Smialek Restores Novelist Maria Edgeworth to Economic Canon
Bloomberg
The professionalization and mathematical formalization of economics in the 19th century systematically erased pioneering female writers like Maria Edgeworth, who had successfully popularized and advanced the discipline through narrative fiction.
Maria Edgeworth was one of the most prominent literary celebrities of the Regency era, outselling contemporary Jane Austen while using popular fiction to teach classical economic ideas from Adam Smith to the broader public. (7:22)
Despite widespread 19th-century influence and correspondence with economists like David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, Edgeworth was largely dropped from the canon as economics formalized into a male-dominated, mathematical discipline. (20:00)
Edgeworth anticipated modern economic thought by rejecting the classical labor theory of value in favor of utility and the productive role of non-physical services such as law and management. (36:34)
The devastation of the Irish potato famine forced Edgeworth away from strict Smithian laissez-faire principles toward an early proto-Keynesian defense of direct government intervention and emergency public spending. (31:37)
Detailed notes
## Background
Published by Bloomberg on the Odd Lots podcast on October 23, 2026, this episode examines the overlooked legacy of Regency-era novelist Maria Edgeworth. According to the show description, hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal interview New York Times Brussels bureau chief Jeanna Smialek about her biography, The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth, which explores how Edgeworth popularized Adam Smith's ideas through fiction, debated leading classical economists, and addressed issues like rent seeking and the Irish potato famine.
## TL;DR
Hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with author Jeanna Smialek about Maria Edgeworth, an early nineteenth-century literary celebrity who outsold Jane Austen while translating Adam Smith's economic concepts into narrative fiction. The conversation traces Edgeworth's intellectual contributions, from exploring rent-seeking and land productivity in Castle Rackrent to anticipating modern utility theory over the labor theory of value. Smialek details Edgeworth's spirited debates with David Ricardo regarding Irish agricultural specialization, her pivot toward proto-Keynesian government intervention during the Irish potato famine, and the subsequent mathematical turn that helped erase narrative-driven women from the economic canon. The episode concludes by drawing direct parallels between Edgeworth's mission to educate the democratic public during the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and today's structural dislocations driven by artificial intelligence and shifting global trade.
## Atmosphere & style
The discussion carries an energetic, witty, and warmly intellectual tone, characterized by the hosts' genuine astonishment that such an influential, bestselling thinker was almost completely excised from modern history. Playfully framed as 'Bridgerton for nerds,' the dialogue balances deep archival history with relatable macroeconomic concepts, bouncing effortlessly between eighteenth-century agricultural leases and modern New York commercial real estate. It feels like an engaging, high-level salon conversation that pairs serious economic critique with humorous commentary on didactic children's literature.
## Bulletin
- `07:22` Maria Edgeworth was one of the most prominent literary celebrities of the Regency era, outselling contemporary Jane Austen while using popular fiction to teach classical economic ideas from Adam Smith to the broader public.
- `20:00` Despite widespread 19th-century influence and correspondence with economists like David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, Edgeworth was largely dropped from the canon as economics formalized into a male-dominated, mathematical discipline.
- `36:34` Edgeworth anticipated modern economic thought by rejecting the classical labor theory of value in favor of utility and the productive role of non-physical services such as law and management.
- `31:37` The devastation of the Irish potato famine forced Edgeworth away from strict Smithian laissez-faire principles toward an early proto-Keynesian defense of direct government intervention and emergency public spending.
## Key takeaways
- `02:02` Economic theories historically spread through cultural storytelling, poetry, and fiction rather than purely abstract academic treatises.
- `07:22` Maria Edgeworth outsold Jane Austen in her lifetime and was read widely across the British Empire and the United States, even drawing envy from Lord Byron.
- `10:00` Edgeworth fell out of the literary canon partly because of her explicit pedagogical focus on economics and moral instruction, branded as 'moral tales' rather than frivolous romantic fiction.
- `13:17` Viewing the democratic and industrial transformations post-1776, Edgeworth believed public economic literacy was a civic necessity for ordinary citizens and estate managers.
- `15:47` Her 1800 novel 'Castle Rackrent' explored the economic consequences of racked rents, tenant productivity incentives, and absentee landlord negligence.
- `20:00` The professionalization of economics in the mid-19th century created 'physics jealousy,' driving the field away from literary prose toward mathematical modeling, notably advanced by her nephew Francis Ysidro Edgeworth.
- `20:00` Institutions like the Political Economy Club deliberately excluded female economic writers as male thinkers sought academic appointments and disciplinary prestige.
- `23:15` While Edgeworth published fiction under her own name, she used anonymity or male family members' names when publishing theoretical or academic essays.
- `30:00` In letters with David Ricardo, Edgeworth debated Ireland's reliance on potatoes, prompting Ricardo to acknowledge the systemic vulnerability of monocultures and absolute comparative advantage.
- `31:37` Experiencing the Irish potato famine shattered Edgeworth's dogmatic adherence to laissez-faire, arriving at proto-Keynesian conclusions about state relief decades before Keynes.
- `34:25` Edgeworth mentored Jane Marcet, whose popular conversational dialogues across female characters served as an early, accessible economics textbook.
- `36:34` Edgeworth broke with classical thinkers on the labor theory of value, arguing that utility and intangible professional services are foundational to economic worth.
- `43:00` Economics continually experiences a pendulum swing between rigid theoretical DSGE models and grounding empirical, behavioral realities.
- `46:30` Current macro disruptions around artificial intelligence, geopolitics, and populist unrest closely mirror the structural anxiety of the Industrial Revolution around 1800.
The episode opens with promotional announcements for Barclays Brief—a concise, ten-minute weekly markets podcast—and HCA HealthONE's neonatal intensive care network, featuring a testimonial from a mother whose child was cared for at Sky Ridge. Following these spots, Carol Masser delivers the Bloomberg Tech Minute (presented by ChatGPT), highlighting reporting from *Bloomberg Businessweek*’s Lauren Grush regarding the intense recruitment standards at SpaceX.
Grush reports that securing a job at SpaceX demands exceptional capability and can involve Elon Musk personally reviewing a candidate's resume. Company culture is heavily shaped by Musk, requiring prospective hires to demonstrate deep commitment and loyalty to his vision. Recruiters place a premium on raw, innate intelligence and hands-on, tangible achievements over advanced academic credentials. While SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment, recruiters and applicants emphasize that people are drawn primarily by the mission of space exploration—a goal Musk routinely invokes alongside job postings warning that employees must be prepared to work weekends and extended hours. In return, workers receive company equity through restricted stock units or share purchase rights.
`02:02` Pre-Internet Virality and How Economic Ideas Spread
Tracy Allaway and Joe Weisenthal open the show by exploring how intellectual concepts—particularly economic theories—managed to achieve widespread cultural saturation long before the advent of social media and online retweets. Tracy notes that nearly everyone recognizes Adam Smith’s famous metaphor of the “invisible hand” and possesses at least an intuitive grasp of its meaning, even if they have never opened *The Wealth of Nations*. Joe reflects on the mechanics of pre-internet virality, drawing an analogy to the way schoolyard rhyming games and playground traditions spread organically across regions and countries without centralized media coordination.
The hosts discuss how modern thinkers often assume economic comprehension is a purely rational calculation: an individual reads an argument, evaluates its logic, and chooses whether to adopt or reject it. In reality, economic notions have historically diffused through culture via creative mediums like art, music, poetry, and storytelling. Joe underscores this dynamic, observing: “And to your point, I think people forget that, you know, the transmission of ideas is not just like a sort of like calculation.” Rather than being confined to academic treatises, narrative fiction became an extraordinarily effective vehicle for translating abstract economic models into relatable human experiences.
`04:47` Introducing Maria Edgeworth: "Bridgerton for Nerds"
While Adam Smith never authored a novel to proselytize his economic theories, a prominent Regency-era author did: Maria Edgeworth. Writing in the early nineteenth century, Edgeworth achieved enormous literary renown while actively engaging with the vanguard of economic thought, weaving Smithian concepts into her popular novels. Prior to preparing for the episode, neither Tracy nor Joe had ever encountered Edgeworth's name, either as a literary figure or as an economic pioneer.
Tracy explains that Edgeworth’s work and biography have recently been described as "*Bridgerton* for nerds"—a framing she finds delightful because it infuses the world of Regency romance with substantive political economy. Reflecting on the parallel, Tracy remarks: “And I always thought Bridgerton, like if there's one thing it could use, it's more discussion of agricultural productivity and rent seeking behavior on the part of the wealthy class.” To discuss Edgeworth's life and her overlooked legacy, the hosts welcome Jeanna Smialek, former Bloomberg reporter, Federal Reserve beat veteran, and currently the Brussels bureau chief for *The New York Times*, who has authored a biography titled *The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth*.
`06:05` Discovering Edgeworth in Heilbroner's *The Worldly Philosophers*
Tracy asks Smialek how she first stumbled upon Edgeworth given the writer’s near-total absence from mainstream economic history. Smialek recounts that roughly a decade ago, while covering the Federal Reserve for Bloomberg without a formal degree in economics, she embarked on a self-directed crash course in the history of economic thought to better understand the institutional debates she reported on daily. Her reading list included Robert Heilbroner’s classic work *The Worldly Philosophers*.
While Heilbroner's narrative tracks a familiar, almost exclusively male canon across centuries, Smialek noticed a brief aside that appeared only in later editions of the text. Heilbroner mentioned that classical economist David Ricardo shared a close intellectual friendship with a woman named Maria Edgeworth (pronounced "Mariah" in her own day), suggesting she may have been the first woman to seriously engage with economics. Smialek’s curiosity was piqued: upon running an initial search, she was shocked to discover that Edgeworth had actually outsold her contemporary Jane Austen during the Regency era. That revelation set off a deep, years-long research project into Edgeworth’s life and work.
