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, and the misery of unemployment during the Great Depression, portrayed in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
