Planet Money - Economic fact in literary fiction

Episode Date: November 18, 2023

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. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Always free at these links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Find more Planet Money: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.Music: Universal Music Production - "This Summer," "Music Keeps Me Dancing," "Rain," and "All The Time."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. You know that saying, never meet your idols? I recently got to test out that theory, and I'm happy to report that whoever says that, they're wrong. My name is Min Jin Lee, and I'm an author. I write books. Min Jin 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. And are they about economics, your books? They are. They are about economics because even though I write novels, I wanted to be an economist. I don't think most people know this.

I didn't know that. Yeah. So I go to college and I think I'm going to be an economist. And then, of course, I take economics. I took macro, which was a mistake. Of course, yeah. And everything was guns and butter. And my brain just sort of melted. Guns and butter. That's macroeconomic shorthand for all the stuff a government might choose to spend money on.

So guns, that's like national defense versus the butter of social programs. It was not what Min imagined studying economics would be like. I think what I really meant to do is to become a behavioral economist. And I think that's kind of like what novelists do. Go on. Well, we're trying to understand the motivation behind why people make decisions. And in order to live, you have to make decisions about material culture as well as how you live your life. And economics is the foundation of it. So I think it's fascinating. Whenever I meet writers and they go, oh, I don't understand business or finance or real estate or economics. I look at them and go, well, do you know people? Because money is right at the center of so much of what we do, and it can reveal so much about whoever's holding it.

Tell me what you like by telling me how you spend your money. If I understand your inflow and outflow of cash or credit or whatever you want to call the units of measurement that we use to move the world around. I know exactly what's in your heart. I know what you care about. I know what you idolize. I know what you don't care about at all. Incidentally, this is an artful description of the economic concept of revealed preference. The idea that despite what people may say, they will reveal what they actually want or care about with their money. And understanding what people actually care about, what's motivating their decisions,

that is at the core of what fiction writers do as they go about building their worlds. Which explains why a few times in the past few years, I've had this weird thing happen to me. I'll be minding my own business, reading a beautiful, immersive novel, when wham! The book is suddenly about economics, or financial markets, or God forbid and this really did happen, I turn the page and there's a chapter titled Bonds. It's as if some novelists are secretly economists. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Mary Childs. And I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi.

Today on the show, a different kind of financial literacy. Aha! Yeah. We're going to talk to a few of those secret economists who happen to have written some of the most influential and beloved novels of the past few years. They'll tell us why they started poking around in this world of money and economics in the first place, how they learned about the obsessions that they found there, and how they translated those ideas into fiction. There will be spoilers, but they're small. Baby spoilers. Little tiny ones.

Minjin Lee's book, Pachinko, is this intergenerational epic. It was a bestseller, a 2017 finalist for the National Book Awards for Fiction, and it follows a Korean family that immigrates to Japan in the 1900s. It captures all the emotional minutiae of family life, but also this huge sweep of economic history, how industry and job opportunities changed over decades. The book feels like this masterful work of economic reporting, down to the tiniest details, which Min told me is essential to her process. One of the things that fiction writers are constantly trying to do is to put the reader in a dream.

And we have to do everything possible to not set off the alarm clock. And the alarm clock is the subconscious or the conscious mind of the reader saying, that doesn't sound right. And that's a very loud alarm. You're going to be like, you know what, this dream is stupid. I'm leaving. For her, the way to keep readers engrossed in the world she's building is to get every little detail right, to be accurate. And the way she does that is by talking to people, reporting, really understanding what it's like for someone to do one particular job and live in one particular place and time. And she finds her sources wherever she can. Like when she was working on her first

book, which has a character who's a private equity guy who went to Harvard Business School, she would bring up in conversation with a friend like, hey, I'm trying to find a Harvard business grad. And then someone will say, oh, my brother-in-law went to Harvard Business School. And I say, do you think he has an hour? And then I usually will have, let's say, coffee with this person. And that person says, oh, I don't mind telling this person all of my secrets because it's in fiction. Like, I'm never going to get quoted. So he is telling me all of his secrets. And he has so much fun. Usually he'll say, so you want to talk to somebody who went to Harvard Business School and now works in private equity.

Oh, talk to Tony. And then she'd repeat the process all over again. She would go get coffee with Tony and ask him, what is it you actually do all day and why? And Tony would just tell her. And this process, talking to people, reporting things out, this is exactly how she got to the conceit of the book that made me want to talk to her in the first place, Pachinko. Because a few decades ago, Min moved to Japan with her husband after he got a job there, and she decided to resurrect an old manuscript she'd abandoned about Koreans living in Japan. So she was doing her research, talking to people about the discrimination they face, the neighborhoods they could live in, the jobs they could have. And she started to notice that everyone kept mentioning this one thing.