`07:22` Outselling Jane Austen and Why Edgeworth Was Forgotten
Joe asks why a novelist who outsold Jane Austen in her own lifetime would vanish so completely from modern reading lists while Austen became an enduring literary titan. Smialek explains that Edgeworth’s contemporary celebrity was staggering: British royalty read her works, her readership spanned across the British Empire and the United States, and Lord Byron even expressed petty, documented jealousy in his personal letters after Edgeworth temporarily displaced him as the literary “lion of the season.”
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Edgeworth's Fame versus Long-Term Literary Canon
accDescr: Diagram contrasting Edgeworth's immense Regency-era popularity with her subsequent neglect due to overt pedagogical economic themes.
subgraph Contemporary["Regency Era Prominence"]
A["Outsold Jane Austen"] --> C["Mass Cultural Reach"]
B["Read by Royals & Envied by Lord Byron"] --> C
end
subgraph Legacy["Historical Divergence"]
C --> D["Explicit Pedagogical & Economic Focus"]
D --> E["Dismissed by Later Literary Critics"]
F["Austen's Timeless Character Studies"] --> G["Canonized into Modern Curriculum"]
end
```
Despite that sweeping fame, Edgeworth fell out of the canon largely because of her ambition to educate her audience. Unlike Austen, whose enduring popularity rests on timeless romantic comedy and social observation, Edgeworth viewed fiction as a deliberate pedagogical instrument meant to communicate practical social, moral, and economic theories. Emphasizing this dedication to educating her readers, Smialek observes: “She took her writing very seriously. She saw it as a way to communicate ideas.”
`10:00` The Pedagogical Style and Why Edgeworth Was Sidelined
Maria Edgeworth flourished during her heyday from approximately 1795 through 1815, directly preceding the era of Jane Austen, who emerged slightly later in the early 1800s. As literature transitioned into the Austen period, storytelling shifted toward a far more naturalistic style and abandoned the overt pedagogy that characterized Edgeworth's work. Jeanna Smialek observes that Edgeworth’s tendency to deliberately instruct the reader is a major factor behind her fading from the literary canon: “I think that actually, ironically, the economics that she's including in her novels is part of her problem.”
Her output was vast and tailored across different genres and intended audiences. For children in the nursery, she produced early-learning readers such as *The Cherry Orchard*, which introduced concepts like the division of labor—though modern readers might find them heavy-handed and dry. By contrast, her mature works engaged with economic philosophy at a remarkably sophisticated level. Her novel *Ennui*, which Smialek considers her most engaging title for modern audiences, dedicates roughly a chapter and a half entirely to pure economic argument, weaving economic analysis throughout the remainder of the narrative. In other works, such as *Letters for Literary Ladies*, she used fictionalized epistolary exchanges to examine whether women should enter the labor market, using narrative devices because academic publishing avenues were barred to women.
Smialek acknowledges that reading Edgeworth today can occasionally be an uphill battle, as the novel form was still under active construction. Writers of that era were experimenting without a settled template, and Edgeworth intentionally added analytical weight and wonkiness to counteract the prevailing prejudice that novels were merely silly, trivial romances written by women for women. To avoid that frivolous stigma, she famously branded her books "moral tales" rather than novels.
- **Peak Active Period**: 1795 to roughly 1815, directly ahead of Jane Austen's rise.
- **Children's Fiction**: Didactic stories like *The Cherry Orchard* used simplistic narratives to teach economic principles such as the division of labor to early readers.
- **Recommended Novel**: *Ennui*, singled out by Smialek as the work that “still scans the best in modern reading” and contains extensive, explicit economic discourse.
- **Epistolary Non-fiction/Fiction**: *Letters for Literary Ladies* explored female labor force participation under the guise of correspondence because formal academic publication was unavailable to female intellectuals.
---
`13:17` First-Generation Economics and Educating the Democratic Public
When asked whether Edgeworth was an ideological partisan—akin to modern free-market initiatives like Russell Roberts's *The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance* or libertarian educational efforts—Smialek clarifies that Edgeworth operated in a fundamentally different historical context. Publishing her first works in the mid-1790s, she belonged to the very first generation absorbing Adam Smith's *The Wealth of Nations* (1776). Her father moved in the same intellectual circles as Smith’s closest associates, granting her an intimate, front-row seat to the founding of modern political economy.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Transmission of Smithian Ideas to the Public
accDescr: Flow diagram showing how Adam Smith's 1776 economic theory moved through intellectual networks to Maria Edgeworth and the broader public.
subgraph S1["Origin of Theory"]
A["Adam Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations' (1776)"]
end
subgraph S2["Transmission & Network"]
B["Smith's Inner Circle & Scottish Enlightenment"] --> C["Richard Lovell Edgeworth & Family Intellectual Circle"]
C --> D["Maria Edgeworth"]
end
subgraph S3["Practical Adaptation"]
D --> E["Pedagogical Novels & 'Moral Tales'"]
E --> F["Democratic Masses & Estate Managers"]
end
A --> B
```
Edgeworth did not see herself as promoting an ideological doctrine, but rather as translating an entirely new science of human society for ordinary people. Writing in the immediate shadow of both the American and French Revolutions, she recognized that political power was dispersing downward and that the global order was transforming rapidly. In her view, if the public was going to exercise democratic power, economic literacy was an urgent civic necessity:
> “A new world is dawning. How do we educate people to be ready for it? And she thinks that economic education is an important part of that.”
Smialek stresses that Edgeworth’s primary contribution was taking the abstract, high-level philosophy of Smith and adapting it into concrete, actionable scenarios that ordinary citizens and estate managers could implement.
---
`15:47` *Castle Rackrent* and the Mechanics of Productive Land Ownership
The most famous early example of this translation is *Castle Rackrent*, published in 1800. The book takes its title straight from Adam Smith’s phrase "racked rent"—a punitive level of rent set so high that the tenant farmer cannot turn a profit or invest productively in the land. Drawing directly from *The Wealth of Nations*, Edgeworth examined the realities of Anglo-Irish estate ownership, analyzing the moral, social, and financial obligations of the landlord class in an increasingly commercial society.
Smialek points out that the core debates in *Castle Rackrent* remain unresolved in contemporary urban economics. Edgeworth explored where landlords should set their rents, how to structure incentives so that tenants invest in productivity, and how absentee owners ruin their own estates through negligence and extortionate leases. Joe Weisenthal draws a direct parallel to modern New York City, where commercial storefronts sit abandoned for years because tax write-offs, bank debt covenants, and property valuation models discourage landlords from lowering rents to market-clearing levels.
As the discussion turns to the nature of economic writing, the hosts reflect on how political economy originally relied on descriptive prose, morality, and social narrative before transforming into mathematical modeling and geometry. Smialek notes that the shift toward hard mathematical formalism contains a profound irony: the very person who helped mathematicalize economics was none other than Maria Edgeworth’s nephew, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth.
- **Smithian Influence**: The term "racked rent" comes directly out of *The Wealth of Nations*, describing rents that strip tenants of productive capital.
- **Estate Economics**: *Castle Rackrent* serves as a practical manual on preventing estate decay, illustrating how fair leases incentivize tenant productivity while greedy landlord practices destroy long-term property values.
- **Modern Echoes**: The hosts compare Edgeworth's landlord incentives to vacant retail properties in modern Manhattan held off the market due to financial valuations and tax rules.
- **The Mathematical Pivot**: Smialek reveals that Maria Edgeworth's own nephew would later become one of the foundational figures responsible for stripping storytelling out of economics in favor of mathematical equations.
`20:00` The Mathematical Turn and the Edgeworth Legacy
The intellectual legacy of the Edgeworth family extends directly into modern economics through Maria Edgeworth's nephew, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth. Students of introductory microeconomics still encounter his work today via the "Edgeworth box," a analytical tool representing multi-party trade-offs and distribution. This contribution marked a pivotal moment in the discipline's history. As Jeanna Smialek explains, "And it's really the application of utility to economics that takes it from the realm of philosophy to the realm of economics." This shift introduced a wave of what some economic historians term "physics jealousy" during the mid-1800s, as economists sought the academic prestige and rigor associated with the hard sciences.
To establish economics as a formal academic discipline, early thinkers sought university appointments, which were exceedingly rare at the time; Thomas Malthus was one of the very few to hold such a post. In pursuit of professionalization, these male economists established the Political Economy Club, pointedly excluding the prominent women writing on economic matters at the time. This era saw the rise of the "marginalists," a group of theorists who integrated utility theory—originally a philosophical concept championed by Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarians—into mathematical models of the world.
Maria Edgeworth was deeply integrated into these utilitarian circles and played an active, albeit hidden, role in translating these complex ideas for the public. She authored an anonymous essay translating and simplifying Bentham's work from French back into English. Some contemporary academic research even suggests that the groundbreaking utilitarian concepts later formalized by her nephew, F. Y. Edgeworth, may have originated with Maria herself. This transition eventually culminated in the late 19th century when Alfred Marshall published his seminal textbook, officially dropping "political" from "political economy" to establish the academic field of "economics."
- **F. Y. Edgeworth:** Maria Edgeworth's nephew, pioneer of the "Edgeworth box" and early mathematical microeconomics.
- **Physics Jealousy:** The mid-19th-century drive among economists to adopt mathematical and physics-style modeling to gain scientific credibility.
- **Political Economy Club:** An exclusive, male-only intellectual club formed to professionalize the field, excluding active female economic writers.
- **Alfred Marshall:** The economist whose textbook solidified the transition from "political economy" to "economics."
`23:15` Authorship, Pseudonyms, and Castle Rackrent
Unlike many female writers of the 19th century who adopted male pseudonyms, Maria Edgeworth published much of her work under her own name. During her early career, writing fiction was considered a socially acceptable pursuit for women, as evidenced by contemporaries like Frances Burney. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, Edgeworth operated in a brief historical window before the full societal backlash against intellectual women took hold.
