Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius

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Sylvia Nasar. Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius

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GRAND PURSUIT

Sylvia Nasar

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For Mill, economies are governed by natural laws, which couldn’t be changed by human will, any more than laws of gravity can. “Happily,” Mill wrote as he was finishing Principles in 1848, “there is nothing in the laws of Value which remains for the present or any future writer to clear up; the theory of the subject is complete.”90

Henry Mayhew, for one, refused to accept this conclusion. By his lights, Mill had failed in his attempt to turn political economy into a “gay science,” that is, a science capable of increasing the sum of human happiness, freedom, or control over circumstances.91 The fact that Mill had not jettisoned the iron law of wages was all the more reason for trying again. Ultimately, Mayhew did not succeed in mounting a challenge to the classical wage doctrine, and neither did anyone else of his generation. Still, his landmark series on London labor became the unofficial Baedeker for a younger generation of “social investigators” who were inspired by his reporting and shared his desire to learn how much improvement was possible without overturning the social order.

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