Every single subject told me about this game, this gambling game, which at one point in Japan's economic history was more important than the export of their cars. Like, that's how important it is. And yet I knew nothing about it. That game is pachinko. It looks a little bit like a mix between an arcade game and a pinball machine, but with gambling. And the people Min talked to, descendants of Korean immigrants who moved to Japan in

the 1930s and 1940s, told her that when their families arrived, they were largely shut out of the formal economy. And pachinko parlors, these back alley places where people would go to gamble, were one way Korean immigrants could actually work and make money. And the more Min understood about pachinko and its role in the lives of the people she was talking to, the more she started to see it as kind of a metaphor. Pachinko, the game is more or less fixed. So there is a lot of tinkering and there's a lot of man-made intervention to affect your outcomes. So when I learned that, I thought, well, that reminds me the way life works. The Korean immigrants she talked to were stuck in this

rigged and unfair economic situation in Japan, trapped by racial discrimination. But these stigmatized jobs gave them a chance to transcend poverty. And for me, this is the thing that's at the heart of this book. Her characters have to play the game that's in front of them, not some better, more fair game, not the game they wish they could play. And Min says that can apply to how we all think about work. Because there's this idea, at least in the U.S., that the labor market is some kind of

meritocracy, that if we work hard enough, we might find exactly the job that's going to fulfill us personally. But in reality, the labor market is a lot more like that game of pachinko. And Min says we should play it that way. Be clear-eyed about the actual limited options in front of us and the way those options change when the economy changes. We have to pick the best possible path without being too upset that the fantasy isn't real or that the job we worked for so hard might become obsolete. To Min, that was true in early 20th century Japan, and it's true today. My only takeaway lately is, can you please learn how to adapt? Because I think adaptation is probably the only thing that will eventually last.

As for Min's own professional path, she says it took a few iterations. She thought about being an economist, she was trained as a lawyer, and she chose to be a novelist. You have all these alternate lives. What makes fiction the right avenue for exploring these questions about economics and finance? I think for me, fiction is a way I can have the broadest reach. I do think that the stuff that I-wrenching life that I put into it, then I have the possibility of that narrative being read by one person. And if that one person thinks it's worth reading, in my experience, my pass-along factor is quite high.

By pass-along factor, Min is referring to a real metric in the publishing industry. She's saying that people who read her books tend to like them enough they pass them to a friend. And her books resonating with people like that, that makes her think that all the research and revising is worth it. It was worth spending almost all of my adult life writing now just three books. So perhaps for another person that may seem inefficient, to use an economics term, but for me, it's maximum efficiency if the totality of who I am can be directed in the work that I really choose to do. Min Jin Lee is the author of Pachinko. I wanted to talk to our next author because from reading her books, I was pretty sure that she is definitely obsessed with something that we are also obsessed with here on the show.

The author is Emily St. John Mandel. Emily writes these layered sci-fi books about lives that intertwine across time and space. She's the author of the bestselling novel Station Eleven, which came out in 2014 and got made into this blockbuster HBO show. It's so good. Love that show. 12 out of 10. It's awesome. She also wrote The Glass Hotel and most recently Sea of Tranquility, which are also bestsellers.

When I was reading her books, I started to notice this pattern. They all have these shipping characters, shipping plots. And I'm like, I think Emily might really love shipping. You know, the question I get all the time in interviews is, so you're really into shipping, like what's up with that? Which, which fair, it's a little. Sorry. No, it's cool. No, it's, it's interesting. The thing that draws me to it, I think, is the combination of scale and invisibility, which is that we don't think about the men who pilot our bananas through the Strait of Malacca. That's not a part of our day-to-day considerations. But it is interesting to look at the room you're in and think about how much of it came to you from other places. And people piloted those ships into port.

I mean, weirdly, I feel like Emily's kind of describing the whole purpose of Planet Money here, which is, you know, to learn about how bananas or whatever else connect us to this enormous web of people and forces around the world. Yeah, sometimes it literally is bananas. And Emily remembers the moment she fell in love with shipping. It was around the time of the Great Recession. What first sparked my interest in that world was an article published in 2009 in the Daily Mail of all places. I think the title was something like Revealed, the Ghost Fleet of the Recession. That was the title. You know, if you think about what our economy was doing in 2008, 2009, consumer demand was way down. And if nobody's buying stuff, then stuff does not need to be shipped. So shipping companies had a problem. Too many ships, not enough stuff to fill them. There were ships moving half empty over the oceans, which is not efficient. The ships are just meant to be in continuous movement for the duration of their lives. So what do you do with all of these extra ships that nobody needs?