While she initially published anonymously—a standard practice for authors of all genders at the time—she was forced to claim her work publicly due to plagiarism. Following the massive success of her bestseller *Castle Rackrent*, an imposter went so far as to produce a fake manuscript to claim authorship of the novel. Smialek notes, "So I think it was really a part of it was about staking claim to her own authorship."
Despite publishing her fiction openly, Edgeworth remained highly cautious about her more academic and economic writings. When reviewing Bentham or drafting scholarly essays, she chose either strict anonymity or published under the names of male relatives. For instance, she drafted an unpublished essay on Oxford education written entirely in her own handwriting but framed from her father's perspective, utilizing his notes while integrating her own distinct ideas.
`25:15` Mid-Show Briefing: EV Markets and Business Travel
The podcast takes a brief commercial and news interlude, starting with an invitation to listen to the *Barclays Brief* podcast for concise weekly market updates, followed by a promotion for Underdog Fantasy sports gaming.
In the *Bloomberg Tech Minute*, anchor Carol Massar reports on unexpected signs of life in the American electric vehicle market. Both Tesla and Rivian reported third-quarter sales that exceeded market expectations, prompting dealers to request more battery-powered inventory. Massar observes, "Just when it seemed American car buyers had left electric vehicles for dead, there are new signs of life in that corner of the auto market."
The segment highlights a significant stabilization in EV demand, supported by generous U.S. tax credits. Additionally, the commercial segment features an advertisement for the Delta Sky Miles Reserve Business American Express card, highlighting premium travel benefits, Delta Sky Club lounge access, and a limited-time sign-up bonus.
| Metric | Previous Level | August 2026 Level |
|:--- |:--- |:--- |
| **U.S. EV Dealer Inventory Supply** | 180 days (Early 2026) | 78 days |
| **EV Share of U.S. Auto Market** | — | ~6% (Stabilized) |
`28:30` The Potato Correspondence with David Ricardo
The discussion returns to Maria Edgeworth's personal intellectual relationships, focusing on her extensive correspondence with the leading economists of her era. During her frequent visits to London, Edgeworth established herself as a prominent social and intellectual figure, developing close friendships with both Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo.
Her relationship with Ricardo resulted in a remarkably active and spirited letter-writing campaign. While the tone of their letters remained warm and deeply respectful, the substance of their exchange was defined by constant intellectual combat. Smialek highlights the nature of this relationship, stating, "After she became friends with Ricardo, they started a very sort of aggressive letter writing campaign to each other in which they were like very friendly, but literally always disagreeing." A central focus of this debate was the "potato correspondence," in which Edgeworth and Ricardo argued over the agricultural, social, and economic risks of relying heavily on potato cultivation in Ireland—a debate that would prove tragically prophetic in the decades to follow.
`30:00` The Potato Debate, Comparative Advantage, and David Ricardo's Doubts
Maria Edgeworth and David Ricardo engaged in an active written debate about political economy, revolving around whether Ireland should exclusively specialize in potatoes. Taking Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage to an extreme, Edgeworth wrote to him arguing that Ireland ought to go all in on growing potatoes and trade for everything else. Historians debate her intentions, but she was likely playing devil's advocate by throwing his own concept right back at him:
> “She is literally parroting Ricardo's own idea back to him...”
Ricardo took the bait and pushed back. Rather than defending total specialization, he cautioned that relying entirely on a single, failure-prone crop like the potato was far too dangerous. The short-term profitability of comparative advantage was not worth the existential risk of starving an entire population if the crop collapsed. In doing so, Ricardo complicated his own model in his correspondence with Edgeworth, echoing arguments that Thomas Malthus had pressed on him for years—nuances he never included in his formal published texts. Tragically, Ricardo contracted a severe ear infection and died shortly thereafter, leaving his published legacy defined by an oversimplified view of free trade, even though his letters show he recognized the fatal flaw of over-specialization.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: The Ricardo-Edgeworth Specialization Debate
accDescr: Maria Edgeworth pushes comparative advantage on potatoes, prompting Ricardo to introduce food security risks.
subgraph Debate["The Potato Argument"]
ME["Maria Edgeworth"] -->|"Pushes comparative advantage:<br/>Ireland should specialize fully in potatoes"| DR["David Ricardo"]
DR -->|"Pushes back:<br/>Monoculture is vulnerable to blight and famine"| Risk["Systemic Risk & Famine"]
end
subgraph Aftermath["Historical Outcome"]
Risk -.->|"Tragically validated by"| Famine["Irish Potato Famine"]
DR -.->|"Dies of ear infection before"| Canon["Nuance omitted from economic canon"]
end
```
`31:37` The Irish Famine and the Shift Toward Proto-Keynesianism
For most of her life, Maria Edgeworth was an uncompromising disciple of Adam Smith's laissez-faire doctrines, opposing trade barriers and rejecting handouts to the poor. However, the catastrophic devastation of the Irish potato famines forced an agonizing reappraisal of her rigid free-market principles:
> “She does not believe in any kind of handouts to the poor. Like she she's taken the word of Adam Smith and she has interpreted it very literally. And she thinks that it should be applied pretty absolutely for much of her life. She then gets to the potato famine and everybody in her neighborhood is dying.”
The crisis struck Ireland in two successive waves. An earlier, lesser-known famine first began to destabilize her convictions, but the Great Famine that followed devastated her local community and shattered her dogmatic beliefs. Facing mass starvation, Edgeworth realized that private markets alone could not resolve such immense human catastrophes; survival demanded direct government intervention and emergency public spending. Through this experience, she arrived at a proto-Keynesian understanding roughly eighty years before John Maynard Keynes formalized the doctrine. On her deathbed, when asked if she wanted to compose an autobiography, she declined. Instead, she dictated unfinished intellectual projects, placing at the top of the list a directive that someone must re-examine the potato as Ireland's national staple, advising researchers to start with David Ricardo's letters to her.
- Edgeworth originally read Adam Smith with strict, uncompromising literalism.
- Witnessing starvation across her estate and neighborhood forced her to embrace public relief spending.
- Her dying intellectual directive pointed future economists to Ricardo's correspondence on agricultural vulnerability.
`34:25` Fiction as an Engine for Popular Economics
The conversation shifts to why Edgeworth was so wildly popular as an author. While some of her moralizing children's tales (such as *The Cherry Orchard*) can feel dry and heavy-handed to modern sensibilities, contemporary audiences found her fiction delightful. Queen Victoria even tried to emulate Edgeworth's writing style as a child. Her adult novels, such as *Ennui*, were celebrated for their biting wit, vivid humor, and caricatures of real social figures. Beyond sheer entertainment, her audience was eager to understand the complex economic ideas reshaping society.
Adam Smith’s *The Wealth of Nations* was notoriously dense, dry, and difficult for non-specialists to navigate. Edgeworth solved this problem by embedding economic disputes inside engaging fictional narratives, helping people discuss economic concepts intelligently. Her success established a path for others, including her close friend and mentee Jane Marcet:
> “She mentors and is very good friends with a woman named Jane Marcet, who then sort of takes the idea of putting this stuff into fiction and takes it one step further and kind of puts it in what I think you can consider an early economics textbook.”
Marcet’s work, structured as conversational dialogues among three women, functioned as an accessible economics primer and became a runaway hit, satisfying the era's demand for clear, engaging explanations of political economy.
`36:34` Challenging Adam Smith on the Labor Theory of Value
Although Edgeworth embraced Adam Smith’s arguments on free trade, she diverged sharply from the classical consensus regarding the source of economic value. Classical economists such as Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus leaned toward the labor theory of value, viewing physical, tangible output—such as harvesting potatoes or manufacturing physical goods—as the primary standard of productive worth. Edgeworth anticipated modern economics by recognizing utility, rather than physical labor, as the foundation of value:
> “Yeah. So she was early to an idea that we basically still think is right today, which is that utility is kind of the basis of value as opposed to labor.”
Edgeworth argued that non-physical, service-oriented professions—such as lawyers, accountants, and administrators—create genuine economic value because they provide utility and improve lives. In her novel *Castle Rackrent*, the character who ultimately takes over and stabilizes the estate is trained as a lawyer, subtly demonstrating that intangible professional skills drive prosperity. Her personal correspondence and the writings of her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, make this critique explicit. In an exchange with followers of Jeremy Bentham, her father noted their ambition to correct Adam Smith's errors by placing utility at the heart of economic theory.
- Classical economists equated productive labor almost exclusively with physical output.
- Edgeworth and her father argued that utility and professional services generate real value.
- This early defense of non-physical labor prefigured the marginal revolution and modern utility theory.
`38:52` Bloomberg Tech Minute: Rebound in U.S. Electric Vehicle Sales
The segment concludes with an interlude covering an unexpected uptick in U.S. electric vehicle adoption, hosted by Carol Masser:
> “Just when it seemed American car buyers had left electric vehicles for dead, there are new signs of life in that corner of the auto market.”
Reporters Cara Carlson and Gabby Coppola note that Tesla and Rivian both beat third-quarter sales expectations. Dealerships have worked through the inventory glut that plagued the market earlier in 2026, bringing excess inventory from a 180-day supply down to 78 days in August. Bolstered by interest in higher-volume models from manufacturers like Toyota and General Motors' Cadillac brand, executives at Ford and Hyundai report that dealers are actively requesting additional battery-powered inventory to meet rebounding consumer demand.
`40:00` Commercial Break
The broadcast opens mid-segment with an auto-industry market report noting that U.S. demand for electric vehicles has begun to stabilize around 6% of the market following a post-subsidy bust, according to Cox Automotive. This is followed by promotional announcements for ChatGPT, the Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business American Express card (featuring bonus miles and Delta Sky Club lounge access privileges), and Wise cross-border foreign currency transfer services.
