An economist asks: What is the value of reading great literature like Eliot and Tolstoy?
Joy Buchanan's Thoughts
Today we have a guest post from the economist Joy Buchanan. Joy recently started re-reading great novels. When I asked her about what she felt was the value of reading these books, I got this splendid reply.
In 2025, after mostly feeling too busy for great literature for a few years, I picked up two books that come highly recommended by people with good taste: Middlemarch and Anna Karenina. They are excellent, and they are long. I propose two reasons why they need to be long.
A long novel of excellent quality introduces us to many characters. The reader gets intimate access to the inner lives of characters completely absorbed in their own struggles. Through Tolstoy’s characters, we see other minds in ways we rarely do in real life.
I have a behavioral economics paper, “My Reference Point, Not Yours,”1 about how difficult it is for us to understand the perspective of other people. These novels demonstrate a point that should be obvious and yet is hard to remember: we are surrounded by people who are more absorbed in their concerns than our desires, and that affects how they act.
The first powerful thing about a long novel is that we can see down on the community from above. Unlike a typical film, which centers on a single protagonist, these novels show many intersecting lives, each with its own self-centered inner world.
One example from Anna Karenina that stood out to me occurs when we learn Vronsky’s state of mind as he first begins pursuing a married woman. He had expected to receive a prestigious military position, but it was given to someone else instead. The rejection stung his pride.
Had Anna fully understood the place that the military career held in Vronsky’s emotional life, or asked about it directly, she might have foreseen more trouble ahead. Vronsky could offer her love, but eventually trying to make a life together deprives them of other pursuits that had very significant meaning to them. Vronsky fails to realize how central Anna’s social standing in polite society was to her sense of self. He couldn’t imagine how differently men and women experienced social exile in their world.
The second powerful thing about a long novel, if they are written by geniuses like Eliot or Tolstoy, is that you have enough time to see how choices play out over years. You have space to even see the consequences of the consequences. You will experience moral formation from these novels in a way that you just cannot from a 2-hour movie or social media post. You will see reasonable relatable people fall into traps, and then you will see how it affects them years later.
I could list the most powerful moments to me from Anna Karenina, but that would rob you of discovering them yourself. Different passages will resonate with different readers. Reading someone else’s summary is like reading a travel guide instead of visiting a foreign country yourself. You must go.
“My Reference Point, Not Yours“ (2020) Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 171: 297-311.
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"you have enough time to see how choices play out over years. You have space to even see the consequences of the consequences." Yes! Was just thinking about this and Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. Half way through she's looking pretty good! It takes a lifetime for our choices to catch up to us, for good or for ill.
I like your thoughts on the question. Values are difficult to define for experiences that are largely subjective. I read Middlemarch last year and enjoyed the experience. In addition to the pleasure of the reading act itself was the subtle and hard to articulate effect it had on my thoughts and feelings during other parts of my day. I seemed to have a greater capacity for unstructured thought, a bigger internal canvas for musings and general attention.