Dostoevsky as an Economist (Ch. 21)
Dearest existentialists, nihilists, and readers drifting somewhere in between,
By now, it’s practically ritual to begin these essays with a mea culpa for my prolonged absence. This time, however, I assure you it’s for reasons beyond mere procrastination. Something’s stirring behind the scenes—a grander writing project taking shape. Friends have patiently endured my endless rants, ramblings, and raves about it for months, and soon enough, this little corner of the internet will, too. Stay tuned.
For now, I present a smaller, more peculiar offering. This essay, Chapter 21, extends on an idea I’ve been mulling over for three years: the notion that Fyodor Dostoevsky’s cast of beatniks, rebels, subterraneans, and dreamers may be precisely the people economists have overlooked in their models—and that this omission changes everything.
I. Preface
This essay, and its somewhat absurd title, is a nod to an unlikely inspiration. Some time ago, while wandering the Map Room at the Lizzie in New Haven, I stumbled upon Shakespeare as an Economist (1913), a curious pamphlet by Henry W. Farnam, a 20th-century professor of political economy at Yale. It seemed almost comically out of place—a slim, leather-bound volume nestled awkwardly among hefty tomes on Elizabethan drama and literary criticism. Its title intrigued me, a scholarly non sequitur that whispered of overlooked connections between the Bard’s tragedies and the mechanics of economic life. [Read Farnam's pamphlet online. In 1931, he expanded the booklet into an extended volume, Shakespeare's Economics]. Farnam opens his preface with:
A MERE economist who undertakes to write about Shakespeare must seem as audacious as Orlando, when he undertook to get a fall out of Charles, the professional wrestler … Have we not had books dealing with Shakespeare's grammar, his pronunciation, his punctuation; his knowledge of history and jurisprudence; his morality; his acquaintance with birds, with natural history, and with classical antiquity; his familiarity with medicine and the Bible; and even with his insomnia? And how can critics have overlooked his interest in economics? Economic conditions everywhere determine to a large extent political power, social relations, and the organization of the family, all of which are important elements in the business as well as the romance of life.
Fast forward a year to a midnight scene in old Jeddah, where I found myself reading Notes from the Underground in a dimly lit teashop. (Yes, there’s a certain irony to reading the confessions of the Underground Man, with his absurd musings on freedom and morality, in modern Saudi Arabia.) It was there that Farnam’s project resurfaced in my mind. If Shakespeare could be examined through an economic lens, why not Dostoevsky?
Unlike Farnam, however, this essay is not an attempt at grand theorizing, nor does it suggest that Dostoevsky deliberately embedded economic doctrines in his novels. Instead, consider this a series of observations on what I collectively term ‘Dostoevskian Economics’—a worldview fundamentally opposed to the tidy rationalism cherished by many a neoclassical economist. Dostoevsky’s worlds—rife with psychological torment, existential doubt, and moral quandaries—challenge us to rethink the assumptions underpinning modern economic thought: the primacy of rational choice, the predictability of utility maximization, and the pursuit of equilibrium. In Dostoevsky’s universe, characters seek suffering, reject utopia, and revel in chaos, often choosing self-destruction over calculated gain. They embody a deeply human irrationality that resists the predictive logic of the Homo economicus. Dostoevsky does not outright reject classical frameworks; rather he forces us to confront their limits. In doing so, he offers a counter-narrative that invites us to explore the messy, illogical heart of human motivation—a realm where the numbers don’t always add up, and where two times two is sometimes, charmingly, five.
II. Rational? Hardly. Human? Absolutely.
For centuries, economic theorists have clung to the comforting myth of homo economicus—that self-interested, utility-maximizing paragon of rationality who graces countless models. In his 1881 Mathematical Psychics, Francis Edgeworth declared, “The first principle of Economics is that every agent is actuated only by self-interest.”1 For simplicity, we might say that homo economicus operates under three foundational assumptions:
a) She is self-interested.
b) She knows her self-interest.
c) She seeks to maximize said self-interest through rational decision-making.