`43:00` The Pendulum Swing: Abstract Models vs. Practical Economics
Returning from the break, the conversation centers on the ongoing identity crisis within the discipline of economics. Tracy Alloway frames the historical transition: political economy started with Adam Smith writing dense treatises to establish concepts, which Maria Edgeworth then translated into tangible, behaviorally grounded narratives. Later, the discipline drifted into abstract, formal mathematical modeling. Alloway asks whether economics is trapped in an endless pendulum swing between practical, behavioral observation and rigid theoretical abstraction.
Jeanna Smialek agrees with the characterization, emphasizing that the lessons of the early 1800s speak directly to modern practice. When thinkers and policymakers attempt to apply economic dogma as an absolute doctrine, it repeatedly backfires. Smialek cautions against treating models as if they reflect physical constants: “There's something to be said for, you know, remembering that this is a philosophy at its root and it's not physics.” Economic models break down whenever people make irrational choices, become greedy, face crop failures, or when economists misunderstand how an individual variable behaves. The profession, she warns, frequently becomes overly reliant on complex DSGE (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium) models and then undergoes a painful reassessment when reality refuses to conform.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Evolution and Pendulum of Economic Methodology
accDescr: Chart showing how economics swung from political treatises to narrative education, to mathematical modeling, and back to behavioral reality.
subgraph EarlyEra["Early Political Economy"]
A["Adam Smith:<br/>Dense Theoretical Treatises"] --> B["Maria Edgeworth:<br/>Practical & Behavioral Fiction"]
end
subgraph MathematicalShift["Modern Shift to Abstraction"]
B --> C["Formal Abstract Modeling<br/>(DSGE reliance)"]
end
subgraph ReassessmentPhase["Real-World Frictions & Recalibration"]
C --> D["Breakdown via Behavioral Frictions<br/>(Greed, misjudged variables, shocks)"]
D --> E["Recalibration back to<br/>Philosophical Roots & Observation"]
end
E -.->|"Pendulum swing repeats"| C
```
`45:00` Leaving the Fed Beat for Europe and Structural Macro Questions
The hosts transition to Smialek's current post as Brussels bureau chief for *The New York Times*, asking whether she misses covering the Federal Reserve beat. Smialek acknowledges she misses it because it was an inherently enjoyable assignment, though she finds her current European mandate equally stimulating. When asked about the common thread between covering European parliamentary politics and the Fed beat, Smialek dryly draws the parallel: “It's 12 districts where, you know, you've got you've got various people who are going to sort of weigh in on the issue and who you have to satisfy with with one central decision.”
Joe Weisenthal notes that while month-to-month macro data—such as high inflation readings, CPI prints, jobs reports, and Fed press conferences—remain interesting, they increasingly feel overshadowed by profound structural questions. The core tensions of the current moment do not feel cyclical:
- What is the long-term viability of Europe as an integrated economic and political bloc?
- What will become of the escalating relationship between the United States and China?
- How will the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence redefine the basic structures of work and production?
Because these forces transcend monthly data calendars, the present era feels far closer to an epochal turning point than a typical business cycle.
`46:30` Parallels Between the 1800 Industrial Dawn and the AI Era
Smialek points out that the current anxiety closely mirrors the dawn of the Industrial Revolution around 1800. At that time, multiple structural upheavals struck at once: the division of labor was being systematically introduced, factories were rapidly increasing efficiency, agriculture had just undergone massive productivity gains, and cities like London were industrializing. Society was paralyzed by fears that workers, sharecroppers, and farm laborers would be displaced, and critics worried that mind-numbing assembly-line tasks would essentially turn human beings into robots. Simultaneously, the fallout of the French Revolution and regional insurgencies unleashed waves of populist unrest and counter-revolutionary backlashes.
Modern economics was born out of that collision because society desperately needed a conceptual framework to explain a world that had suddenly transformed. Smialek argues that the current moment shares those exact traits:
- **Artificial Intelligence:** AI has not yet triggered a full seismic wave across macro figures, but its disruptive potential is recognized everywhere.
- **Geopolitics and Trade:** Global alliances are fragmenting as China's economic role evolves and American trade policy pivots away from open globalization.
- **Populism:** Widespread populist movements across Europe and the United States continue to challenge institutional norms.
Alloway links this directly to the core theme of Smialek's book: Maria Edgeworth used literature to democratize economic understanding precisely because she believed education was the only defense working people had during an era of disruption. Smialek concurs, explaining that Edgeworth wanted to equip people with adaptive tools so they could achieve upward mobility rather than be crushed by structural progress—a dilemma identical to modern companies urging their workforces to master artificial intelligence to stay relevant.
`50:00` Maria Edgeworth’s Erased Legacy and Modern Parallels
As the interview concludes, Jeanna Smialek reflects on the contemporary resonance of Maria Edgeworth’s project: equipping the general public with fundamental economic principles so everyday citizens can evaluate and navigate sweeping transformations as they unfold. Smialek observes that our current era feels remarkably like Edgeworth's, noting, “I feel like that feels like a somewhat similar moment.” With economic debates swirling around industrial policy, technological disruption, and living standards, the need to demystify political economy for ordinary readers remains as urgent as ever. Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway thank Smialek for returning to the podcast and spotlighting her new book, *The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth*.
Reflecting on the discussion immediately after the interview, Weisenthal and Alloway marvel at the sheer scale of Edgeworth’s historical disappearance. It is staggering that a thinker could play such a pivotal role at the very inception of political economy as a formal discipline, achieve immense mainstream popularity, and then vanish from standard economic histories. Alloway expresses utter disbelief at how thoroughly history buried her accomplishments: “The fact that someone can be like, oh, in their day they outsold Jane Austen, and then it's like literally no one has heard of this person.” Both hosts emphasize that Edgeworth was not an obscure academic writing strictly for ivory-tower peers; she was a bona fide literary celebrity whose pedagogical fiction engaged the broader reading public on questions of rent, productivity, and labor long before those ideas were codified into dry textbooks.
`51:15` Moralistic Cautionary Tales and *Der Struwwelpeter*
The conversation turns to the tone of children's literature, comparing Edgeworth’s didactic, practical economic stories with other traditions of youth instruction. Alloway asks Weisenthal whether modern children's books are still heavily moralistic. Weisenthal replies that contemporary works are a mixed bag—some are lighthearted and normal, while plenty still preach behavioral lessons.
Alloway then recalls a notorious 19th-century German classic translated into English as *Slovenly Peter* (*Der Struwwelpeter*), which took moralizing to an extreme and terrifying level. Rather than teaching useful concepts like resource allocation or the division of labor, the book presented illustrated horror stories of children suffering gruesome deaths for minor infractions, such as playing with matches and setting themselves ablaze. Weisenthal and Alloway laugh over the sheer trauma such Victorian-era moral tales inflicted on young minds. Remarking on Edgeworth's comparatively wholesome approach, Alloway quips, “I think I would have preferred reading a book about the division of labor as a child versus don't set yourself on fire.”
- *Slovenly Peter* (*Der Struwwelpeter*): A collection of darkly comedic, cautionary rhymes and illustrations created in mid-19th-century Germany by Heinrich Hoffmann, notorious for depicting catastrophic punishments (like fingers being snipped off or children burning alive) for everyday misbehavior.
- Edgeworthian Alternative: By contrast, Maria Edgeworth’s juvenile tales sought to instruct children through rational cause-and-effect reasoning, demonstrating how foresight, industriousness, and understanding economic value yield tangible rewards.
`52:30` Sign-off and Credits
Alloway and Weisenthal bring the episode to a close with their customary sign-off and acknowledgments. They urge listeners interested in foundational economic thinkers to read Jeanna Smialek’s biography of Maria Edgeworth and follow her reporting.
The hosts conclude by directing their audience to the show's daily coverage and community channels:
- Host social handles: Tracy Alloway (@tracyalloway) and Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart).
- Guest: Jeanna Smialek (@jeannasmialek), Brussels bureau chief for *The New York Times* and author of *The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth*.
- Production team: Carmen Rodriguez (@CarmenArmen), Dashiell Bennett (@Dashbot), Kel Brooks (@Kel_Brooks), and Kevin Lozano (@kevinrozo).
- The *Odd Lots* daily newsletter, available on Bloomberg.com.
- Subscription options: Ad-free episode listening available exclusively to Bloomberg subscribers through Apple Podcasts.
## Notable quotes
> `20:00` It's really the application of utility to economics that takes it from the realm of philosophy to the realm of economics. — Jeanna Smialek
## Mentioned
Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, Barclays Brief, Bloomberg, Bloomberg Businessweek, Bridgerton, Cadillac, Carol Massar, Castle Rackrent, ChatGPT, Cox Automotive, David Ricardo, Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business American Express, Der Struwwelpeter, Elon Musk, Ennui, Federal Reserve, Ford, Frances Burney, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, HCA HealthONE, Heinrich Hoffmann, Hyundai, Jane Austen, Jane Marcet, Jeanna Smialek, Jeremy Bentham, Joe Weisenthal, John Maynard Keynes, Letters for Literary Ladies, Lord Byron, Maria Edgeworth, Odd Lots, Political Economy Club, Queen Victoria, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Rivian, Robert Heilbroner, Russell Roberts, Sky Ridge, SpaceX, Tesla, The Cherry Orchard, The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth, The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance, The New York Times, The Wealth of Nations, The Worldly Philosophers, Thomas Malthus, Toyota, Tracy Alloway, Underdog Fantasy, Wise
## Video description
<p>In 1776, the field of economics was born with the publication of Adam Smith's <em>The Wealth of Nations</em>. And among the book's earliest readers, and most ardent advocates, was a Regency-era novelist named Maria Edgeworth. In her time, Edgeworth was one of the most famous literary figures in England, and she smuggled into her stories economic concepts and debates around rent seeking, the idea of productive labor, and so on. These works were enormously influential and they helped expose a generation to practical applications of Smith's new theories. Yet when you read about the history of economics, Edgeworth's name is hardly ever mentioned. Jeanna Smialek, a veteran reporter and the Brussels bureau chief at <em>The New York Times</em>, thinks Edgeworth's name needs to be placed back in the pantheon of economic history. On this episode, we speak with Smialek about her biography, <em>The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth</em>, and we discuss Edgeworth's friendly debates with the likes of Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, how the Irish potato famine reshaped economic thought, and how Edgeworth used the novel form to educate the masses on the value of economics.<br><br>Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Sign up at <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast" data-link-cookie="1" data-destination="https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast">bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots</a></p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p>
Author Maria Edgeworth outsold Jane Austen during the Regency era by translating early classical economics into popular fiction, yet she vanished from the canon as economics formalized into mathematics and literature turned toward naturalism, according to biographer Jeanna Smialek.
