Economic fact in literary fiction

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Some of the most influential and beloved novels of the last few years have been about money, finance, and the global economy. Some overtly so, others more subtly. It got to the point where we just had to call up the authors to find out more: What brought them into this world? What did they learn? How were they thinking about economics when they wrote these beautiful books?

Today on the show: we get to the bottom of it. We talk to three bestselling contemporary novelists — Min Jin Lee (Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires), Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility), and Hernan Diaz (Trust, In the Distance) – about how the hidden forces of economics and money have shaped their works.

This episode was hosted by Mary Childs and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Willa Rubin, edited by Molly Messick, and engineered by Neisha Heinis. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez.

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Music: Universal Music Production - "This Summer," "Music Keeps Me Dancing," "Rain," and "All The Time."

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:04.0	You know that saying, Never Meet Your Idols?
0:09.0	I recently got to test out that theory,
0:11.0	and I'm happy to report that whoever says that they're wrong.
0:15.2	My name is Mingen-Lee and I'm an author. I write books.
0:18.8	Mingen-Lee is a pretty big deal in the fiction world. Her most famous book, Pachinko, came out in 2017 and is now a show on Apple TV.
0:27.0	And are they about economics, your books?
0:31.0	They are.
0:32.8	They are about economics because even though I write novels,
0:37.6	I wanted to be an economist.
0:40.3	I don't think most people know this.
0:41.9	I didn't know that. Yeah, so I go to college and I think I'm going to be an
0:46.9	economist and then of course I take economics I took macro which was a mistake
0:51.6	of course yeah and everything was guns and butter and took macro which was a mistake. Of course, yeah.
0:53.3	And everything was guns and butter.
0:54.9	And my brain just sort of melted.
0:56.9	Guns and butter.
0:58.2	That's macroeconomic shorthand for all the stuff
1:00.5	a government might choose to spend money on.
1:03.4	So guns, that's like national defense versus the butter of social programs.
1:08.2	It was not what Min imagined studying economics would be like.
1:11.6	I think what I really meant to do is to become a
	...

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