In this framework, rationality means that homo economicus not only identifies the most efficient means to achieve her goals but also consistently chooses actions aligning with her well-defined preferences. If Dostoevsky, ever the philosophical gadfly, had a ruble for every time a theorist made such tidy claims, he could have funded another exile in Siberia.
Take Raskolnikov, whose infamous plan to murder the pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment is steeped in cold utilitarian calculus. By killing this “useless” woman, he reasons, he can redistribute her wealth for the greater good. A cost-benefit analysis worthy of any first-year economics course. The scheme collapses not under the weight of external forces but from within—Raskolnikov is undone by moral agony and existential dread. Rationality collapses; conscience prevails. Through Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky warns of the dangers inherent in applying rational utility to moral dilemmas. The greater good, as calculated by our hypothetical economist, becomes grotesque when filtered through the messy reality of human emotions.
Economic Notes from the Underground
If Raskolnikov’s downfall exposes the flaws in rationalizing morality, Notes from the Underground obliterates rational utility altogether. The Underground Man, with caustic disdain, mocks the entire enterprise of rational choice: "What is profit? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect exactitude precisely what man's profit consists in?2
Written as a direct response to Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s utopian socialism, most notably his novel What Is to Be Done?, Notes from the Underground dismantles the deterministic belief that human behaviour can be predicted, controlled, and optimized through rational models. Chernyshevsky, with the zeal of a social scientist, envisioned a world where enlightened self-interest would lead to universal harmony. Dostoevsky, however, saw this as a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. [Note: I’ve written about Cheryshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? on Ink-uilab before. See Chapter 4, where I compare it to five other texts of the same name].
The Underground Man insists that even when humans are presented with clear, rational paths to their supposed self-interest, they often choose the opposite—not from ignorance, but from sheer, stubborn willfulness:
If instead of a palace there is a chicken coop, and it starts to rain, I will perhaps get into the chicken coop to avoid a wetting, but all the same I will not take the chicken coop for a palace out of gratitude for its having kept me from the rain. You laugh, you even say that in that case it makes no difference—chicken coop or mansion. Yes, say I, if one were to live only so as not to get wet. But what's to be done if I've taken it into my head that one does not live only for that, and that if one is to live, it had better be in a mansion? This is my wanting, this is my desire. You will scrape it out of me only when you change my desires …. Let it even be so that the crystal edifice is a bluff, that by the laws of nature it should not even be, and that I've invented it only as a result of my own stupidity, as a result of certain old nonrational habits of our generation. But what do I care if it should not be? What difference does it make, since it exists in my desires, or, better, exists as long as my desires exist?
Desires, the Underground Man insists, are not mere byproducts of material conditions or survival instincts. They are irrational, stubborn, and often divorced from practical considerations. Economists can plot preferences on indifference curves, but those curves are blind to the irrational dream of a palace—even when that palace is a fantasy, impractical or outright impossible.
Utility of Process > Utility of Outcome
The Underground Man ridicules social science’s fixation on outcomes, arguing that the act of striving often eclipses the goal itself. In his view, the ‘grind’ provides its own kind of perverse utility, independent of the result:
Man is a frivolous and unseemly being, and perhaps, similar to a chess player, likes only the process of achieving the goal, but not the goal itself… Suppose all man ever does is search for this two times two is four; he crosses oceans, he sacrifices his life in the search; but to search it out, actually to find it—by God, he's somehow afraid.
Do our economic models capture this peculiar infatuation with process over product? Behavioral economics, with its ever-growing bestiary of biases, tries to offer some answers. Consider the IKEA effect, where people overvalue things they’ve had a hand in building, or omission bias, where harm by inaction feels morally lighter than harm by action. Even so, these concepts merely scratch the surface. Dostoevsky’s insight aligns, curiously, with Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach. In this framework, human agency isn’t solely about the outcomes—wealth, consumption, material achievements—but about the freedom to pursue and value activities. It’s the doing, the striving, that matters. For Dostoevsky, this Nietzschean emphasis on the act of striving elevates the process as life’s real currency. Success, it seems, is a lesser god.
