Hypereconomics: Frank Norris, Thomas Piketty, and Neoclassical Economic Romance

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has received a remarkable amount of attention for a book that is neither all that radical in its politics nor all that likely to see the implementation of its main policy recommendations. But through the massive statistical project at its heart, Piketty's book has upended some of the most widely held and most cherished assumptions about the economics of inequality. Over fifteen years, Piketty and a team of collaborators worked to quantify levels of inequality in wealthy western nations since about 1700, and occasionally extending as far back as antiquity. Piketty acknowledges that the task would have been impossible without computers to organize, collate, and query this vast body of economic data, and by doing so he brought historical "big data" to economic policy debates on a scale never previously seen. This massive expansion of the scale of historical and statistical analysis has challenged longstanding assumptions about the relationship between capitalism and inequality, and with it, certain economic orthodoxies that have held sway for more than a century.

One important factor complicates this story: another source of economic data for Piketty is literature, especially the social realist novels of Honoré de Balzac and Jane Austen. In fact, Piketty devotes more pages to either Balzac or Austen than he does to any other economist he discusses, including Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Paul Samuelson, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, or even his main antagonist, Simon Kuznets. Piketty says he includes literary evidence because "it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the intuitive knowledge that everyone acquires about contemporary wealth," and that "nineteenth-century novels especially, are full of detailed information about relative wealth and living standards" (2). But that turns out to be a rather surprising claim, given that Piketty's statistical investigation is designed precisely to remedy the deficiencies of "intuitive knowledge that everyone acquires about contemporary wealth" today (2). The unreliability of intuitive knowledge, informed as it is by a very different kind of economics, is why he needs big data.

The question, then, is how Piketty's data analysis relates to the intuitive economic knowledge that nineteenth-century realist fiction represents among its characters and presumed of its period readers, and which is different from our own; and further, how it relates not just to the realist novels Piketty cites, but also to the somewhat different economic knowledge found in naturalist fiction. As the pages that follow will make clearer, Piketty's interest in realism indicates a kinship between statistical representation and realist literary representation, both of which attempt to remedy deficiencies of economic knowledge, even if they also nostalgically represent intuitive knowledge as an ideal. The rise of nineteenth-century realism is itself part of an attempt to represent social and economic conditions that seemed to many people to have become too vast, fast, and complex to know at all. Accordingly, as many critics have argued, realism is a remedy for those who no longer feel they have a solid grasp of the real, and as such realism remains confident that it can organize and impart useful knowledge, even if that knowledge falls short of total mastery.¹

In contrast, the literary naturalism of the later nineteenth century exhibits far more profound doubts about economic knowledge, and also about the ability of realist diagnostics to redress them. Many naturalist novels are highly attentive to the material conditions of late nineteenth-century capitalism, but Frank Norris's The Pit also attends to the ways in which an economy becomes known. In a novel about wheat trading in which wheat scarcely appears, the characters instead traffic in information about wheat, gleaned from newspapers, field observers, agricultural reports, crop statistics, rumors, intuitions, and above all, the seemingly magic communicator of price. Despite all this, far from fixing the vagaries of a global grain market through realistic description, The Pit metaphorizes it as an overpowering wave, a vortex, or a wild beast. As the macroeconomy takes one sensational form after another in The Pit, it retreats out of the novel's zone of realist representation...