Also, he was deeply committed to the idea of acting for the sake of others. He strongly believed that people are individuals and their lives and choices can't be explained by math or logic alone. He was totally against their whole deal in general. We're just making observations about how many people do this and that, so the government can use those numbers for better governing.' On the other hand, other economists, like Harriet Martineau, were pretty psyched to make their ideas proscriptive – they really did want to go around and tell everybody what do to and how to do it.ĭickens, meanwhile, didn't really care about the internal fighting of the economists. It was like saying, 'Wait, we're not telling you how to live your life.

Some, like David Ricardo, just hung back and decided that economics was descriptive. Now there is definitely some dispute about how far the economists really wanted to take their theories. It sounds good when we say it like that, but how can anyone tell what the greatest good is? And what happens to the people who aren't part of that 'greatest number'? Utilitarian thinkers were threatening to slowly but surely replace older Judeo-Christian ideas of morality with more statistically based explanations of what people should do for themselves, for one another, and for society. Whoa, don't panic! Shmoop to the what-on-earth-is-that-big-capitalized-word rescue! Political Economy is just what they called economics back in the day, and Utilitarianism is the idea that we should set up society to do the greatest good for the most number of people. Victorian times) Charles Dickens was totally fed up with Utilitarianism and Political Economy.

In England, in the middle of the nineteenth century (a.k.a.

Hard Times by Charles Dickens