Perfect Information, Perfect Folly
Ah, but here come the micro-theorists waving Game Theory textbooks! Surely, they insist, irrationality arises from a lack of information. Give people perfect information, and rational choices will follow. The Underground Man spits on this notion with characteristic venom:
Oh, tell me, who first announced, who was the first to proclaim that man does dirty only because he doesn't know his real interests; and that were he to be enlightened, were his eyes to be opened to his real, normal interests, man would immediately stop doing dirty, would immediately become good and noble, because, being enlightened and understanding his real profit, he would see his real profit precisely in the good, and it's common knowledge that no man can act knowingly against his own profit, consequently, out of necessity, so to speak, he would start doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! And when was it, to begin with, in all these thousands of years, that man acted solely for his own profit?
Even with perfect knowledge, humanity would still sabotage itself. This isn’t mere oversight; it’s deliberate, gleeful defiance. Which brings us to Dostoevsky’s most damning critique of rationality: humanity’s love for spite.
The Sweet Taste of Spite
The Underground Man delights in shredding the notion that humans act in their best interest. Rationality assumes that, given the right conditions, tools, and knowledge, people will make choices that maximize their well-being. Dostoevsky flips this premise on its head: hand humanity every comfort, security, and rational incentive, and it will still torch the house just to feel the warmth. Why? Because rationality can’t account for spite3.
What can be expected of man as a being endowed with such strange qualities [of good behaviour]? Shower him with all earthly blessings, drown him in happiness completely, over his head, so that only bubbles pop up on the surface of happiness, as on water; give him such economic satisfaction that he no longer has anything left to do at all except sleep, eat gingerbread, and worry about the noncessation of world history – and it is here, just here, that he, this man, out of sheer ingratitude, out of sheer lampoonery, will do something nasty. He will even risk his gingerbread, and wish on purpose for the most pernicious nonsense, the most noneconomical meaninglessness, solely in order to mix into all this positive good sense his own pernicious, fantastical element.
The Underground Man’s tirade sharpens: even in a world governed by the immutable laws of science and logic, man’s defiance persists. He cannot—and will not—be reduced to a cog in the grand machinery of reason.
It is precisely his fantastic dreams, his most banal stupidity, that he will wish to keep hold of, with the sole purpose of confirming to himself (as if it were so very necessary) that human beings are still human beings and not piano keys, which, though played upon with their own hands by the laws of nature themselves, are in danger of being played so much that outside the calendar it will be impossible to want anything.
And more than that: even if it should indeed turn out that he is a piano key, if it were even proved to him mathematically and by natural science, he would still not come to reason, but would do something contrary on purpose, solely out of ingratitude alone; essentially to have his own way.
This isn’t just rebellion for rebellion’s sake; it’s a performance, an act of existential theatre. In a world obsessed with optimization, the Underground Man steps onto the stage and declares: I’d rather burn it all down.
“What is to be done with the millions of facts testifying to how people knowingly, that is, fully understanding their real profit, would put it in second place and throw themselves onto another path, a risk, a perchance, not compelled by anyone or anything, but precisely as if they simply did not want the designated path, and stubbornly, willfully pushed off onto another one, difficult, absurd, searching for it all but in the dark. So, then, this stubbornness and willfulness were really more agreeable to them than any profit . . Profit! What is profit?
This isn’t mere rebellion—it’s the active pursuit of disutility. Humans seem to derive a perverse satisfaction from undermining their own interests, engaging in behaviours that defy logic and harm themselves. Overspending, under-saving, addiction, or, in Raskolnikov’s case, murder—each act stands as a monument to the irrational.
Lest you dismiss this as the ramblings of 19th-century Russian angst, modern thinkers have picked up Dostoevsky’s torch. Bryan Caplan’s Rational Irrationality and Herbert Simon’s Bounded Rationality translate the Underground Man’s diatribes into today’s academic lexicon. Simon posits that humans, constrained by time, cognitive limits, and incomplete information, settle for “good enough” solutions rather than optimal ones. Caplan, meanwhile, explores how individuals knowingly embrace irrational beliefs or behaviours because the emotional or social rewards outweigh the logical costs. But here’s where Dostoevsky pulls ahead: he doesn’t merely acknowledge suboptimal choices; he revels in the actively destructive. This is where Shinsuke Ikeda’s The Economics of Self-Destructive Choices comes into play. Ikeda examines why people engage in behaviours—overspending, under-saving, addiction—that are predictably harmful. The Underground Man would skim Ikeda’s thesis and chuckle: Self-destruction isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.
