A Beautiful Novel, and its Lessons for Economic Development

Can a novel teach us about economic development?

Dear readers,

I write this newsletter once every month or so. It features my reflections on the deployment of creativity to making the world’s economic systems (and by extension social and to some extent political systems) more inclusive and, therefore, fairer.  That sounds like a tall order – and it is! 

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Can a novel teach us about economic development?

We usually suggest that professionals interested in economic development read the works of economists or political scientists, or devour weighty tomes from allied disciplines. Novels are just for fun and relaxation surely?

Fun, yes, but novels also reflect the time and place within which they’re written, and of course they reflect the setting in which the author chooses to unfold her desired narrative.  Personally, I love a good work of historical fiction since it immerses me in the society of that time and place. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ comes to mind, for example; she brings to life the tragedies and complexities of the Biafran war in Nigeria.

Recently, I picked up a book that has been on my shelf forever, Amos Oz’s ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness,’ which I read (translated from Hebrew to English) on a beach on Cape Cod amidst bracing swims in a gorgeous but not-too-warm ocean.  Oz was a famous Israeli writer, proponent of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The book is a memoir, masterfully interweaving Oz’s family history of migration from Eastern Europe to the British Mandate of Palestine, and thence through the birth of the modern state of Israel. 

The writing is masterful. Memorably, Oz compares anti-Semites to ‘germs,’ saying something to the effect of not being able to see either of them, but just knowing that they’re there!

So other than thoroughly enjoying my immersion in the birth of Israel, what does this have to do with economic development?  What did I learn about the development of the ‘institutions’ that underpin a modern nation state? 

A few things come immediately to mind:

Institutions are not just constituted by formal rules. Informal sentiments shape their emergence, and their effectiveness. Emotions matter. The community in Jerusalem amidst which Oz found himself had, like his parents, immigrated from Eastern Europe.  Some of them thought of Jerusalem as too ‘Asiatic’ and therefore dirty and uncomfortable. As an ‘Asiatic’ myself, I didn’t quite know what to make of this! How, I mused in a counterfactual thought experiment, might I have reacted to a hypothetical reciprocal parachuting into Eastern Europe? Perhaps I’d have thought it overly sanitized? Insufficiently stimulating to my sight, taste and smell?  In any case, that attitude influenced (some of) the immigrants and how they assimilated, if they did.

Central to any new society are the emergence of its own centers of learning. Interwoven in the text of the novel are Oz’s reflections on Israel’s emerging universities – Hebrew University in particular, whose founding in 1918 predates the birth of the Israeli nation-state in 1948. 

References abound to the first-rate German universities whose graduates had pride-of-place in many an intellectual arena then. Interestingly, in the early decades of Hebrew University, there was some controversy about whether some of the subjects should be taught in German.  Now, Hebrew’s use dated back to Biblical times, primarily as a liturgical language, and it began to be spoken more widely only by the late nineteenth century. Perhaps it had not developed an adequate scientific vocabulary, for example.  Nonetheless, the use of German did not come to pass, given the salience that the Hebrew language had for the Jewish people and their independent state.  Fast forward a few decades and Hebrew and Tel Aviv Universities rank among the world’s leaders in many areas of scholarship. I enjoy engaging with my former classmates and colleagues there, peers of my own institutional home at Harvard; indeed, one economic historian at Hebrew University kindly discussed this newsletter with me.

Oz’s book also contains insights on institutional dissolution, through numerous narratives of how conflict ended up being birthed between Arabs and Jews. Even today, as I write this, Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab-settled part of Jerusalem is in the news, the site of a pitched and continued legal battle as Jews seek to evict the Arabs from where they’ve most recently been living, on the grounds that the Arabs in turn occupy sites taken from the Jews during the pre-1948 Jordanian control of Palestine.  It’s complex, and sad. 

Oz references Sheikh Jarrah as well. Indeed, his novel has an evocative description of the home of a respectable Arab family, and of Oz’s awkward but revealing visit as a Jewish adolescent youth to a physically proximate but nonetheless alien surrounding. He then describes how that Arab family was forced to leave their home by tensions that rocked the area right after 1948.

History doesn’t quite repeat itself, but it seems to continue to rhyme.

Now, I didn’t read ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness’ to learn about institutions. But my takeaways are a pleasurable by-product of a handful of lazy beach afternoons immersed in that memoir. Oz’s book motivated me to start to compile a list of historical fiction that I have similarly savored over the years, which I’ll share shortly.

That’s why I love my job as an educator and researcher.  I can read a story and it constitutes work!

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