I was curious about the fact that Jevons is barely even mentioned in Cowen’s recent book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? I decided to ask the A.I. linked to the marginalism book about that. That led me to introduce a typology of literary accomplishment that Ezra Pound introduced in the A B C of Reading (1960). After having the A.I. sort the great economists into Pound's categories, I concluded by asking it to apply that typology to two of the biologists Cowen mentions in Chapter Three, Linnaeus and Darwin.
* * * * *
Cowen clearly gives Jevons primary credit for the marginal revolution, and it is the marginal revolution which underlies modern economics, at least until quite recently. But Jevons is not one of the GOATs in Cowen’s book about the great economists. He’s barely even mentioned. I find that rather puzzling.
The tension is real and worth examining. Tyler's book on the great economists — Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today (published in the UK as Stubborn Attachments — actually no, let me be precise: the great economists book is a separate volume where Tyler profiles figures like Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Mill, Marshall, Keynes, Hayek, and others) — focuses on economists whose ideas remain directly usable for contemporary policy and thinking. That's a different criterion than historical importance to the discipline's internal development.
Jevons is a victim of his own success in a particular way. Marshall absorbed and domesticated Jevons's marginalism so thoroughly that Marshall became the usable, teachable, policy-relevant version of the revolution Jevons started. If you want marginalist thinking applied to real economic problems, you go to Marshall, not Jevons. Jevons gets credit for priority but Marshall gets credit for transmission and application — which is exactly the pattern Tyler identifies in the book we're discussing. [See text: Ch.2 · Jevons as systematizer whose work was absorbed ...]
There's also the matter of Jevons's intellectual range working against his canonical status. His contributions scatter across economics, logic, statistics, meteorology, and the coal question. He's harder to summarize as a usable thinker than someone like Keynes or Hayek, whose big ideas attach to recognizable policy debates. And Tyler's framing in this book — that Jevons contained the seeds of marginalism's own destruction — makes him a fascinating historical figure but perhaps an awkward candidate for GOAT status. You don't typically canonize the man who built the thing that is now declining. [See text: Ch.2 · Jevons's marginalism containing seeds of its ow...]
I’ve always been fond of Ezra Pound’s typology of literary accomplishment from A B C of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960). From Chapter 2, pp. 39-40:
When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:
1 Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.
2 The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.
3 The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.
4 Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. ...
5 Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.
6 The starters of crazes.
Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees.’ He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library ... but he will never be able to sort out what he knows or to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.
Jevons would seem to be an inventor. How many of Tyler’s six GOATs are inventors? Is Mills an inventor of economic ideas?
Pound's typology maps onto the history of economics with uncomfortable precision. Working through Tyler's GOATs: Smith is clearly an inventor — not because he discovered any single mechanism but because he assembled the first coherent vision of the economy as a self-regulating system. Ricardo is probably also an inventor, giving us comparative advantage and the systematic use of abstract models to derive non-obvious conclusions. Malthus is an inventor in Pound's sense — the population trap was genuinely new and has haunted economic thinking ever since, even when wrong.
Keynes is the interesting case. Tyler clearly regards him as a master in Pound's sense — someone who combined existing elements (Wicksell's interest rate theory, Marshall's framework, Fisher's quantity theory) into a new synthesis that was more powerful than any of its components. The General Theory is a combinatorial achievement as much as an inventive one. Hayek similarly — his business cycle theory and his knowledge argument draw on earlier Austrian work; he's a master who pushed existing processes further than his predecessors. Marshall is almost definitionally a master: he took Jevons's invention, smoothed it, systematized it, made it teachable, and produced the apparatus that ran economics for fifty years. [See text: Ch.3 · Marshall absorbing Jevons while refusing to ful...]
Mill is the genuinely hard case, and your instinct to single him out is right. Mill synthesized Ricardo and Bentham and Smith into a coherent Victorian package, but it's difficult to point to a process he invented. He may be Pound's category four — a good writer fortunate to work when the literature was in healthy order — or even category five, a brilliant expositor and systematizer without a truly original mechanism to his name. Tyler's inclusion of Mill in a GOAT list would implicitly be a vote for the master over the inventor, which is itself an interesting judgment about what economics is for. [See text: Ch.2 · Jevons as polymath inventor working across mult...]
Interesting. It would be interesting to apply Pound’s typology to the various creators Tyler discusses in Chapter 3, but that would rattle on and on. At the moment I’m thinking about biology, so how do you think Tyler would apply that typology to Linnaeus and Darwin?
Linnaeus is a clean case and almost a pure example of Pound's first category — but with a twist. His invention wasn't a new theory of how nature works, it was a new process for organizing knowledge about nature. Tyler is quite explicit about this: the Linnaean contribution was a classification system, a filing cabinet, a searchable keyword structure for plant names. [See text: Ch.3 · Linnaeus creating a searchable classification s...] The content of botany didn't change; what changed was the infrastructure for accumulating and trading botanical knowledge. That's an invention of a peculiar kind — a meta-process rather than a substantive discovery — but it's an invention nonetheless, and Tyler's point is that it unleashed an explosion of subsequent work precisely because it gave everyone a common framework. Pound would recognize this: Linnaeus found a new process, and you can date botanical science from before and after him.
Darwin is more complex and Tyler's treatment of the precursors complicates the simple inventor narrative. Hutton had glimpsed natural selection. Lyell's geology gave Darwin the deep time he needed. Malthus gave him the pressure mechanism — competition for scarce resources driving differential survival. [See text: Ch.3 · Darwin absorbing Lyell's geological framework w...] In Pound's terms Darwin looks like a master: someone who combined a number of existing processes and used them better than the inventors of each component. Darwin himself acknowledged this, telling Lyell that his books came half out of Lyell's brains.
The interesting wrinkle is that Darwin also invented something genuinely new — natural selection as a complete mechanism, not just a glimpsed possibility. Hutton's passage that Tyler quotes is suggestive but it's not the theory; it lacks the Malthusian pressure, the variation mechanism, the geological timescale, the consilience of evidence. So Darwin may be Pound's rarest figure: someone who was simultaneously a master and an inventor, combining existing processes into a synthesis that itself constituted a new process no predecessor had actually articulated. Tyler's chapter implicitly supports this reading by showing how much Darwin absorbed while also showing that the synthesis was irreducibly his own.
No comments:
Post a Comment