I’ll admit, I don’t entirely buy the Underground Man’s nihilistic grandstanding (see Footnote 3 and my Conclusion). Perhaps I am the naive optimist he so sardonically mocks.
III. Even if Man were Rational, Utopia would Crumble
Dostoevsky had no patience for utopias. The idea of Chernevsky’s perfect society, where every variable is controlled, every behaviour optimized, and every conflict neatly resolved, struck him as both naïve and fundamentally dangerous. His target was not just the feasibility of such a society but its very premise: perfection, he argued, is a prison. Utopia, in all its sterile brilliance, is unbearably boring—and boredom, as Dostoevsky knew, is the mother of chaos. In this, he eerily echoes Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1714) —though the causes differ, the conclusions converge: harmony is inherently unstable.
In Notes, the Underground Man skewers this ideal with his signature sardonic wit:
And it is then – this is still you speaking – that new economic relations (Note: Coulson translates this as “Political Economy”) will come, quite ready-made, and also calculated with mathematical precision, so that all possible questions will vanish in an instant, essentially because they will have been given all possible answers. Then the crystal palace will get built. Then . . . well, in short, then the bird Kagan will come flying.
This “crystal palace” is no random metaphor. It’s a direct swipe at Chernyshevsky’s text, where the heroine Viéra dreams of a society embodied by a glittering Crystal Palace—a marvel of technological and social harmony. To Dostoevsky, such visions were not just unrealistic but spiritually barren. The problem wasn’t that utopia couldn’t be built; it was that once built, it would immediately start to rot from within.
Of course, there's no guaranteeing (this is me speaking now) that it won't, for example, be terribly boring then (because what is there to do if everything's calculated according to some little table?), but, on the other hand, it will all be extremely reasonable. Of course, what inventions can boredom not lead to!
Boredom, Dostoevsky suggests, is a greater threat to utopia than failure. It is boredom that compels rebellion.
The Underground Man foresees a future where, amid the serene monotony of perfect rationality, some discontented soul—a “gentleman of retrograde and jeering physiognomy”—would inevitably emerge:
Man really is stupid, phenomenally stupid... I, for example, would not be the least bit surprised if suddenly, out of the blue, amid the universal future reasonableness, some gentleman... should emerge, set his arms akimbo, and say to us all: ‘Well, gentlemen, why don’t we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to the devil and living once more according to our own stupid will!’
Is Dostoevskian Economics Capitalism?
Let’s clear the air: Dostoevsky’s critique of utopia is not an endorsement of its opposite. In researching this essay, I encountered numerous articles—many from overtly conservative publications—using Dostoevsky as a bludgeon against socialism, positioning him as some proto-capitalist anti-Marxist Christian-existentialist defender of free markets. This interpretation, frankly, is nonsense. Dostoevsky wasn’t serenading the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism or Russian feudalism. If anything, his contempt for materialism and capitalistic greed was just as scathing.
In Crime and Punishment, Luzhin—a grotesque caricature of capitalist ambition—embodies the moral decay wealth can bring. He blamed this Dostoevsky’s broader critique of materialism is laid bare in A Writer’s Diary:4:
There appeared some twisted and unheard of distortion of ideas in people with occupying worshiping of materialism. In this case, I call materialism people’s worshipping of the money idol, the worshipping the power of the golden sack. It’s as if a notion has invaded the people that the sack is now everything, that it contains all the power, and that everything that they were told, that everything that their fathers taught them, is all nonsense
Vadim Shneyder’s interpretation (2018) of The Idiot reinforces this point:
Once the capitalists have won, they enter a time that marks the cessation of events as such. While within the novel Lebedev can interpret Russia's railroad network as a fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy, the further progression of the economic struggle between merchants and capitalists in The Idiot results in a radical separation between the temporality of capitalism and a time that could accommodate an apocalyptic ending. In contrast to so many accounts, both in the nineteenth century and in the present day, that stress, alternatively, the dynamism, the creativity, or the violence of capitalism, The Idiot posits that a fully capitalist world is one in which nothing can happen and about which nothing can be said.
