The Fable of the Bees and the Purpose of Economics

Matthew Smith

Once upon a time, there was a thriving beehive.

Business was good. The worker bees were productive. The drones dutifully looked after the queen. And the queen herself enjoyed the prosperity of a ruler who experienced little social unrest.

But what really made the bees happy was their relentless pursuit of pleasure. Each looked out for his own interest, and on the whole, each got what he or she wanted. Their's was a life of luxury. Nobody was burdened by a sense of moral obligation. Instead, if a bee had the chance to pull one over on his neighbor, he'd do it. Everyone cheated, when they could get away with it. Everyone stole, when nobody was looking. Each used the other for his own ends.

And this experiment in self-interested productivity worked. Their businesses grew, and leisure was in abundance. Honey was plentiful. If there was something lacking, something that would bring a bee pleasure, it was there. Merchants and producers of all sorts of delights filled the hive. ...All because pleasure was their highest good.

But on one fateful day, all of this changed.

It began with a single bee who had an idea. A virtuous idea. "Aren't we meant for something more?," he thought. What about moral duty? Love of one's neighbor? Self-sacrifice? Justice? A well-ordered life? The hive can't be happy just by pursuing pleasure, he concluded. We need to be honorable, noble, and good.

This bee told his friends, who told their friends, and so on, until the entire hive was convicted by the message. They uniformly reformed their ways. People stopped cheating, and exploiting, and pleasure-seeking. And instead, they built their society around norms and laws designed to direct one another toward virtue.

And the hive collapsed. Productivity dwindled. Quality of life tanked. The economy fell apart.

... This was the story told by the 17th-century lawyer and economist, Bernard Mandeville, one of the first writers to describe an economy based on self-interest. It's not entirely clear what Mandeville meant by this fable. It's blatantly satirical, but it's also well argued. The majority of the work is a commentary that makes his argument clear: humans are driven by the pursuit of pleasure, not by virtue. We're all hypocrites, he thought. And so we should stop pretending like we're trying to do the honorable thing and simply face the reality of what makes society flourish.

Mandeville's Fable of the Bees is the third book we discussed at Hildegard this semester in our tutorial, "The History of Economic Thought." Before it, we discussed Xenophon's Oeconomicus (the Estate Manager) and Thomas Aquinas on usury (or lending with interest). Mandeville is at the forefront of modern economic thought. David Hume and Adam Smith respond to him, trying to make sense of what an economy consists of. Is it self-interest? Sentiment and desire? Is economics based on a principle of scarcity?

Midway through the term, I'm experiencing just how important this course on economics is. If you surveyed the economics course offerings at most universities, you'd think that economics was about money, or trade, or, at best, human behavior under conditions of scarcity.

All of these approaches to economics assume a specific "science" to the study. That is, they adopt a predetermined method, one that searches for certain laws, like supply and demand. And indeed, that's how modern economies work. They're rates of inflation and interest, their health, and their unemployment follow patterns that can be described as laws.

But there's another side to economics that only appears when you reach back and study its history. "Economics" is a modern term and belongs to a modern scientific field. Yet before there modern economics existed, there were still industry, agriculture, trade, currency, and rules that regulated all of these things. But what did not exist was a predetermined method for understanding these components.

That's because works by authors like Xenophon, Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas were written in cultures that still asked the question, What is society for?

Even Mandeville, Hume, and Smith still asked this question. But at some point, around the time of the Enlightenment, this question faded from view. If you read the brilliant works of Ricardo, Keynes, Veblen, and other modern economists, you'll find ground-breaking insight into how commerce works. But you won't find much about what a society is for. It may even sound like a naive question to many students of economics — which was once a liberal art but is now treated as a practical skill or maybe a social science.

It's my conviction that we need to treat economics as a liberal art, as a field of study and practice that helps us become freer as citizens of the cities of God and man. To demonstrate this, look no further than the New Testament gospels, where Jesus routinely flips economic assumptions on their heads. The first will be last. The least will be greatest. Lazarus and the rich man. The rich young ruler. The leaven. The talents. The fig tree.

Our tutorial on the History of Economic Thought is paired with our Foundations of Thought seminar, "What makes a society Just?" This sort of integration is one of the things that makes education at Hildegard College different. Our students study financial models, and test business models, and build prototypes, and participate in internships. But they always ask why. They always seek to understand the first principles that define our assumptions. They aren't content with a method alone. They want to know the truth claims upon which a method is based.

And nothing prompts consideration of the greater "why" more than exploring the history of an idea. Or, in this case, the history of a science like economics.