Popularizing Smithian Economics Through Regency Fiction (10:00)
Active from roughly 1795 to 1815, Maria Edgeworth absorbed Adam Smith’s 1776 work *The Wealth of Nations* through her father’s intellectual circle. Operating amid the democratic upheavals of the American and French Revolutions, Edgeworth viewed economic literacy as a civic necessity for ordinary citizens rather than an ideological dogma. Because formal academic avenues were closed to women, she utilized narrative fiction and epistolary tales—which she labeled "moral tales"—to explore political economy.
Landlord Economics and the Utility Theory Challenge (15:47)
Edgeworth’s 1800 novel *Castle Rackrent* adapted Smith's critique of "racked rents" to demonstrate how predatory leases and absentee landlords destroyed tenant productivity and long-term estate values. Smialek and the hosts draw a parallel between these incentives and modern commercial real estate dynamics, such as vacant New York retail spaces held off the market due to loan covenants and valuation formulas.
Edgeworth also broke with classical thinkers like Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus over the source of economic value. While the classical consensus embraced a labor theory of value grounded in physical output, Edgeworth asserted that utility was the basis of value, arguing that non-physical professions such as law and administration created legitimate wealth—anticipating the marginal revolution.
The Ricardo Correspondence and Famine-Driven Realism (30:00)
During regular visits to London, Edgeworth maintained an aggressive intellectual correspondence with David Ricardo. In the "potato correspondence," Edgeworth pushed Ricardo's comparative advantage model to its logical extreme by proposing that Ireland specialize entirely in potatoes. Ricardo pushed back, admitting that monoculture posed catastrophic systemic risks if the crop failed—an existential qualification regarding food security that he omitted from his formal published works before his early death.
Edgeworth’s early adherence to strict Smithian laissez-faire doctrine collapsed when successive potato famines devastated her local community in Ireland. Confronting mass starvation, she concluded that private markets alone could not resolve systemic crises, arriving at a proto-Keynesian defense of emergency public relief spending decades ahead of formal twentieth-century theory.
Professionalization, Mathematics, and Canonical Erasure (20:00)
Edgeworth's subsequent obscurity stemmed from shifts in both literature and political economy. In literature, storytelling moved toward Jane Austen's naturalistic, character-driven social observations, casting Edgeworth's overtly didactic narratives aside. In economics, the discipline actively professionalized: male thinkers formed institutions like the Political Economy Club that excluded women and sought scientific prestige through mathematical models and utility curves.
Ironically, this mathematical turn was accelerated by Maria’s nephew, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, who helped pioneer microeconomic tools such as the Edgeworth box. The shift was completed when Alfred Marshall dropped "political" to establish "economics" as a formalized science, divorcing the field from the descriptive prose and behavioral narratives Edgeworth had championed.
Smialek argues that modern economics faces an identity crisis mirroring Edgeworth's era: abstract models repeatedly stumble over behavioral realities, greed, and structural shocks. As contemporary workers confront automation, trade fragmentation, and geopolitical realignment, Smialek views Edgeworth’s original objective—democratizing foundational economic mechanics so the public can navigate rapid structural transformation—as an enduring necessity.
[20:00] Jeanna Smialek: It's really the application of utility to economics that takes it from the realm of philosophy to the realm of economics.
Original transcript
[0:00] There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts. Today, I'm joined by Johanna from HCA Health One NICU story. Johanna, after having two healthy deliveries, what was it like to suddenly find yourself facing a NICU stay? Gosh, it was overwhelming at first. You never expect it. But the moment we walked into HCA Health One Sky Ridge, the NICU team was incredibly calm and confident. They cared for my baby and they cared for me. They explained every step, checked on us constantly, and made sure we never felt alone. And you worked with several specialists during thrive and helped me feel confident as a mom again. And knowing you had access to one of the largest NICUs in the state, what did that mean? Everything. I mean, even though our baby didn't end up needing the highest level of care, just knowing it was there gave us incredible peace of mind. To learn more about HCA Health One's maternity and NICU network, visit hcahealthone.com. This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChachiPT. I'm Carol Masser. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly including in job ads that candidates, quote, must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed. One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChachiPT. Get started at ChachiPT.com. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe... Something I like to think about is how ideas, specifically economic ideas, go viral, how they get popularized. And so you think about something like the invisible hand. A lot of people will recognize that phrase and have a sort of basic understanding of what it means, even if they've never actually read the works of Adam Smith. Yeah. I'm actually very fascinated by the concept of pre-internet virality. It's like someone says something online and everyone retweets it. They're like, all right, I get how that works. Or says something on a podcast. Or says something on a podcast, whatever. But how did ideas spread back, media but they did i mean they did spread you know i always think about like It's a little different, but like school children, like rhyming games and stuff like that. And how like all around the world and all around the country, children will be like doing roughly the same like sort of like games and stuff like. How did they how did it get around so far? Yeah, it's like really I'm fascinated by this question. It's a good question. And before there was social media, before there was podcasts, one of the ways that ideas would get spread around is through podcasts. fiction, basically, through novels, through stories, as you just pointed out. Right. And it's interesting because, like, you know, we think of ideas, particularly economic ideas. As you said, you referred to the invisible hand. We think of ideas as being like, OK, I'm going to read some idea. It's going to rationally make sense to me. And then I'll either adopt this idea or I will discard it, et cetera. But a very powerful way of spreading ideas is through like read, et cetera. And to your point, I think people forget that, you know, the transmission of ideas is not just like a sort of like calculation. It's through art. It's through storytelling.
[5:00] through poetry, music, etc. And this almost never gets discussed in a sort of intellectual context. No, and Adam Smith never wrote a novel to popularize his ideas, but someone who did write about economics through the medium of fiction is going to be our subject for today. We're going to be talking about Maria Edgeworth, who was a very successful novelist in the early 1800s, I guess during the Regency era, who was also very, very involved with shaping the future of economic all these people like Adam Smith and actually injecting some of those ideas into her various stories. Prior to having prepped for this episode, had you heard of her? No, I had not had you. I think this is really interesting. Neither as an economic thinker nor as a novelist, actually. And so I'm very intrigued by this. Yeah. So this is something else that I'm very interested in is like who gets to decide who gets the credit for various economic ideas and which theories we and reasonable. I know of her now because I read this book and it's been described as Bridgerton for nerds, which I kind of love because it's a Regency era novelist. And I always thought Bridgerton, like if there's one thing it could use, it's more discussion of agricultural productivity and rent seeking behavior on the part of the wealthy class. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to talk about Maria Edgeworth, her contribution to economics and I guess how her ideas, you know, kind of got forgotten and who gets the credit nowadays. I'm excited about this one. It's a really good book, and I'm very happy to say we have the perfect guest to discuss it. We're going to be speaking to the author, Gina Smilich. She is a former colleague of ours at Bloomberg, now bureau chief, Brussels bureau chief over at the New York Times. Previously seen in many Fed press conferences asking questions in a previous version of her job. That's exactly right. 19th century novelist taught the world economics. So Gina, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. So how did you discover Maria Edgeworth? Because as Joe and I were saying prior to the publication of your book, I had never heard of her either in an economics or a literary context. So I was it was about a decade ago, I was working here, actually, and I was covering the Federal Reserve. And I was relatively new on the Fedbeat, trying to learn as much as I could about the ideas I was covering. I didn't have an economics degree at the time. And so I just thought that I needed a little bit more background than I had. And so I was reading a lot of economic history. And I read Robert Halebronner's The Worldly Philosophers, Seminal History of the Field. And, you know, that book is excellent. It's a fun read. Thank you. Adam, Bob, John, Mark, you know, you move through history and it's a very male dominated industry. But he has this little aside that. Ricardo, David Ricardo, obviously one of the most famous economists of all of history, was really good friends with this woman named Mariah Edgeworth, called Mariah at the time, called Maria today. And... she was probably the first woman to think about economics. And that's the extent of the aside. It's only in some editions of Hale Bronner. So people who have read the book may not even recognize that because he's only got it in the later editions. And it really struck me that I had never heard of this lady. And then I, of course, I Googled her and discovered that she had been outselling Jane Austen in her day and age, which was, you know, extremely surprising to me. And so I just went down a rabbit hole and here we are. Should we call her Maria or Mariah Okay. That's actually interesting that in her day she outsold Jane Austen because that Raises a second question sort of related to what you're talking about. So like who we're reading today may not have any correlation to people who people were reading back then. It's very hard to know like who will actually be durable and sometimes people get rediscovered. Can you explain that? Why, if she was selling outselling Jane Austen her day, does everyone read Jane Austen and not Maria? Yeah, so I actually think this is really fascinating because I think two things are true. Sometimes people get forgotten and she got forgotten in an almost surprising way. So she was extremely famous in her day. Lord Byron once said that she had replaced him as the lion of the season and he was extremely jealous of this. Actually, it's very funny. He's got a whole little sequence in his letters where he's being jealous of her. She was read by the royals. She was, you know, across the British Empire. The Americans were really excited about her writing. And so she was incredibly famous. She got forgotten. And I think that a huge part of that is actually that she was putting a lot of pedagogical material in her novels. She took her writing very seriously. She saw it as a way to communicate ideas. And you get into sort of the Jane Austen era. So Mariah is really active. Maria is really
