T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: The economics of murder

Last month, after reading some novels by a Reserve Bank of India economist, I had idly wondered in this column if any economist other than John K Galbraith had ever written a novel. Galbraith had written two satirical ones.

There was a prompt answer from Niranjan Rajadhyaksha whose erudition in economics is matched only by his cheerful optimism about literature. He mailed me saying that someone called Marshall Jevons had indeed written a novel, that too a crime thriller.

Thoroughly intrigued, I googled Marshall Jevons and found that there were four novels by this author with such an unlikely name. In the event, Marshall Jevons turned out to be the good professors William Briet and Kenneth Elzinga.

The former, in fact, turned out to be the Briet of Breit and Hochman of Readings in Microeconomics fame. He passed away in 2011. Professor Elzinga has kept the flag flying and written a fourth novel called the Mystery of the Invisible Hand.

I quickly turned to Amazon and was astonished to find that the books were available in India. I quickly ordered two of them.

The bookseller charged me the current exchange rates even though they had probably been imported when the rupee was below Rs 40 to the dollar. Last week my niece brought me the first book from the US for two dollars. It's called Murder at the Margin (1978).

Of course, the booksellers could always have charged me the old dollar but new courier rates making the total payable roughly the same. You just can't win with these guys.

The novels in-between the first and the fourth are called The Fatal Equilibrium (1985) and A Deadly Indifference (1995). Some of these novels are prescribed reading in some universities in the US because they make microeconomics fun.

They should be in India, too, because you can learn so much basic microeconomics so painlessly from them. Even Milton Friedman thought so.

The two middle novels are set in the two Cambridges of UK and US. The books are highly evocative to anyone who has spent a few months there. There must be a few thousand Indians, not just economists, who will love these two books.

Marshallian Method

The hero in all four books is a slightly portly Harvard economics professor called Henry Spearman who uses his skills in microeconomic analysis to figure out who the murderer is. The deductive method using Alfred Marshall's theories is quite fascinating, as are the glimpses they manage to provide into human behaviour.

In A Deadly Indifference the house in which Marshall had lived in Cambridge (UK) is up for sale and an American tycoon is trying to acquire it. Some of the professors are not in favour; others don't care.

The authors give a lucid of description of the politics of the economics department complete with a professor who is, I suspect, loosely modelled on Joan Robinson. In fact, quite a few of the characters are clearly recognisable.

The ghost of Keynes hovers above everyone and there are sharp exchanges about Adam Smith, Marx and other such worthies. It is an immensely enjoyable book, never mind that the murder plots are a bit straggly because most of the excessive emphasis on motive and very little on opportunity. But the polite derision for each economic theory more than makes up for the thin plots.

The Fatal Equilibrium is set in the newer Cambridge across the Charles River in Boston. It describes in great detail the politics of the economics department in Harvard as also the selection process for granting tenure, around which the entire mystery is centred.

In the process a lot of microeconomics gets discussed, not the least of which is the central postulate of microeconomics, rationality. Marshall Jevons who doubtless had first-hand experience of the scepticism of psychologists and anthropologists describe tensions with great finesse.

As a result, the certainties of economics come under severe strain. But somehow Marshall Jevons eventually makes out a reasonably convincing case for rationality as a way of solving murders.

I have yet to read Murder at the Margin which, from the description on the back cover, seems to be set in the Caribbean. Being the first book, it will be interesting to see how "Marshall Jevons" have tweaked the style. First novels usually tend to be quite self-conscious.

Postscript

For me these books come in the category Lawrence Durrell's masterly and hugely entertaining Sauve Qui Peut series on British diplomacy. So don't even think of borrowing these books. I will not lend them.