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An Economics Lesson from Tolstoy

The Russian novelist believed that the dismal science was inescapably suffused with morality and politics.

Nick Romeo

The New Yorker, 2024

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Leo Tolstoy’s stories show that economics can be a force for social change rather than simply a science of fixed laws and outcomes. Journalist Nick Romeo engagingly assesses Tolstoy’s work in highlighting human behavior in business, and he notes lessons that are as resonant today as they were more than a century ago. Romeo also reports on the shift now occurring within the dismal science, one that augurs a better understanding of commercial activity through the combined study of economics, politics and philosophy.

Summary

A reliance on mathematics and theory pushed economics toward the hard sciences.

Practitioners of economics have traditionally treated their subject as a physical science, void of the potential to account for the possibility of qualitative, human-influenced outcomes. Mainstream economic thought has informed discussions and policies that consider economic growth a necessity. This has led to increasing wealth imbalances among individuals and to oligopolistic and monopolistic levels of concentration among businesses.

The renowned Russian author of, among other classics, War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy was not an economist by trade. Yet his work offers a broad...

About the Author

Nick Romeo is a journalist at the New Yorker, a teacher at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and the author of The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy.

An Economics Lesson from Tolstoy

The Russian novelist believed that the dismal science was inescapably suffused with morality and politics.

Read or listen offline

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Summary

A reliance on mathematics and theory pushed economics toward the hard sciences.

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