[10:00] active from 1795. through sort of 1815 is sort of her heyday. Jane Austen's slightly later. She's sort of like the early 1800s. And so you get into the Jane Austen era and things become a lot more naturalistic. The storytelling is less pedagogical. It's less like hit you over the head with some ideas. And so that is part of why she gets forgotten. I think that actually, ironically, the economics that she's including in her novels is part of her problem. And so I think I think there's a there's sort of an irony there. Well, okay, so talk to us about when we say that she tried to illustrate economic ideas through her writings. What would be an example of that? And I have to say, so I read your book, I did not read, I didn't have time to read one of Edgeworth's actual books. I did read a short story for children called The Cherry Orchard, where she kind of gets into the division of labor. It was a very boring story, I got to say, and to your point, very much sort of hitting you over the head with its message. But like, what did her writing actually look like? And how did she deal with economics? So she was prolific. She wrote a lot. Not all of her work deals with economics, but quite a big portion of her catalog does. She does it differently for different audiences. So the children's audience, she is writing very much to be read in the nursery as sort of an early learning, when you're learning how to read kind of text. And so it's very simplistic. her novel Ennui, which is one of her more famous novels at the time. And in my opinion, the one that still scans the best in modern reading. So if listeners want to start with a Mariah Edgeworth book, I would recommend Ennui. It's a fun book. But that one has a very sophisticated take on economics. It's extensive. There's essentially a chapter and a half that's just solely dedicated to economics. And then the rest of the book has it kind of woven in and out throughout. And she also at times just basically does essays. So she's got a book called Letters It's framed as fiction. It's a bunch of letters in between various people discussing whether women should be in the labor market. And it's very much building on Adam Smith. She's writing just after Adam Smith. This is her first book. And so it's very much sort of an argument, but she's making it in a fictional format because... she's a woman and she is not allowed to publish academic papers. So I think it really varies between extremely simplistic and very sophisticated. Do you like her books? I like some of them. Okay. Some of them are slog because she's writing at a time when books are very long, when books are very dry sometimes. She's trying. I think it's important context for readers to know that or listeners to know that at the time that she is writing, the novel is still in its formation. It has not solidified into the format that we know today. She actually helps it to do that, as do most of her contemporaries. And so they're not really sure what they're doing. It's an era of experimentation. novels really ranging with that experimentation. Like as people are trying to figure out what these should look like, she's changing her style. And I think she also is making them slightly boring and making them slightly wonky in the service of making them seem serious. So at the time, novels are mostly written by women for women. They're seen as light and stupid and trivial. And so she's trying to say like, no, these are not light and stupid and trivial. There's a way to take these seriously. She actually calls her novels moral tales somewhat hilariously because she doesn't want them to get stained by the label of novel, but they're very clearly novels. Oh, interesting. You know, it's funny... Have you heard of Russell Roberts, The Invisible Heart and Economic Romance? Have you heard of this book? No. Yeah, so Russell Roberts is an economist. There's actually – and like it was sort of popular in the – like in the early 2000s. There was a lot of – you know, like sort of like Koch Brothers, George Mason University-esque money that was put forth towards let's create art that like smuggles in. Yeah. etc and i'm sort of curious like because you said she's trying to hit people over the head a little bit maybe that's why they're not read as much like i'm curious how it compares to like the other efforts over the years like let's teach children the importance of free enterprise by like writing uh like did she have an ideology was what was there an overarching lesson when you said coke brothers and romantic economic literature i thought you were going to go in a very different direction but The Coke with a K, brothers. Oh, yes. K-O-C-H. Yeah. I think the important distinction here, and the context that's really important, is she is writing in sort of 1795, sort of her start date. So Adam Smith has just written The Wealth of Nations in 1776. She's generation one. Like, she's the first set of people starting to write.
[15:00] to understand economic ideas. And so I think because I think, you know, most people date the start of modern economics to 1776 and the wealth of nations. And her dad is friends with the crowd that Smith is working in. He doesn't know Smith personally, but he knows all of Smith's best friends. And so she's got a really front row seat as early economics is being developed. And she's doing her best to popularize the set of ideas that nobody knows yet. So I think, ideology she is more like There's a new... way of thinking about the world in town. Why don't you take a look at this? And she thinks, she, I think, almost uniquely at the time when she's starting to write, thinks that these ideas need to be translated for normal people. So she's writing just in the wake of the French Revolution. People have democratic power that they hadn't necessarily had before. The American Revolution has just happened as well. Sort of the whole world is in a state of flux and change. The it's clear that it's coming and the elites understand that. And so she's really thinking about like, a new world is dawning. How do we educate people to be ready for it? And she thinks that economic education is an important part of that. And so I think that a lot of her ideology is really surrounding how do we apply the ideas in the wealth of nations in broader ways? And a lot of her contributions are basically taking the ideas that she finds in the wealth of nations and making them more practicable for the real world. Yeah. So give us maybe a concrete example. So when I came up first was Castle Rack Rent, which it turns out is directly borrowed from the Adam Smith text, this idea of rack rent. What were the Smithian, Smithsonian? I don't know. Smithian. Smith-esque ideas that were embedded in that book. Fun fact, it's Smithian. This is actually a word that exists. I did not know this prior to researching this book. But yes, so she writes rack rent, which is literally the name of it, is pulled straight from Smith. He talks about racked rent, which is a rent that's too high to allow the renter to productively make a profit. And so she pulls the title directly from Adam Smith. The book, this was actually the first Murray Edgeworth book that I personally read, and it is just like a regurgitation of the wealth of nations in large part. And there's actually a lot of literary historian work that sort of analyzes fact, I am not the first person to observe this. But she pulls very directly from Smith. She talks about a lot of ideas that he talks about in The Wealth of Nations, but applies them to Irish estate owning. So she is Anglo-Irish. She's an English elite who owns an estate in Ireland. Obviously, this becomes much more problematic throughout her life. But when she's young, this is, though, basically the way that Ireland is run. And she's talking about how you can be a landlord in sort of a more moral and productive way, like how this old system can fit into our new capitalistic system. And so so much of what she talks about in Rack Rent is where do you set do you incentivize workers to be more productive and how do you not squander people? your resources in a way that sort of runs your estate into the ground. And so she's really taking the stuff that Adam Smith put out very abstractly, simplifying it and applying it to the real world. And these are all ideas that still apply to today. Joe, you and I, we both live in New York, and I know we've walked down streets where you have shop faces that have been empty for years and years and years. And you go like, well, why doesn't the landlord just lower the rent and rent it out to someone rather than keeping it empty? I've answered this question a bunch of times. Everyone is like, oh, so there's like banks and taxes. Valuations. Valuations. And like, I've never understood this. So I'm still curious. So thinking about economics today. It's just like, especially academic, academic economics specifically, like you might as well in some cases like be reading geometry or math or something like that. There's a lot of equations, etc. There's a lot of. I don't – I'm more sympathetic to them than I used to be, but seeming disconnect from anything in the real world, et cetera. Especially you read a lot of old economics and it's like people – maybe not literally writing novels, though in this case it was, but like sort of stories. And I think – what did they used to call economics before it was economics? It was like – Political economy. Political economy. Like, this sort of, like, telling stories and stuff like that. When did that die off? When was the end of economics taught as a sort of, like... almost like a moral instruction yeah in a way so this is this is a fun plot twist that i'm kind of going to give away because it's an important part of the book actually but her nephew is a
[20:00] part of this transition, actually. Yeah, so Mariah Edgeworth's nephew is FY Edgeworth, who your listeners may be familiar with, because if they took Econ 101 and they studied the Edgeworth box, so the sort of four-way trade-off, that you get in Econ 101, that is her nephew who came up with that idea. And so a lot of microeconomics that we still learn today actually is based on the ideas of Edgeworth. And it's really the application of utility to economics that takes it from the realm of philosophy to the realm of economics. sort of math and physics. So there's what some people, some economic historians will call physics jealousy that sort of springs up in the mid-1800s where economists are sort of... They want to be a science, right? Yeah, they're looking around and they're like, oh, people are taking these scientists seriously. And so they really want to become more serious. They want to be involved at universities. At the time, there are very few economists working out of universities. Thomas Malthus is the first sort of academic economist, but it's a relatively rare posting. There aren't a lot of them at the And so they started they formed this thing called the political economy club. They don't invite any of the women working in economics at the time to the political economy club. And they start working really hard to sort of make economics a little bit mathier. Ricardo had kind of started with this abstraction, but it's really the marginalists. So the group of people who take utility theory and apply it to economics, who kind of successfully make this transition happen because they successfully sort of write down models and say that these models describe the world. And so you see the sort of early marginalists, including Edgeworth, but it's sort of the a very academic pursuit. Why were they called the marginalists? Because they were working with marginal utility. So utility was originally a philosophical idea. Yeah, right. Utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham, all those guys. Exactly, exactly. And actually, very interestingly, Mariah Edgeworth was extremely interested in utilitarians and was friends with a lot of them. And so she actually, her only... sort of known academic work that kind of touches on an economic issue was an anonymous essay that we only know exists because she had some surviving letters that sort of got through that describe it. She was very set on this essay saying secret, not being attributed to her. But in it, she reviews a translation of Bentham and in doing so translates it back. The translation of Bentham is in French. She translates it back into English and like simplifies Bentham for the average reader. utility theory, there's some academic research suggesting that the utilitarian ideas that her nephew came up with probably actually originated with her. And so and so, yes, so this transition happens. She's kind of on the leading edge of it, probably. But what we what we know for sure is that by sort of the mid 1800s, the. Political is dropped from political economy. It becomes economics with Alfred Marshall's seminal textbook. And it really becomes an academic sort of, you know, at university pursuit from there. you know, Why didn't she ever publish under a male pen name? Because it's not like it was unheard of. Maybe later in the 1800s, the Bronte sisters published... under a male pseudonym. Her father was an economist. I guess she had her nephew who became an economist as well. Why did she choose to publish under her own name? Thank you. So I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that she's writing fiction. And so it's acceptable for women to do that. And at the time, there are several women publishing under their own name. Frances Burney is writing simultaneously to her. You know, this is a fairly vibrant era for female novelists. It's just after the French Revolution. The full backlash to women being active in sort of the intellectual sphere has not started yet. And so there are other women publishing under their own names. It's, Fairly common for women at this time to publish anonymously first. It's fairly common, actually, for everybody to publish anonymously first. And she does publish anonymously at first. But she becomes so incredibly famous that people start taking credit for her work. And she really does not love that. manuscript trying to claim that he had written Castle Rackrent because it was, you know, the premier bestseller of the age. And so he wanted to take credit for it. And so after that point, it's anonymous at that point. After that point, she always publishes under her own name. So I think it was really a part of it was about staking claim to her own authorship. But like I said, when she wrote anything more heavily economic, she would often either say, publish it anonymously in the case of this essay we know about, or she would get a male colleague or a male relative to write it and publish it under their name. So some of her some of her sort of most academic writing, for example, there's a
