Q&A with Ball State University Professor of Economics Cecil Bohanon

Home Interviews Q&A with Ball State University Professor of Economics Cecil Bohanon

How did you become interested in the philosophic work of Adam Smith and Jane Austen?

“I had been at a Liberty Fund conference, read Theory of Moral Sentiments, and discussed it with some top notch scholars. Self command is an absolutely essential component to Theory of Moral Sentiments, which I taught a short course on. I ended up buying a Nook and it came with the 100 greatest novels of all time. Being the academic I am, I thought ‘hey you should read that stuff. You didn’t get enough literature courses in college.’ Obviously the first letter was ‘A’ and I came to Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Twenty pages into it and my jaw dropped. It was all about self command. I was fascinated.”

Do you think literature is helpful for promoting economics to the broader culture?

“Absolutely. I’m a big believer in economics as part of culture. Literature is showing what people do and their specific actions. Although economics is about human behavior, but I like what Mises says: It’s more about human action. You get that in literature in ways you can’t with summary statistics or dry prose written in social scientific terms. So there’s a lot of very interesting economic principles that can be illustrated by great literature. A master of this principle was the late professor at Purdue, Michael Watts, who passed a way a year and a half ago, which was a great loss to the economics profession. He continuously worked on the intersection of art and economics. This is such an important project. Literature mixed with economics engages the right and left sides of the brain and that’s a great way to get educated. Our feelings need to be educated by our rationality and our rationality needs to be educated by our feelings.”

What virtues are necessary for a free society?

“I think it’s all of the Smithean virtues, but I would start with self command, which is a sense of self control and self determination that goes beyond white knuckling things. It’s more than just restraining yourself. Its developing strategies, and being other directed, busy, happy, and resilient. The other thing is important, and this may surprise some people, but its beneficence. We don’t get a good society unless people have concern about others. The more beneficence we have, the less we have to rely on awkward, coerced solutions to things.”  

Do you have any upcoming scholarly projects?

“I would like to do something with Steinbeck, especially East of Eden. I find his writing to be very moving and I think he’s an interesting man because he’s been called a conservative, a progressive, and a liberal.  Another thing I’m working on is examining the scholarly community’s literature on sensibility. What I’d like to do is investigate further how it fits into Adam Smith.”

Why is it important for students not majoring in economics to read Adam Smith?

“It is absolutely the only way to understand what economics is all about. There are so many stereotypes about him. The best antidote? Read his stuff. Read the first chapters of the Wealth of Nations. If you really understand these chapters, you probably know more economics than 90% of the people with PhDs because you get the basic notion of what economics is all about and why it’s a powerful tool to understand how the world operates.”

As an economist, what did you learn from Jane Austen?

“Even though utility-maximizing marginal analysis is a very powerful tool—and I nowhere want to denigrate it nor say that its at all wrong—there are other ways of thinking about human decision-making that may be appropriate for various settings. I don’t have anything against the supply and demand of love or the elasticity of demand when talking about the beloved, but it really might not be the best language to use when we’re trying to understand it.”