Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn From The Humanities, by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, made me groan slightly, inwardly, when it arrived at Enlightenment Towers. Did I really want to read another book criticising economics, having just tackled two other recent arrivals in the econ-bashing genre?

In fact, it’s rather a nice argument for economists paying more attention to stories. It also softened me up by starting out by pointing out, quite rightly, that the humanities (‘dehumanities’, the book calls them) have to a large extent brought their decline on themselves by devaluing the idea of great literature, teaching bowdlerised politics and sociology, and generally disappearing down the rabbit hole of critical studies.

Broadly, I agree wholeheartedly with the view that economics, narrowly understood as modelling and empirics, needs to be supplemented by careful attention to history, ideas and culture. This matters because important variables are unquantifiable; because people do not only take decisions on ‘economic’ grounds; and because causes simply can never be identified by looking at macro data, which need narrative to make sense of the numbers. It also matters in a meta way. As this book argues, empathy is vital so researchers understand that some people think differently from them and are not bad or stupid for doing so: “The narrower the set of values entertained and entertainable by our major educational institutions, the less empathetic they become to the population at large, and the more they wind up turning themselves into trainng grounds for one social gruop to maintain its pre-eminence.” A vital message for the academy in our times.

The bulk of the book is devoted to examples of economists who fail to understand the importance of stories and humanity (eg Gary Becker) and those who completely get it (eg Joel Mokyr). I would challenge some of the details or interpretations. For instance, the authors criticise the use of ‘QALYs’ (quality adjusted life years) to evaluate the selection of patients for costly treatments by the UK’s NHS, seemingly imagining that hospitals look at individual patients and take account of their earning potential before deciding to treat them or not. This is an absurd projection of the practices and mores of the US health market on the UK’s non-market system. Still, elsewhere the book makes the very good point that cost benefit analysis is widely tainted by the use of market values only to evaluate benefits – the example is spending to eliminate the parasitic disease of river blindness in sub-Saharan Africa, prevalent in poor areas where people do not earn much – meaning the value of the project hard to demonstrate to donors.

The moral of the book, for economists, is read more history, or novels even. For researchers in the humanities – well, maybe that’s their next book, but the advice probably isn’t to become more like economists.

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