[25:00] essay on education at Oxford that never got published but was intended for publication, it would have been published under her father's name. She was never intending to publish it under her own name. It's written from his perspective. It is written in her hand with his notes. And just based on his notes, it seems very clear that a lot of the ideas are actually her and not him. But so she really sort of did take on the guise of men, but she took on the guise of real men. She just wrote under other people's names. Thank you. There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays markets and research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts. Real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18 plus terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare. This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by Chachi PT. Now with Chachi PT work, I'm Carol Masser. Just when it seemed American car buyers had left electric vehicles for dead, there are new signs of life in that corner of the auto market. Bloomberg's Cara Carlson and Gabby Coppola report that Tesla and Rivian each posted better than expected EV sales for the third quarter. say dealers are asking for more battery-powered inventory to sell as customers come back. Even some lower-volume models from Toyota and GM's Cadillac brand are gaining momentum. Dealers have also sold through much of that excess inventory, going from about a 180-day supply of EVs in early 2026 to 78 days' worth in August, roughly in line with industry stocks of vehicles with combustion engines. It all points to EV demand that's beginning to stabilize after of generous U.S. tax credits for EV buyers. EV sales have stabilized at close to 6% of the U.S. market this year, according to researcher Cox Automotive. To be sure, many automakers continue to report weak year-over-year EV sales, and a demand boom for new EVs has not materialized. Instead, shoppers are snapping up gas-electric hybrids, as well as used EVs which can be had for prices similar to their conventional counterparts. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChachiPT. Available with all paid ChachiPT plans. Running a business means you're always on the move. The Delta Sky Miles Reserve Business American Express card is made for frequent travelers who want premium benefits that works as hard as they do. For a limited time, new Delta Sky Miles Reserve Business card members can earn 200,000 bonus miles, the highest miles offered this year. And when you need to recharge or find a quiet place to work, the Delta Sky Club can turn a layover into precious productive time or a restful reset. visits each medallion year to the Delta Sky Club when flying Delta and unlock unlimited Delta Sky Club access after spending $75,000 in purchases on your card during a calendar year. Plus, receive four one-time guest passes each medallion year so you can bring a colleague along. That's 15 Sky Club visits plus four guest passes for an annual value of up to $950. Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Apply today www.delta.com slash podcast. Offer ends 11-426. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Can I ask about the potato correspondence? Oh, yes. So you mentioned she was friends with Ricardo earlier, and there's a chapter in the book where they basically go back and forth about... potatoes in Ireland and the risks that growing lots of potatoes may or may not cause. Yes. I think this is probably one of the more interesting chapters of her life, particularly to anyone interested in sort of the formation of economic ideas. She became very good friends with both Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo during her time. She used to visit London quite a lot. She had a little bit of a socialite sort of aspect to her. And she was friends with both of them. And after she became friends with Ricardo, they started a very sort of aggressive letter writing campaign to each other in which they were like very friendly, but literally always disagreeing. And so
[30:00] They had a very active debate about economics going on. And the question that they most... centrally debated was whether it was okay for Ireland to exclusively specialize in potatoes. historians read these letters multiple ways and i think it's very difficult to know for sure what her goals were but basically maria maria writes to ricardo and says i think that we should totally specialize in potatoes like i think ireland should just go all in on the potato trade for everything else classic comparative advantage if you can grow potatoes well then that's what you should do this is comparative advantage she is literally parroting ricardo's own idea back to him she's saying you Push. I think it's possible she's playing devil's advocate here. And it works if that's what she's doing, because he comes back to her and says, ah, not sure about that. Like, I think it may actually be risky to so totally specialize in the potato. The potato is prone to failure. It's not worth, you know, the profitability that comes with that kind of specialization if it leaves you capable of starving a nation, essentially. And so Ricardo complicates his own idea in a way that he really never does in his in his actual written texts and in a way that he certainly never does in his arguments with Maltus. Like this, he basically argues what Maltus has been arguing to him for years in his letters to Mariah Edgeworth, which is fascinating from a historical perspective, because it seems like he's complicating his own ideas. Very sadly, he then gets an ear infection and dies. And so he never we never actually get this from Ricardo in any of his academic texts. It does not become part of his sort of, you know, legacy. Like he has a very simplistic view on trade. And that is what sort of becomes part of the canon. But we know that he complicated that because he didn't did in these letters. But he was also right when it came to potatoes, because Ireland then had a very famous potato famine. Tragically, right? Yes. Yeah. And I think that this is actually a really interesting moment in Maria's development as an economist, it's very clear. Like I said, she may have been hit playing devil's advocate to some degree in these letters, but it is very clear from her writings that she is, a devoted free trader up until the potato famine. She is very devoted to laissez-faire economics. She does not believe in any kind of handouts to the poor. Like she she's taken the word of Adam Smith and she has interpreted it very literally. And she thinks that it should be applied pretty absolutely for much of her life. She then gets to the potato famine and everybody in her neighborhood is dying. It's like a huge tragedy. It hits her part of the country hard. It hits the whole country hard, but including her part of the country. And so she really sort of starts to revise her views, including with the sort of potato famine that predated the one we all know about. So there are two potato famines that hit in succession. The first one starts to complicate our views. The real one that we know about really, really complicates our views. some kind of government spending in times of extreme crisis that you might have to just do handouts to get the economy back in action. She sort of comes around an early version of what we would today call Keynesianism. Keynesianism obviously won't be developed for another 80 years. But yes. And so she really does change her views during the potato famine. And I think she in particular reflects on this conversation with Ricardo and thinks that she was wrong. In a very interesting turn of events, when she is dying, she actually, you know, people ask her, you know, you were so famous. You were the most famous author in the English language for a time. Do you want to write an autobiography? And she's like, no, but I would like to dictate some projects I didn't get to. And the first project she dictates, basically, is that somebody should think about the potato as a national food for Ireland. And she suggests that people look at David Ricardo's letters to her as a starting point. Can you explain like What was it about her story? Why was she so popular? Like, what was it about them in general? Yeah, because again, if you read The Cherry Orchard, to be completely honest, I know it's for kids in the early 1800s, but... Not that impressed. Not that compelling. So some of her children's literature, The Cherry Orchard, I will agree with you. Not a joy to read. Some of her children's literature is more engaging, and people found it very fun. Actually, Queen Victoria, when she was a child, used to try and write in the style of Maria Edgeworth because she thought she was so much fun. So yeah, so they were quite popular at the time with kids, which is interesting. The adult literature, I will say, humor. She's very witty. And so that really shines through in her literature. And her characters are caricatures of real people. And so it kind of does, it does work, I think, even today in Anhui's case. And at the time, it is just seen as wildly entertaining. And so she's very popular because these books are fun. She's also popular because people do want to learn these ideas.
[35:00] at the time. I think it's worth noting that so she obviously is putting these in pure fiction. her, she mentors and is very good friends with a woman named Jane Marseille, who then sort of takes the idea of putting this stuff into fiction and takes it one step further and kind of puts it in what I think you can consider an early economics textbook. It is framed as a conversation between three women, but it is basically, for all intents and purposes, a textbook is an absolute bestseller. Like it is a runaway hit. And so I think that, you know, what people are choosing to read at this time is a little bit different than what we think of as the bestseller list today. People were think it's also worth noting what they've got to read at the time is The Wealth of Nations, which I don't know if you've ever read The Wealth of Nations, but it is not a joy to read. It's very, very dense. Yeah, it's very dense. It's difficult to understand what he's saying sometimes. And at the time, when these ideas are all new, it's really difficult. People don't understand it. And get a better sort of analysis of what the wealth of nations is trying to say, and then to be able to talk about the wealth of nations in an informed way is actually really attractive. You also write about she had an important disagreement with Smith on one thing. So she agreed about the free trade aspect. But you. she disagreed about the value of labor. So I guess Smith had this idea that unless you're producing something like a potato or, I don't know, a factory component or something like that, it didn't really have value. Whereas Maria argued that People who are producing other things like, I don't know, lawyers or accountants, those are ephemeral, non-physical things, but because they're making people's lives better. better maybe not in the case of lawyers, because they're making people's lives better, that that still has some value. Can you talk to us about that disagreement and how that kind of played out in the future of economics? Yeah. So she was early to an idea that we basically still think is right today, which is that utility is kind of the basis of value as opposed to labor. So Smith is labor theory of value. This is somewhat complicated. He is not actually as clear on his theory of value as I think some historians make him out to be. And I think there's a thought about the basis of value. But certainly the classical economists in general, Ricardo Maltes, think that labor is the basis of value. She comes in and she really questions that. And she questions it in a very subtle way in her literature. She, the character who sort of like wins in Castle Rackrent, who takes over, is trained as a lawyer. And so, you know, I think she's basically saying, you know, you can have... in this new economy, in this new world we're forming, you can have... productive people. Physical labor is not the be-all and end-all of the economy. Exactly. And so she's coming in and saying, like, something has changed here, and we should reconsider it. It's very subtle there. It's much less subtle in some of her correspondence, and in particular, her father's correspondence. It's pretty clear from her father's correspondence that Maria and her father are thinking about utility as a basis for value, and think that Smith is wrong about this. He, at one point in time, says in a letter to one of the Benthamites, you know, I think we could correct some errors in Adam Smith's thinking with this concept. And so she's very much early to this train. And I think that, you know, in a way that ends up becoming influential and really sort of the way that we think about value now. Games on a break? Don't doom scroll. Try Rips on Underdog. Buy a digital pack, rip it open, and reveal a real physical card. Football, basketball, even Pokemon. Packs start at just $5. Ship it straight to your door or sell it back instantly at full market value. Max value up to $125,000. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Deposit $5, get five free packs. Real Rips, extremely rare. This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by Chachi PT. Now with Chachi PT Work, I'm Carol Masser. Just when it seemed American car buyers had left electric vehicles for dead, there are new signs of life in that corner of the auto market. Bloomberg's Cara Carlson and Gabby Coppola report that Tesla and Rivian each posted better-than-expected EV sales for the third quarter. Executives at Hyundai and Ford say dealers are asking for more battery-powered inventory to sell as customers come back. volume models from Toyota and GM's Cadillac brand are gaining momentum. Dealers have also sold through much of that excess inventory, going from about a 180-day supply of EVs in early 2026 to 78 days' worth in August, roughly in line with industry-based sales and sales.