And the solution that several shipping companies came up with was they just parked those boats like just offshore with a skeleton crew. Hundreds of giant freighters just sitting in the sea 50 miles east of Singapore. What used to be a busy horizon with ships constantly passing each other on their way elsewhere was now entirely blocked by these empty, still ships. At night, they turned the lights on. The perspective of the people on shore was these people in this fishing village who came outside one night and the horizon was a blaze of lights. All of these ships lit up on the horizon. And it was just this very strange economic moment. This image sparked something in Emily's brain.

The ghost fleet, the crowded horizon. And she starts binge reading about shipping. There's this industry publication slash website called Lloyd's List, which is just everything about shipping out of London. And they gave me a subscription for a week for free, this trial subscription. So I spent a week just reading everything I possibly could about shipping. It was really fun. So she's reading Lloyd's List, subhead maritime intelligence, and she starts to pick up on this clinical way that the shipping industry talks about

some of the most dramatic events imaginable. I remember this very dry article about piracy, which was slightly alarming. Alarming not because it's filled with plunder and violence, but because there isn't even a single hint of swashbuckling. It's treated as this business risk, which, you know, is not to imply callousness. Obviously, these are real sailors on these ships. But people in that industry have to think about it as part of their day-to-day lives and insurance requirements. Emily starts to take all this new shipping knowledge

and build characters who work in shipping. There's a main character in Station Eleven, and then there are two characters in the Glass Hotel. One of those characters is a cook on a freighter who goes missing, and for insurance reasons, a shipping executive is sent to investigate. is sent to investigate. Emily applies this poetic sense of wonder to the seemingly dry logistical processes described in the shipping trade magazines. And there's this one passage in particular that I love that has really stuck with me

from The Glass Hotel. I'm going to read it to you, Alexi. Storytime. Exactly. And in it, the shipping executive is sitting in a hotel lobby talking to a guy who asks him about his job. And it, the shipping executive is sitting in a hotel lobby talking to a guy who asks him about his job. And it makes the shipping executive go into this moment of reverie.

Here it is. There are tens of thousands of ships at sea at any given moment. And he liked to imagine each one as a point of light, converging into rivers of electric brilliance over the night oceans, verging into rivers of electric brilliance over the night oceans, flowing through the narrow channels of the Suez and Panama canals, the Strait of Gibraltar, around the edges of continents and out into the oceans. An unceasing movement that drove countries, a secret world that he loved so much. Yeah, that's really lovely.

It's this kind of lyrical way of describing all these goods zipping to and fro around the globe to satisfy the demands of the moment. It's like this giant engine of revealed preference. Because shipping is kind of the manifestation of the aggregate desires of the whole world. Behavioral economics on the largest possible scale. And Emily manages to paint it in one beautiful image. After the break, our final novelist, Hernan Diaz, turns his frustration with. And Dave Blanchard. And you got to check out our recent bonus episode where we pull back the Planet Money curtain a little bit and talk about those of us who make this show and some of our firsts. Like what our first job was, but truly it is so much more than that.

Yeah, I mean, don't you want to know which of us got in trouble at work for having a lip piercing? Or sitting down on the job? You can hear that if and only if you're a Planet Money Plus supporter. If that's you, thank you. And if it's not, it's easy to sign up. You get bonus content, sponsor-free listening, and support NPR in the process. Go to plus.npr.org. dot org. For our last author, I called Hernan Diaz, who wanted to give an important disclosure. I want to stress this to you and to any unfortunate listeners. I am not an economist. That's okay. We have lots of those. Wonderful.

So all... That's okay. We have lots of those. Wonderful. Like Min Jin Lee, Hernan Diaz writes sweeping historical fiction. He just won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, Trust, which on the surface is about a finance tycoon in early 1900s New York. But it's really about who gets to speak and who doesn't, who gets trusted in the financial world and who is excluded.

Hernan began his journey of writing Trust with this big ambition. I wanted to write about capital in America without knowing the first thing about money and its inner workings. Money and its inner workings, Hernan says, seem to be shrouded in all sorts of opaque, confusing language that made it impossible to understand. Right. Like when you're watching CNBC or whatever, and someone's talking like, oh, commercial

real estate, commercial mortgage-backed security tranches are priced to perfection here. And you're like, I'm sorry, what are you even talking about? The rhetoric around money has this very viscous, dense sort of quality. And you're stripped of agency by this kind of discourse. And that is something that I take profound issue with. So Hernan decided he was going to demystify money and finance for himself by writing a book about it. So about six years ago, he started to research.

