Twilight of the Money Gods

The neoclassicals disagreed. Believing value to be determined by supply and demand, and thus ultimately by individual purchasing decisions, they saw humans first and foremost as consumers. Thus, we don’t get our satisfaction from making things so much as from buying them. You may like your job, you may even love your job, but think of the pleasure you can get when you hit the shopping centres. Meddling in the workplaces to improve workers’ lives, many neoclassicals would say, added to the costs of running a business and made it hard for new firms to get off the ground. That meant there would end up being less stuff to buy, which would leave us all less happy.

Reagan and Carter then hit the campaign trail at the height of summer. Like a mosquito buzzing tirelessly in the night or the refreshing breeze that refuses to blow while tempers wilt, the hot, dry summer of 1980 seemed only to aggravate America’s irritable mood. The grasslands of the Great Plains dried up. Cattle died of thirst, evoking in older minds memories of the Depression. Eastern cities sweltered in heat waves and rationed their water. The once-green lawns of Washington turned dusty and brown. As summer turned to autumn and the election drew near, pollsters found it impossible to predict a winner. Although Americans were deeply disappointed with Carter, Reagan, more right-wing than most of them, was proposing a conversion as big as Roosevelt’s New Deal had been – but in reverse. Opinion surveys suggested that he elicited only tepid enthusiasm among his compatriots, who considered him old and inattentive – a perception fed by rumours that he had occasionally napped through California cabinet-meetings.

No, the goal must not be to dispense with our narratives, but to leave their construction and selection to the experts – which is to say, to the storytellers in all of us. Most of us, faced with the question of why we believe what we believe, will ultimately fall back on the insights we have gleaned from experience, then organise them into a coherent plot by reference to those tales that inspire or guide us. Ultimately, therefore, the narrative of our own life story shapes our intellectual journey. Economic models are then dropped into that plot when they explain the reality we have encountered. We all, in sum, begin with a tale. Reflecting on that, and on the way we want that tale to finish, can give us an appreciation of the virtue of humility about what we can actually know about a world that is, in the end, filled with billion of other storytellers.