Economics through mysteries

Can detective stories be a clever gateway to learning complex subjects? Two American professor show the way

The legendary American literary critic Edmund Wilson penned Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? in The New Yorker back in 1945. Eight decades on, people still care about the Agatha Christie thriller, while most people have forgotten Edmund Wilson. This is the allure of a classic detective story. So, can detective stories also be an effective way to learn a subject?

Perhaps, yes. Recently, I discovered a series of detective novels of an exceptional genre. What sets this apart is that the amateur investigator, Henry Spearman, also happens to be a Harvard professor of economics who would ultimately win the Nobel Prize in 2016. These novels stand out not only because its authors are professors of economics, but also because of their rarity. There have only been four adventure thrillers in nearly 50 years. In the novels, Spearman believes that the rules of economics govern all aspects of human behaviour, including romance, map reading, and car buying. He applies his favourite economics theorems to every phase of life. This is distinctive since reviews of these detective novels have appeared in scholarly publications. The uniqueness also extends to the fact that some of these detective novels are published by a university press. Some American universities have even included them as prescribed reading.

The fictional Spearman, a middle-aged balding man, is modelled after Nobel-laureate Milton Friedman, a leading scholar in consumer behaviour. The fictional Spearman also lived and breathed economics, just like Friedman. When someone says that one of Picasso’s works cost $104 million because of economics, Spearman retorts, “Don’t blame economics... Blame demand and supply, or blame the market — that’s where the one hundred and four million dollars came from.”

However, William Breit and Kenneth G Elzinga, professors of economics at Trinity University in San Antonio and the University of Virginia, respectively, used a pseudonym, Marshall Jevons, to write these works. In fact, the title of their first novel was Murder at the Margin (1978). It includes references to the 19th-century English economist Alfred Marshall who invented marginal analysis in economics, and William Stanley Jevons, who introduced mathematics into its analysis.

An economist’s career was cut short by the Harvard Promotion and Tenure Committee in their second book, The Fatal Equilibrium (1985), and he committed suicide. Subsequently, after the murder of two committee members, his fiancée was charged with murder. Spearman stepped in to solve the mystery. In the fourth and last, Fatal Equilibrium,  the killer and Spearman finally came face to face on a luxury liner amid a raging sea storm.

In A Deadly Indifference (1995), Spearman travelled to Cambridge, England, to help a Chicago businessman buy “Balliol Croft,” the former residence of the great economist Alfred Marshall. Here Spearman employs some complex variations of supply and demand to solve a cunning murderer.

Breit passed away before the fourth adventure could be published, but Professor Elzinga used the same alias, Marshall Jevons, to write it. In the 2016 thriller, The Mystery of the Invisible Hand, Spearman went to Monte Vista, a small but prestigious liberal arts college in San Antonio, just after receiving the Nobel Prize in economics. An artist-in-residence was murdered. Spearman, who was already there, invariably got involved and investigated the relationships between economics and the art world by looking for hints in monopolies, the Coase conjecture, auction theory, and Adam Smith’s work (as is clear from the title of the novel).

Certain stories by Raymond Chandler, Earl Stanley Gardner, Bret Harte, and Edgar Allen Poe did mention economics. Additionally, economics came in John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee books. However, the only series I’m aware of where economics is the central theme of the story is Henry Spearman’s adventures. Breit and Elzinga drew parallels between fiction and economic analysis in their 2002 paper “Economics as Detective Fiction,” which was published in The Journal of Economic Education. “The economist’s epistemology, presented in the form of scientific narratives, runs parallel to the puzzle-solving processes of the mastermind sleuth presented in the form of fictional narratives,” they wrote. Rationality, or rather, its absence, is the basis of the Henry Spearman novels. Spearman’s “little grey cells” use the framework of microeconomic analyses to solve the mysteries by assuming that humans frequently act irrationally and make mistakes.

Milton Friedman, after whom Spearman was modelled, deemed Spearman’s economic arguments to be “extremely ingenious.” Paul Samuelson remarked that “if Henry Spearman hadn’t already existed, God would have had to invent him.” And John Nash said that reading these books was a good way to learn about economics!

 As a professor of statistics, I can’t help but wish for a similar detective character to elegantly convey statistical concepts through crime novels.

The writer is professor of statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata