Joy in Economics… and Tolstoy?

In a recent McKinsey Global Forward Thinking podcast with Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, the latter says, “It’s not your grandfather’s economics, it’s not the widget factory. It’s the decision about how many kids to have, it’s what’s going to determine the next election, it’s whether people are going to turn to crime. It’s issues of social policy, the questions of inequality, of racial justice, of healthcare systems, of financial crises, of pandemics.”1 Stevenson, attempting to lay to rest Thomas Carlyle’s description of economics as “the dismal science,”2 responded, “Economics includes making choices that are going to leave you as well-off as possible. That’s a very optimistic view of life. Economics helps you live your best life possible. It gives you the tools to systematically make decisions that will leave you, whoever you are, with whatever values you have, making the best choices you possibly can.”

Are these economists correct? Is economics the most fruitful way to approach the pressing issues of our times? Does it reliably guide both micro-level decision making, such as whether to rent or buy, as well as macro-level decisions, such as how to reduce crime? Does it show us how to live the best possible life? Are human beings best understood as fully optimizing, fully rational creatures whose paths in life can best be described in mathematical terms? Finally, does economics offer our best shot at joy?

To understand these questions more deeply, we turn to a very different account found in Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina. Some characteristics of Tolstoy and his novel might recommend him to economists. First, Tolstoy commanded a large fortune. Furthermore, multiple polls of writers and the reading public have singled out Tolstoy as the greatest writer who ever lived, with Anna Karenina frequently emerging at the top of rankings of the best novels.

To begin with, I would note that wealth and joy, at least in Tolstoy’s eyes, are not necessarily correlated. The richest of the principal characters in the book is Count Alexi Vronsky, the man who will become the lover of the novel’s title character, Anna Karenina, the wife of a government official. Vronsky is “terribly rich, handsome, and has first-rate connections,” yet despite scoring highly on all parameters of the well-being equation, by the novel’s end, he declares sincerely that, “To me, life is worth nothing.”

A casual economically minded reader might suppose that the count has lost his fortune, but this is not the case. He is as rich as ever, with more money than he can count. Yet he has lost something much dearer to him that wealth, namely the woman he loved, who has taken her own life in order to escape her troubles and make him pay. He serves as the novel’s clearest reminder that, while wealth makes many things possible, it does not guarantee some of the things in life that matter most.

Another character is constantly beset by financial difficulties. The novel opens with great tumult in the household of Stepan Oblonsky, whose wife has just discovered that he has been having an affair with their French governess. Oblonsky is a perfectly good-natured fellow who lives in the moment. When he is with his family, he is capable of thinking as a husband and father, but when he is out in the world, he thinks of himself as a vigorous young man who should not be deprived of pleasure.

As a creature of the moment, Oblonsky is constantly living beyond his means and burying his family deeper and deeper under a mountain of debt. He spends and tips extravagantly at the clubs but cannot provide his wife the funds necessary to buy a winter coat for their eldest child. Yet it is not his failures as a money manager that constitute his principal problem in life. Far more serious is his inability to do anything more than seek what is pleasurable and avoid what is unpleasant.

For insight into joy, we must consider another character in Anna Karenina, a woman often regarded as a doormat by contemporary readers, namely Oblonsky’s long-suffering wife, Dolly. When we first meet her, she has just found out about her husband’s affair with the governess and informed him that she cannot go on living in the same house with him. Says her husband to himself, “She will never forgive me. And what is more terrible is that it is all my fault, yet I am not to blame.”

Oblonsky does not hold himself responsible for his infidelity because he does not believe in responsibility. He sees his behavior not in terms of fixed moral disposition or character but the “reflexes of the brain.” To him, his wife is merely “a worn-out, aging, no longer beautiful woman who is in no way remarkable; the simple, merely good-natured mother of his family” of five children, and she should have “indulged him, simply out of a sense of fairness.”

Oblonsky is not an evil man. He is, on the other hand, a man without a conscience. He is a pleasure seeker and a pain avoider, who, mindful of the “full gravity of the situation, feels sorry for his wife, his children, and himself.” Yet overwhelmed by the unpleasantness, all he can think to do is to exit, “to lose himself in the demands of the day.” He picks up his hat and stops to consider whether he is forgetting something, realizing that he has “forgotten nothing except the one thing he would like to forget—his wife.”

Dolly, of course, will be visited by her husband’s sister, Anna, and will choose not to leave him, realizing that she “cannot break herself of the habit of considering him her husband and loving him.” She asks herself the question, “Can we go on living together? Is this possible? After my husband, the father of my children, has taken his own children’s governess as his mistress?” That Dolly proves able to do so is precisely why many contemporary readers despise her.

Yet it is Dolly who offers some of the novel’s most profound insights into joy. And she finds this joy not in wealth, or power, or fame, or even pleasure, the things that the men in her husband’s social circle often care most about. To the contrary, she will never acquire worldly power or fame, experience any pleasures other than ones that would strike many as banal, and will only be driven deeper and deeper into penury by her husband’s profligate ways.

Yet Dolly finds joy of a kind that her husband will never know. Consider a scene in which she is bathing her children in a river. “She took no greater pleasure in anything than in this bathing with all her children. To run her fingers over all these plump little legs while pulling on their stockings, to gather up in her arms and dip these little naked bodies and hear their delighted and terrified squeals, to see the wide-open eyes of these splashing cherubs of hers was a great pleasure for her.”

Later, we gain further insight into what life is like for Dolly, and the true source of her joy in it, even in the midst of the suffering of her children’s illnesses. For whistling during supper, one of her little sons has been sent to his room without desert by the governess. She goes to see him, and there she witnesses a scene “of such joy that tears came to her eyes, and she herself forgave the culprit.”

• The punished boy was sitting in the drawing room at a corner window; and next to him stood his sister with a plate. Under the pretext of wishing to feed her dolls, she had asked the governess for permission to bring her portion of pie to the nursery and instead brought it to her brother. While continuing to cry at the unfairness of the punishment he had suffered, he ate the pie brought to him and through sobs kept saying, “You eat some, let’s eat together… together.”

• When they saw their mother, they became frightened, but when they looked at her face, they realized that they were doing a good thing, and they began laughing, and with their mouths full of pie, started wiping their smiling lips and smearing their beaming faces with tears and jam.

• My goodness! Your new white dress!” said their mother, trying to rescue the dress, but she had tears in her eyes and was smiling a blissful, ecstatic smile.

Dolly’s life contains its full share of heartache, perhaps more. Her husband will continue to see other women and deplete his wife’s estate. Her children will continue to behave badly from time to time and break her heart. They will fall ill. And yet,

• … hard though it was for the mother to bear the dread of illness, the illnesses themselves, and the grief of seeing signs of evil propensities in her children—the children themselves were even now repaying her in small joys for her sufferings. Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.

We intuitively understand there is no way entirely to forsake the bad and choose only the good. Oblonsky tries to do so but ends up leading a self-centered, superficial, and ultimately empty sort of life. He has no fixed identity, he is not really dedicated to anyone but himself, and as a result, his world is rather cramped and shallow. He thinks that he is going for life’s gusto, but in reality, his lack of responsibility keeps him on the sidelines.

Oblonsky despises his wife. Her world seems a small one—the household, her children, domestic cares. She is not setting policy, shifting large sums from one account to another, or making a name for herself. In many ways, someone looking at her life through the lens of economics might say that she will never amount to much, and in fact is amounting to less and less. In economic terms, at least in those that Bentham might recognize, this may well be true.

And yet Dolly is all in. Unlike her husband, she lives for something beyond herself, her family and her children. She is totally committed to them, even to the point that she can forgive her husband his betrayals. She cannot love him the way she once did, but the flourishing of their children is so important to her that she is prepared to sacrifice everything for them. In a way her husband and the economists might find nearly impossible to fathom, she lives not for herself but for others.