[40:00] stocks of vehicles with combustion engines. It all points to EV demand that's beginning to stabilize after last year's boom and bust tied to the cancellation of generous U.S. tax credits for EV buyers. EV sales have stabilized at close to 6% of the U.S. market this year, according to researcher Cox Automotive. To be sure, many automakers continue to report weak year-over-year EV sales, and a demand boom for new EVs has not materialized. Instead, can be had for prices similar to their conventional counterparts. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com slash work. Available with all paid ChatGPT plans. Running a business means you're always on the move. The Delta Sky Miles Reserve Business American Express card is made for frequent travelers who want premium benefits that works as hard as they do. For a limited time, new Delta Sky Miles Reserve Business card members can earn 200,000 bonus miles, the highest miles offered this year. And when you need to recharge or find a quiet place to work, the Delta Sky Club can turn a layover into precious productive time or a restful reset. visits each medallion year to the Delta Sky Club when flying Delta and unlock unlimited Delta Sky Club access after spending $75,000 in purchases on your card during a calendar year. Plus, receive four one-time guest passes each medallion year so you can bring a colleague along. That's 15 Sky Club visits plus four guest passes for an annual value of up to $950. Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Apply today www.delta.com slash podcast. Offer ends 11-426. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Wise is the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe. If you've ever sent money internationally using a traditional bank, there's a good chance you've paid more than you realize. Hidden fees, exchange rate markups, and extra charges can quietly add up before your money even arrives. There's a better way. Try Wise. Wise uses the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google, helping you avoid the unwelcome surprises that often come with international transfers. Whether you're sending money to family overseas, We'll be right back. So when we think about the transition of economics from its early political economy days, where you have Adam Smith writing these, you know, kind of dense, treatises, treatise, treatise. I never know how to treatises. Thank you about economics. And then you have someone like Maria who's trying to illustrate them in a sort of practical way. behavioral economics, economics, manner, and then you have the evolution into abstract models. Are we at a moment in time where people are kind of it feels like people are still trying to meld those two worlds together and we constantly get the swing from practical behavioral economics back into theory. And then I don't know, it feels like it's just the pendulum swinging back and forth constantly. Yeah, I do think the pendulum is swinging back and forth constantly. I do think that one thing that is particularly interesting, you know, as somebody who's covered these issues for a long time, and that I thought about a lot while I was writing the book, is that. One lesson from this era is the people who were applying economics in a really absolute way often ended up finding that to be problematic. And by, you know, with the with the benefit of time. And I think I've also seen that play out in my own career and my own observation of modern economics. You know, I think there are. our rules in economics, they are not like physics. And I think that every few years, we have a reappraisal where we have some model that was supposed to work absolutely and has started to break down and, you know, everyone is reassessing. Crops fail or people make the wrong decision or people get greedy and that deviates from the model. Yeah. Or we misunderstand some variable in the model and how it will affect everything. And so, you know, I do think that, you know, we can get a little bit overly DSGE reliant. There's something to be said for, you know, remembering that this is a philosophy at its root and it's not physics. And so, you know, I think there are some interesting applications to today. Do you miss the FedBeat? Oh, of course I miss the Fed beat. The Fed beat was a fun beat. I mean,
[45:00] is fun too. It's not like I'm doing something boring now. How much overlap is there between European parliamentary politics and the Fed beat? What's the connective tissue there? It's 12 districts where, you know, you've got you've got various people who are going to sort of weigh in on the issue and who you have to satisfy with with one central decision. It's interesting because, you know, in some sense, like macro is super interesting right now. Inflation is still elevated, highly uncertain. On the other hand, and I think we all Tracy and I feel it. A lot of people feel it like the the big questions of the day do not feel cyclical. what is the long-term future of like Europe as a coherent block? What is the long-term future of the US-China relationship? What is the long-term future of how AI will change the economy? And so on some level, even though it is very interesting to still listen to the press conferences and watch the CPI, the jobs report and all that, like it does feel like some of that stuff is just being like overtaken by stuff that like these month-to-month things just don't matter to people the same way they used to. and not to literally talk my own book here, but I feel like it does feel kind of like the early 1800s right now. You know, it's like it feels a little bit like the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. I was just about to ask what an Edgeworthian interpretation of AI and the economy would be like. There must be parallels. Yeah, I think there definitely are, because I think this moment feels so much like... basically 1800. So say more about that. Basically 1800, it's the very dawn of the Industrial Revolution. You can see it coming. The division of labor is starting to be applied. Factories are becoming a lot more efficient. London is kind of industrializing and everything is changing. Agriculture has just recently become significantly more efficient. The economy is just in a state of absolute flux. And it seems very clear that there are going to be a lot of people who are Previously farmers or sharecroppers are sort of just traveling around doing sort of menial jobs who are going to be disenfranchised by this or who are going to have their lives fundamentally changed. There's a lot of concern that factories are going to turn people into robots because they're just going to be doing repetitive tasks without having to apply any real critical thinking to them. And at the same time, we're seeing huge political ruptures. You know, it's the wake of the French Revolution. Everybody is afraid that there are going to be uprisings elsewhere. There are, in fact, uprisings elsewhere, including in There's a huge sort of political sort of populist wave that is playing out. Then there's the backlash to that populist wave. And it's colliding with a bunch of economic forces that are fundamentally changing everything. And this is really how we get modern economics. It's because the world is trying to find a new way to explain itself. Essentially, everything has changed and we need to understand it. And so I feel like that has a lot of parallels to today. Like we can see that AI is happening. We can see that it's going to change everything. It's not. I mean. We can quibble about the numbers, but I think we can probably agree that it's not fundamentally changing everything yet. Like you see it in the data, but it has not caused some sort of like seismic wave yet. But it seems likely and many people think that it's coming. It's clearly changing the way. economic actors relate to each other. And it's coming at the same time that we're seeing these populous waves across Europe, but also obviously here in the US. And we are also seeing this sort of reshuffling of the global order as China, becomes whatever China is now becoming. And as the rest of the world tries to react to that, and as the rest of the world reacts to the shift in American trade policy. And so huge moment of flux really kind of, challenging, I think, the way we understand the modern economy. And so in that way, I think there's a real parallel. But this was also and I'm just parroting your own book back to you. But this was Maria's reason for writing about economics in the way that she did, right? Her argument was that in a time of economic flux, one of the things you can do to empower displaced people and workers is educate them about how all of this stuff is supposed to work or could work. Yeah. And I think basically what she was hoping to do is give people the tools for flexibility, essentially. I think she thought that if you were educated and if you were capable of sort of understanding the world around you, you had the ability to have some kind of economic mobility. And so I think there are some interesting parallels. to that today. You know, I think a lot of our companies are probably pushing us to learn as much about artificial intelligence as we can in the whole
[50:00] that we can understand how to apply it as whatever comes down the pipeline comes down the pipeline. I feel like that feels like a somewhat similar moment. Yeah. All right, Gina, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots. The book, again, is The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth. Thanks so much. Thank you for having me. Joe, I love that conversation. Yeah, me too. That we have an influential female economist who was working and was popular at the dawn of political economy as a sort of academic subject. And her legacy was basically completely erased. It's fascinating how that can happen. That she wasn't just sort of like influential within economics. She was popular among people, among readers. The fact that someone can be like, oh, in their day they outsold Jane Austen, and then it's like literally no one has heard of this person. And you can't blame it completely on... Yeah, that's right. One question I wanted to ask you, you know, we were talking about children's books and children's stories. Are children's books nowadays still really moralistic? There are a lot. Yeah, there are a lot. It's a real... It's a real mix. Some aren't. Some are just like sort of normal. There's definitely a lot of like, yeah, moralistic children's books. And I don't know if anyone in America would have heard of it. It's called like... slovenly peter or something in english have you ever heard of this no that sounds great it's absolutely terrifying it's an old book from i want to say like 1800s in german and it's all it's like tales of children dying from doing stupid things like lighting themselves on fire but it's illustrated oh wow no one look it up unless you want nightmares but i think i would have preferred reading a book about the division of labor as a child versus don't set yourself on Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest Gina Smiley at Gina Smiley. And check out her new book, The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Herman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashpot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more OddLods content, check out our daily newsletter, which you can find at Bloomberg.com. And if you enjoyed this conversation, if you like it when we talk about early economic history, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. If you're watching this on video and you enjoyed the show, then please leave a comment or like the video or better yet, subscribe. And remember, if you're a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for joining. Thank you.
