What are the best works of literature about business and capitalism?

AND VOTE FOR THE GOAT

The next Western Canon book club is about Turgenev, October 17th.

The next Shakespeare book club is on October 13th.

---

GOAT Final Round

Well, this isn’t the shortlist I expected, but its the one you all voted for. Now is the final round of voting. And remember, the point is to advocate and discuss—so leave comments, write your own posts, read and write about the novels you think will change people’s minds! Here’s the shortlist.

• George Eliot

• Hilary Mantel

• Jane Austen

• Kazuo Ishiguro

That’s right—no Dickens! I’ll leave the poll open for a while so you have time to persuade each other of your choices.

Voting below the paywall at the bottom after some thoughts about literature and business…

---

Literature and business

Several people have recently asked online about the way literature portrays business, capitalism, and the industrial revolution. (And Naomi Kanakia wrote a very good piece for Dirt about why novelists don’t write about money anymore.) I have been thinking about this for years. The essence of the question is why the insights of economics are not well portrayed in novels. Why are rich people often bad, businesses often boring or grasping, and market economics often ignored or shown as exploitative? As I said in my discourse fiction essay, the rich are merely memes in many modern novels.

Obviously one major problem is depicting the “invisible hand” of the market. But if Hemingway can write The Old Man and the Sea about a man going fishing and Woolf can write Orlando about a woman’s position in society, someone must be able to do something about business. There are of course many writers from Dickens to Waugh who distrust people who make money. Left wing polemics like An Inspector Calls become famous and admired. What about the other side?

Patrick McKenzie says The Hobbit is a start-up story, but that’s a real stretch. Sure, there’s a contract at the beginning, but the whole tenor of the book is pre-industrial, a theme which becomes very important for Lord of the Rings. Economist Jason Furman asked a colleague in the English department for ideas and was given Major Barbara. Maybe that’s a good answer: the message is that there’s no morally pure life, you have to take the faustian pact to make progress. Shaw was coming at this from a socialist perspective, but he dramatised debate rather than performed a polemic. But still, it’s a stretch and surely named ironically. (It is a good “progress studies” play, but that is slightly different.) Furman’s wife suggests Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Good answer! (This video shows Roald Dahl’s knowledge of the history of chocolate innovation.)

So what are the novels that depict business realistically without being a critique? ChatGPT 4 mostly gives options that are satires and criticisms, but I want to know who really understands business.

The short story “An Old and Established Name” by Lao She is one of the best pieces of fiction I have read about what it is like to run a business. (And A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul, of course.)

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers is a very good depiction of life in an advertising agency, based on Sayers own experience as a copywriter.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple has an excellent portrayal of Microsoft. There’s an especially good scene where the senior leader is working to a tight deadline with his team that captures what makes someone like that an engaging and motivating workplace. (Microserfs just isn’t very good…)

We should add Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald for their portrayal of people at work. Try A Far Cry from Kensington and The Bookshop, but maybe these are books about what it is like to be at work. In that vein, Monica Dickens wrote a good book about being a cook.

“The Verger” by Somerset Maugham is good, but it’s brisk.

“Bartleby the Scrivener” very much is a pro-business story, despite the use that Bartleby’s slogan has been co-opted by modern anti-capitalists.

Lionel Shriver’s novel The Mandibles imagines what would happen if a financial crisis like 2008 couldn’t be recovered. Competing economic ideas (a sort-of new Keynesianism versus libertarianism) are represented by different characters. The ending is a good twist. But the book is ultimately too libertarian, and I say this as a reformed libertarian.

Furman has also reviewed Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise as a good depiction of how business works, which is now on my reading list. And Elizabeth Gaskell.

One underrated novel in this area is High Wages by Dorothy Whipple, which is about a woman who works for a mean employer and eventually opens her own competing business. Whipple isn’t George Eliot but High Wages is a good story that captures much of the essence of capitalism: the protestant work ethic, the moral value of competition, the role of risk-taking, elasticity of supply, and so on. It isn’t didactic, but it does demonstrate many benefits of business and the freedom that comes from being able to start your own company.

What else?

---

GOAT VOTE