Dolly’s choice is brought into sharp relief when she visits her husband’s sister, Anna. Anna has left her husband and son to live with her rich and dashing lover, Vronsky, who spares no expense in constructing for her a life that he believes will suit her. Their union has even produced a daughter, whom she names Annie. One day, Dolly leaves her children in the care of her sister and travels to Vronsky’s estate to talk with Anna and see firsthand what her life is like.

On the journey, Dolly, a betrayed wife, considers how the adulteress Anna has been ostracized by society, and whether she deserves such treatment.

• They attack Anna. For what? Am I really any better? At least I have a husband I love. Not the way I would like to love him, but I do, but Anna doesn’t love hers. What is she guilty of? She wants to live. God put that in our hearts. More than likely, I would have done the very same thing. Perhaps I should have left my husband and begun a new life. Maybe I would have loved and been loved for real…. Anna did quite right, and I cannot ever reproach her in the least. She is happy, she is making someone else happy, and she is not broken down, as I am, but is probably just as fresh, clever, and open to everything as ever, she thought, and a mischievous grin creased her lips, especially because, while thinking about Anna’s romance, she imagined parallel to it her almost identical romance with an imagined composite man who was in love with her. Like Anna, she confessed everything to her husband. And Oblonsky’s shock and confusion at this news made her smile.

Dolly’s moment of truth comes when she sees Anna’s life firsthand. She is beautiful. She is surrounded by luxury, and she is engaged in good works. She and Vronsky have a hospital built to tend the peasants. Anna describes herself as “unforgivably happy” and her life as a dream. Her little daughter is surrounded by the finest toys from all over Europe, and she has the best nurses and maids that money can buy. From the standpoint of a hedonic calculus, Anna seems to have it all.

Yet Dolly quickly realizes that something is wrong. “Anna, the wet nurse, the governess, and the child were not accustomed to being together and the mother’s visit was an unusual event.” The last straw comes when Dolly asks Anna how many teeth her daughter has and she gets it wrong, not knowing about the last two teeth. Anna admits, “Sometimes it’s hard for me being in a way superfluous here. It is not the way it was with my first.” Anna has constructed a life for herself in which she is not really a mother.

It is not long before Dolly resolves to leave. In fact, she cannot get home to her children soon enough. Anna has the kind of house and family that would look great in a glossy magazine, while Dolly by comparison seems threadbare and worn out, hardly fit for a photo shoot. But Dolly has something Anna cannot purchase at any price: genuine love for her children, the deepest possible dedication to them. As a result, she experiences a joy in being a mother that is utterly unknown to Anna.

In one sense, at least, Tolstoy’s perspective on joy may be more authentically economic than the economists’ accounts. In Aristotle’s writings, we find economics contrasted with politics, politics involving the management of a state (polis, city) and economics focusing on the household (oikos, household or family). Oblonsky and Anna care for neither the state nor the family and thus fail at both, while Dolly represents the consummate economist, primarily because she loves her family.

Why doesn’t Tolstoy, one of the world’s great geniuses, simply provide us with an equation for joy and a table enumerating the values for each of his characters, including Vronsky, Oblonsky, Dolly, and Anna? Perhaps because he does not believe in it. Could it be that he has concluded that whatever joy is, it is not susceptible to scientific modes of inquiry and cannot be figured out in the way many economists suppose? Instead of calculating joy, he found it necessary to tell a story about it.

Footnotes

[1] “Forward Thinking on bringing the joy to economics with Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers.” McKinsey Global Institute, June 28, 2023.

[2] For more on Carlyle’s infamous label, see “The Secret History of the Dismal Science. Part 1. Economics, Religion, and Race in the 19th century,” by David Levy and Sandra Peart. Econlib, Jan. 2, 2001.