As I understand it, Dostoevsky’s critique isn’t limited to utopian socialism; he levels the same existential charges at capitalism. Both systems, in their extreme forms, lead to a spiritual vacuum—a world where “nothing can happen.” Capitalism, with its relentless commodification, leads to a narrative void. It strips life of its crises, its dramas, its very humanity. Humanity, trapped in a world where every question has been answered and every conflict resolved, would manufacture chaos just to feel alive again. Dostoevsky’s warning is clear: utopias don’t fail because they’re impossible; they fail because they’re insufferable. Perfection is unbearable.
IV. All Is Delusion
Having dismantled the myth of individual rationality, Dostoevsky scales his critique to society itself, targeting the smug certainties of social scientists and empiricists who believe humanity can be neatly charted and improved through data, logic, and systems. For Dostoevsky, such faith in rationality was not only misguided but dangerous. Humans are not mere nodes in decision trees; they are driven by forces that defy prediction—freedom, rebellion, even destruction. These impulses, he argued, render any purely rational model of human behaviour laughably incomplete.
In Notes, he launches a scathing attack on the reductionist tendencies of his time:
Gentlemen, as far as I know, you have taken your whole inventory of human profits from an average of statistical figures and scientific-economic formulas. Because profit for you is prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace, and so on and so forth; so that a man who, for example, openly and knowingly went against this whole inventory would, in your opinion—well, and also in mine, of course—be an obscurantist or a complete madman, right? But here is the surprising thing: how does it happen that all these statisticians, sages, and lovers of mankind, in calculating human profits, constantly omit one profit? They don't even take it into account in the way it ought to be taken, and yet the whole account depends on that.
In The Idiot, Dostoevsky refines this critique through Lebedev, who savagely mocks Thomas Malthus, the 19th-century English economist infamous for his dire predictions about overpopulation and famine. Malthus argued that population growth would inevitably outstrip food supply, necessitating suffering as a natural corrective. Lebedev delivers a scornful indictment:
There has already been Malthus, the friend of mankind. But a friend of mankind with shaky moral foundations is a cannibal of mankind, to say nothing of his vainglory; insult the vainglory of one of these numberless friends of mankind, and he is ready at once to set fire to the four corners of the world out of petty vengeance—the same, however, as any one of us, to speak fairly, as myself, the vilest of all, for I might be the first to bring wood and then run away. But again, that’s not the point!
Lebedev’s jab cuts to the heart of utilitarianism’s moral paradox. In the pursuit of "the greater good," human lives are reduced to mere statistics, expendable in service of systemic goals. Dostoevsky saw in Malthus—and in all grand social theorists—a chilling tendency to dehumanize, justifying cruelty under the guise of progress.
‘The Principles of Economics Before Everything’
Dostoevsky’s satirical short story The Crocodile takes these critiques to absurd heights. Written under the pseudonym A.Y. Poretsky, The Crocodile offers a darkly humorous exploration of economic obsession. Surprisingly lighthearted in tone, it’s almost shocking to think Dostoevsky penned it—its absurdity feels more akin to the works of Roald Dahl or Ilf and Petrov. In the story, a civil servant named Ivan Matveich and his wife, Yelena Ivanovna, visit a shopping arcade at her insistence to see a crocodile on display in one of the exhibitions. At one point, Ivan, eager to impress, playfully tickles the crocodile’s snout with his glove. In response, the crocodile swallows him whole. Remarkably, Ivan survives—finding himself trapped inside what turns out to be a hollow and unexpectedly spacious reptile. His wife and their friend, Semyon Semyonitch, plead with the German proprietor to kill the crocodile and free Ivan. But the proprietor, concerned about his livelihood, refuses—the crocodile is his prized attraction. Miraculously, Ivan survives inside the beast and begins issuing declarations from within:
“The principles of economics before everything,” he declares, counseling his distraught wife and friend not to harm the crocodile, as it would inconvenience the German proprietor who relies on it for his livelihood.
