55 pages • 1 hour read
Russell RobertsThe Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Russell Roberts
Russel Roberts is a successful economist and professor. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1981 and has taught at multiple universities including George Mason and Stanford. Unlike many economists in the early 1990s , Roberts’s primary goal was “to become an economic communicator” and demystify economic principles for a broad audience (Kopf, Dan. “Russ Roberts and the Quest to Make Economics Interesting.” Priceonomics, 2016). His first book, The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protectionism (1994) is, like The Invisible Heart, a novel designed to popularize the understanding of economics. In addition to The Choice and The Invisible Heart, Roberts has published one other novel in the same vein in 2008 and has three non-fiction books that also seek to apply economic principles to larger life questions and philosophical issues. Roberts’s largest claim to fame, however, is the rap video he created in 2010 using popular hip-hop musical styles to present the debate between F. A. Hayek’s Austrian model of economics and John Maynard Keynes’s boom and bust model of the economy.
Roberts’s goal of popularizing economics is particularly important to the structure and style of The Invisible Heart. Laura and Sam debate the ethics of economic principles, and those debates showcase the fundamentals of economic theory and the controversies surrounding them. Although Roberts is unquestionably a classical liberal and that attitude colors the text, he also endeavors to fairly represent both sides of the featured debates. Roberts’s interest in providing an accessible and engaging introduction to economic philosophy is reflected in the character development and the literary devices he employs in writing a novel, not merely a narrative of economics.
Economic Context: Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand
Russ Roberts has written extensively on, among other things, Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand,” which directly inspires the title and is one of the primary motifs of The Invisible Heart. Adam Smith was a Scottish philosopher who wrote on ethical theory and economics. He is widely considered either “The Father of Economics” or “The Father of Capitalism” because of his seminal work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (“Adam Smith (1723-1790).” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In that work, Smith uses the term to describe the effect of a merchant investing his capital locally rather than internationally—because the merchant wants to secure his capital by keeping it close, he invests in his local community and serves the public interest unintentionally. In Smith’s ethical philosophy, Theory of Moral Sentiments, the term arises again to describe the force by which a greedy landlord unintentionally benefits his tenants by serving his own interests.
This concept has become a controversial metaphor throughout economic scholarship and political debate. Some economists interpret the Invisible Hand to be the benevolent force inherent in a free-market system. This interpretation has met with considerable debate both from Smith scholars and critics of free market capitalism. The scholars argue that Smith’s limited use of the metaphor was highly specific rather than generalized. Those critical of free market theories argue that the Invisible Hand either doesn’t exist or is much less benevolent than painted by the proponents of the free market. In the novel, Roberts primarily uses Smith’s ethical usage of the term to introduce the metaphor of the invisible heart of the market—Roberts’s reference to Smith’s metaphor suggests that human compassion is a driving force in the inner workings of the free market.
Historical Context: The Economy of the Early 2000s
A novel focusing on economics published in 2001 was entirely appropriate to the major concerns of the United States at the time. The 1990s are remembered as a time of relative stability and wealth in the United States. Although the beginning of the decade ushered in a recession following the Gulf War, the recession was relatively weak by historical standards, and the country recovered quickly. Computers and other advanced communication technology like cellular phones were becoming cheaper and more advanced, and the dot-com boom in the mid- to late 1990s appeared to be ushering in an entirely new industry ripe for growth and wealth production. The sudden growth of Silicon Valley and the dot-com industry was largely fueled by low interest rates available to venture capitalists and a reduction in the capital gains tax. There was initially high confidence in the success of these ventures; however, in 2000, many of these start-ups ran out of money. As the less successful start-ups failed and anxieties related to Y2K increased, confidence in the industry decreased, leading to significant stock market fluctuations. Additionally, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, which made further venture capital investments less attractive. As a result, in 2000 there were major questions regularly in the news about the health and stability of the American economy.
The Invisible Heart directly engages debates on the value of free market economics. In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, was also a prominent talking point in the 1990s. NAFTA is an economic agreement between Canada, the United States, and Mexico concerning the importing and exporting of goods, tariffs, customs regulations, and even regulations on employment transnationally. NAFTA was ratified by all three nations and put into force in 1994. Throughout the 1990s, though, there were concerns about NAFTA’s consequences to the environment, unemployment rates, and the overall economic health of the nation. The primary problem in the fictional television show described in the novel is HealthNet’s choice to move a factory, and therefore jobs, from Ohio to Mexico—something made much cheaper and easier by NAFTA.
