The Useful Economist Who Solves Murders

TCA Srinivasa Raghavan

THE MYSTERY OF THE INVISIBLE HAND: A HENRY SPEARMAN MYSTERY by Marshall Jevons Princeton University Press, 2014, 224 pp., $ 9.99

MURDER AT THE MARGIN: A HENRY SPEARMAN MYSTERYby Marshall Jevons Princeton University Press, 2014, 224 pp., $ 29.00

THE FATAL EQUILIBRIUM: A NOVELby Marshall Jevons Fawcett, Reprint Edition, 1996, 208 pp., $ 78.14

December 2021, volume 45, No 12

All sorts of people write mystery stories in which a crime has to be solved. Most are solved by policemen, but many are solved by gifted amateurs. For example, there are medical murders. There are drug related murders. There’s murder in the financial world. There are many other types of murders involving rage, jealousy, conspiracy and what have you. Usually, policemen and professional detectives solve them. Sometimes old ladies solve them. So why not economists, too? After all, they have been around for about 300 years and have multiplied like rabbits in the last 50 and at last count there were around 100,000 of them, male and female. But only two, writing under one name, have taken the reputational risk of writing murder mysteries. Economists can be very dull and unforgiving in that respect.

The two are William Briet and Kenneth Elzinga who 45 years ago decided to write under the nom de plume of Marshall Jevons. Alfred Marshall, for those who don’t know, was the 19th century economist who invented the most enduring technique of economic analysis. It is called marginal analysis. William Stanley Jevons, another father figure, introduced mathematics into economic analysis. He thought he was doing it a good turn but mathematics eventually led economics into hundreds of blind alleys.

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