The absurdity of Ivan’s situation—his complete adaptation to life inside a literal beast—mirrors the broader dehumanization wrought by economic rationalism. The repeated refrain in the story “the economic principle first!” parodies Russia’s 19th-century push for foreign investment and industrial growth, which prioritized wealth over human welfare.
The tale’s surreal humour invites comparisons to Kafka’s Metamorphosis. While one story explores a man’s metamorphosis into a creature, the other presents a man being devoured by one. The distinction is ontological—Gregor Samsa becomes the insect, whereas Ivan Matveich merely exists within the crocodile. Yet, in both tales, the protagonists exhibit a similar eerie complacency. Faced with what should be existentially terrifying—whether transforming into or being consumed by a creature—both men respond with a passive resignation.
Even the most sophisticated social theories, Dostoevsky warns, rest on shaky foundations. He takes aim at the blind faith in systems that promise to renew humanity through logic and order:
I boldly declare that all these beautiful systems, all these theories that explain to mankind its true, normal interests, so that, striving necessarily to attain these interests, it would at once become good and noble – all this, in my opinion, is so far only logistics! Yes, sirs, logistics! For merely to assert this theory of the renewal of all mankind by means of a system of its own profits – this, to my mind, is almost the same as . . . well, let's say, for example, the same as asserting, with Buckle, that man gets softer from civilization and, consequently, becomes less bloodthirsty and less capable of war.
Dostoevsky’s disdain for “logistics” reflects his rejection of the mechanistic view of human nature. Systems, no matter how meticulously designed, inevitably distort truth to fit their own logic. This critique remains eerily relevant today, in a world where algorithms promise optimization but often exacerbate inequality and erode humanity.
But man is so partial to systems and abstract conclusions that he is ready intentionally to distort the truth, to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear, only so as to justify his logic.
V. Is there anything to discuss?
Ergo, we arrive at a haunting, almost primal question:
Maybe man does not love well-being only? Maybe he loves suffering just as much? Maybe suffering is just as profitable for him as well-being? For man sometimes loves suffering terribly much, to the point of passion, and that is a fact.
Dostoevsky dismantles the Enlightenment’s central conceit: that human beings, guided by reason, could build a society optimized for happiness. But what if suffering is as integral to the human experience as joy? The Underground Man offers no comfort. Rather, he revels in a kind of nihilistic inertia:
The final end, gentlemen: better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so, long live the underground!
The Modern economics, for all its rigour, has finally begun to confront its blind spots. The once-central figure of Homo economicus—that tireless, rational, self-interested optimizer—is being questioned. Whether the discipline has fully internalized this disillusionment is another matter. Amartya Sen, in Rational Fools, puts it succinctly:
If he (the economic man) shines at all, he shines in comparison—in contrast—with the dominant image of the rational fool.
But let’s not wallow too long in the shadow of Dostoevsky’s existential gloom. To counterbalance the Underground Man’s bitterness, I offer light: Frank Ramsey.
Dostoevsky’s Existentialist vs. Ramsey’s Pragmatist
If Dostoevsky’s protagonist drags us into the murky depths of nihilism, Ramsey—a polymath whose genius spanned philosophy, mathematics, and economics—beckons us toward pragmatic clarity. As one of my favourite thinkers, it’s about time we formally induct Ramsey into the Ink-uilab pantheon. He died at just 26, yet his work remains foundational across disciplines. For those uninitiated, I highly recommend this Atlantic profile and Cheryl Misak’s biography A Sheer Excess of Powers. Ramsey wasn’t merely proficient in multiple fields; he was transformative. His eponymous contributions pepper syllabi in ways that are almost comical in their ubiquity. I had the curious experience of encountering concepts named after him in various university classes—discrete math, set theory, probability theory, linguistic philosophy, macroeconomics—blissfully unaware they all stemmed from the same towering intellect.