And Hernan may not be an economist, but he has a PhD in comparative literature, and he was trained in archival work. So when he begins his process, it's with what's already out there. To me, writing always begins with reading. So I said to myself, OK, let's read all the big novels about moneymaking in America. And I was surprised to find that there

are very few of those. He could find plenty of novels about being rich and weird or about society or about oppression. But the inner workings of capital, the labyrinth of moneymaking itself, not so much. Which was actually great news. That meant he could corner that very particular literary market. So that was his step one, reading books. But if there isn't much out there in the way of books to read, on to step two. He shall read old, dusty papers. I like to work with primary sources. That's mostly what I do. I like to read documents, materials, papers, journals, congressional hearings, treatises, you name it, from the time.

He finds this one moment that becomes really helpful for his understanding of the dynamic between financial power and language. I read and sort of cited or mentioned in the book the 1932 congressional hearings after the crash. The 1929 stock market crash, a pivotal moment in his book and also in history. He finds testimony from Mr. Walter Sachs of Goldman Sachs. And senators are asking Sachs and other finance people about the causes of the crash. Like, what went on there? What were you doing at that time? His responses to the senators there were never more than tops, like five to 12 words long, you know. And this way in which financial power confronted political power was an immense lesson and informed my character to a very deep extent.

He could see on the page, in those scant responses, how financial power can outweigh political power, doesn't necessarily need to bend to it, in a way that's kind of unfathomable for those of us without sprawling financial empires. This way of power addressing power, you know, page after page after page was something that I had never seen in any history book, you know, and that was all rhetoric. That was all in the language. So Walter Sachs' way of speaking, or not speaking, goes directly into Hernán's characters.

Like the tycoon, who is the central character in his book Trust, is private to the point of reclusivity. At one point someone publishes a book about him that he doesn't like, so the tycoon figures out a way to buy up all the copies forever, physically removing it from circulation. His money literally silences language he doesn't like. And this idea becomes a central conceit of the book, that language, or the lack of it, or that viscous jargon, that is the flex, the demonstration of power.

And as Hernan got deeper and deeper into his research, he read things that made him start to see economics itself in a new light, as something less objective and concrete than it projected. Like, you read a paper by economist Paul Romer. The paper basically argues that people sometimes use the mathy, numbersy side of economics as this shield of objectivity to help frame their specific policy ideas as unassailable proofs. In other words, just as financiers and stockbrokers use jargon to shore up their power, economists can use math to kind of do the same thing. Hernan says he actually found this idea kind of freeing.

It gave him an explanation for why finance and economics felt so inscrutable. It's because it's trying to be. Hernán told us about this moment when he realized his relationship to finance had changed through the process of writing Trust. This was before the book came out in 2022, back when interest rates were still historically low. I was refinancing my mortgage as I was proofreading. And you were like, I am locking in these rates, my friend. Yes. And believe it or not, I felt that I could kind of follow what I was being asked to not bother myself with. He could follow it now. Like before all of this, whenever he encountered finance stuff, you know, dealing with technical documents or whatever,

Hernán would get this feeling like he was suffocating. Because he felt so out of the loop, unequipped to make hugely consequential decisions for his own life. After all his research, Hernán doesn't feel that as much anymore. feel that as much anymore. This very long process, you know, it was about five years all in all, has made me a more engaged citizen and has given me a better, thoroughly imperfect, partial and muddled, but better understanding of the world of finance. And I intend to keep track of it to the extent of my abilities. The thing I think I'm taking away from all of this is that we've found a kind of blueprint for gaining financial literacy that all of us can follow. All you need to do is spend five years researching and writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning tome on American capital.

Right, yeah. Or you could listen to the last thousand or so episodes of Planet Money. It's up to you. For Planet Money plus subscribers, we're going to put an extended version of these author conversations in the feed, so keep your eyes peeled for that. And thank you for subscribing.

If you're not already subscribed, that could be fun. As for next week's episode of Planet Money, it is that time of the year again, Thanksgiving. So we're going to try to solve a big Thanksgiving mystery. It's a puzzle that economists have been trying to explain for a long time. That's next week on the show, a very Planet Money Thanksgiving. Today's episode was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Molly Messick.

It was engineered by Nisha Heines, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. And I'm Mary Childs. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.