Maria Edgeworth put a question to David Ricardo in the summer of 1822. Parts of Ireland were hungry after bad harvests, and she wanted to know if the country leaned too hard on potatoes. Ricardo, the top economist of his day, thought it did. If the one crop poor families could afford gave out, he warned, they'd have nothing left. Edgeworth wasn't convinced. The farmers on her family's estate told her potatoes made the most money, and she figured better storage would carry them through a bad year.
The Great Famine arrived about twenty years on. By 1847, roughly 3,000 of the 5,000 people living at Edgeworthstown had nothing to eat. Edgeworth, close to 80 by then, carried baskets of food from house to house. The famine, Jeanna Smialek writes, “would finally change Maria Edgeworth's mind.” Diana Furchtgott-Roth builds her Journal review around that moment. The book is Smialek's The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth (Knopf, 304 pages, $32).
Edgeworth lived from 1768 to 1849, and in her day she was the star. Jane Austen, far less famous then, told her niece in an 1814 letter that Miss Edgeworth's novels were among the few she'd allow herself to like. Edgeworth's writing brought in about £11,000 over her career. The review puts that near $1.7 million in today's money. Austen earned about £630 in her lifetime. Charlotte Brontë earned about £1,500. Edgeworth made that money by folding Adam Smith's new economics into novels and stories for children. Her father was Richard Lovell Edgeworth, an inventor and landowner with four marriages and 22 surviving children. He picked Maria, his eldest daughter, to help him run the estate. That was her training. Today, Smialek writes, she's a footnote.
The exception
Her big belief was that education beats poverty. In Ennui (1809), the hero is the estate agent who wants the Irish poor educated. She also believed jobs beat handouts. The famine tested that one. When hungry men were too weak to work, and there was no seed to plant, she wrote that “exigencies require exceptions.” Some British officials kept quoting Malthus to explain why they withheld aid. She'd changed her mind once before, in an episode the review says Smialek leaves out. A letter arrived in 1815 from Rachel Mordecai, a Jewish schoolteacher in North Carolina. She objected to the Jewish villains in Edgeworth's stories. Edgeworth's next novel, Harrington (1817), was her answer. The two women wrote to each other for the rest of Mordecai's life.
Our read
This is Behavioral, and the lesson isn't really about potatoes. Edgeworth had data. Her own tenants told her potatoes paid best, and they did, right up until they didn't. She trusted the thing that had always worked. Furchtgott-Roth's wish is that more of us would do the same as Edgeworth when new facts turn up. We'd add one thing. Edgeworth changed her mind at nearly 80, after the harm was done. The cheap time to test a belief is before the bad year, and most of us never schedule it.
Every plan has a potato. It's the one holding or paycheck that has paid so well for so long that you stopped asking questions. For some readers it's the company stock in the 401(k). For others it's one rental, or a pension that carries the whole household. This week, pull up your statements and find the single biggest source of your retirement savings or income. If losing it for a year would wreck the plan, that's your potato, and the plan needs a second crop. Nobody shops for an umbrella in a downpour. Check the roof while it's dry, and bring that statement when we talk.