In mathematics, Ramsey essentially founded an entire branch of mathematics, now known as Ramsey Theory. In logic and set theory, he extended and refined the work of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica, developing the Theory of (Simple) Types which laid the groundwork for Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
In philosophy, Ramsey advanced the “redundancy theory of truth,” asserting that to say “It is true that X” is no more meaningful than simply asserting X. To put it plainly, saying “Frank Ramsey was a genius” is functionally identical to “‘Frank Ramsey was a genius’ is true.”
And economics? His Ramsey Model remains foundational, tackling the intergenerational allocation of resources with a sophistication that policymakers still grapple with. Probability theory, taxation models—Ramsey’s fingerprints are everywhere. As if this weren’t enough, his ideas were often so ahead of their time that some were rediscovered independently decades later, as though scholars collectively stumbled upon the same treasure chest long buried. He died at 26.
But Ramsey doesn’t merely dazzle with intellectual feats; he offers an antidote to Dostoevsky’s existential abyss. Speaking at the Cambridge Apostles, Ramsey posed a deceptively simple question: Is there anything left to discuss? With science demystifying the cosmos and religion retreating from public life, he worried that the big questions were devolving into “either technical or ridiculous.” He half-jokingly suggested that conversation, except among experts, was now just a matter of saying how one felt and comparing notes. Yet his closing remarks were anything but trivial:
My picture of the world is drawn in perspective and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are as small as three-penny bits. I don’t believe in astronomy, except as a complicated description of part of the course of human and possibly animal sensation. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; by that is still a long time off still and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have a reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.5
Where Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is tormented by the unyielding laws of arithmetic—“two times two is four”—Ramsey embraces the universe’s indifferent mechanics. Given the choice between Dostoevsky’s bitter and unhappy existentialist and Ramsey’s self-aware yet content pragmatist, I’d choose the latter every time.
VI. Coda
We end where we began, with Professor Farnam’s reflections on Shakespeare as an “economist of deep insight.” His pamphlet insists that the dismal science is not so dismal after all:
If the greatest poet of the English tongue was also an economist of deep insight, then economics must have something to do with poetry. Indeed not only does economic prosperity furnish the humus in which the flower of poetry unfolds its greatest beauty, but economic processes supply more directly the thoughts, the similes, the action of dramas which touch upon the vital interests of men and society.
Farnam’s claim—that the great economist must also be a poet—feels especially apt as we survey the strange, sprawling terrain of this essay. If we are to take Farnam seriously, then perhaps Dostoevsky and Ramsey are not so much opposites as complementary poets of their respective domains. The Underground Man captures the tragic, often absurd depictions of human defiance, while Ramsey, with mathematical precision, sketches the contours of our fragile glee.
And so we close with verse, as all things should. Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin offers a fitting benediction—a (topically Russian) ode to the quiet pleasures and existential surrender that define our saintly lives:
Rambles, and reading, and sound sleep,
The sylvan shade, the purl of streams,
Sometimes a white-skinned, dark-eyed girl's
Young and fresh kiss,
A horse of mettle, bridle-true,
A rather fancy dinner,
A bottle of bright wine,
Seclusion, quiet —
This was Onegin's saintly life;
And he insensibly to it
Surrendered, the fair summer days
In carefree mollitude not counting,
Oblivious of both town and friends
And of the boredom of festive device
Best,
BM
(All errors are my own, and a by-product of editing this in The Bod’s Subterranean Library — literal Notes in the Underground)
Edgeworth was aware that this so-called "first principle of Economics" was far from a realistic portrayal of human behavior. He acknowledged that “the concrete nineteenth century man is for the most part an impure egoist, a mixed utilitarian.” There is a long history of economists concurrently promoting, adopting, and critiquing economic rationality. For a thorough exploration, see Sen's masterful essay, Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory
I use the Pevear & Volokhonsky translations for Dostoevsky’s oeuvre unless otherwise specified
Nor does it, in the theoretical sense, account for philanthropy and collaboration. Sen’s essay Rational Fools and John Roemer’s How We Cooperate: A Theory of Kantian Optimization offer alternative theories.
Quoted from The Foundation of Mathematics in Essays in Biography by John Maynard Keynes, Palgrave/ Macmillan, 2010. First published 28 February 1925.