Gary Saul Morson & Morton Schapiro

Acknowledgments ix
1 Spotting the Spoof: The Value of Telling Stories Out of (and in) School 1
Twin Crises 4
The Dehumanities 5
Humanomics 8
A Return to the "Real" Adam Smith 18
The Value of Telling Stories Out of (and in) School 20
Two Stories 23
2 A Slow Walk to Judgment: Hedgehogs and Foxes, Wisdom and Prediction 46
3 The Power and Limits of the Economic Approach: Case Study 1-How to Improve American Higher Education 64
Enrollment Management 65
Who Teaches Undergraduates? 80
Data Reporting 87
The Allocation of State Operating Subsidies 98
The Federal Interest in Enrollment, Completion, and Matching 105
4 Love Is in the Air . . . or at Least in the Error Term: Case Study 2-What Economists Can and Cannot Teach Us about the Family 119
Do Preferences Change? 126
The Economics of the Intimate 129
Children 138
Crime and Punishment 144
Three Responses to the Economic Model 147
Irrationality of the Second Order 150
Selling Kidneys 153
A Foxy Approach to Economic Demography 162
5 The Ultimate Question: Case Study 3-Why Do Some Countries Develop Faster Than Others? Economics, Culture, and Institutions 167
The Hedgehog of Geography 169
Foxy and Other Economists 180
The Harm That Hedgehogs Do 195
6 The Best of the Humanities 200
Justifying the Humanities 206
The Humanities as Often Taught 209
Why Not Just Read SparkNotes? 212
Overcoming the Human 213
Character and Nanocharacter 216
Ethics and Stories 218
Experience from Within 222
Globalization 232
World Literature and the Curriculum 234
Writing and Argument 238
Conclusion 241
7 De-hedgehogizing Adam Smith: The Economics That Might Be 243
Sympathy and Empathy 248
Theory as Anti-Theory 249
Smith the Novelist 252
Negative Pluralism 254
Rethinking the Invisible Hand 255
What Humanists Can Learn from Economists 259
Humanism and Behavioral Economics 261
8 Humanomics: A Dialogue of Disciplines 288
Index 295

A provocative and inspiring case for a more humanistic economics

Economists often act as if their methods explain all human behavior. But in Cents and Sensibility, an eminent literary critic and a leading economist make the case that the humanities, especially the study of literature, offer economists ways to make their models more realistic, their predictions more accurate, and their policies more effective and just.

Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro trace the connection between Adam Smith's great classic, The Wealth of Nations, and his less celebrated book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and contend that a few decades later Jane Austen invented her groundbreaking method of novelistic narration in order to give life to the empathy that Smith believed essential to humanity.

Morson and Schapiro argue that Smith's heirs include Austen, Anton Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoy as well as John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. Economists need a richer appreciation of behavior, ethics, culture, and narrative-all of which the great writers teach better than anyone.

Cents and Sensibility demonstrates the benefits of a freewheeling dialogue between economics and the humanities by addressing a wide range of problems drawn from the economics of higher education, the economics of the family, and the development of poor nations. It offers new insights about everything from the manipulation of college rankings to why some countries grow faster than others. At the same time, the book shows how looking at real-world problems can revitalize the study of literature itself.

Original, provocative, and inspiring, Cents and Sensibility brings economics back to its place in the human conversation.