[Honeybees] are quite a model community for they respect their Queen and kill their unemployed.
–Lord Robert Baden-Powell, 1908, Scouting for Boys, Campfire Yarn Number 15I. INTRODUCTION
In his 2017 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Robert Shiller emphasized the importance of storytelling in economics, and especially its impact on financial markets (Shiller Reference Shiller2017). He was, perhaps, a bit frightened of the power of narrative, referring to a need to study its “epidemiology” in order to better understand future “epidemics” that may “go viral.” He argued that it is vital to understand how the “core contagious element” of a narrative takes shape in the mind of a single individual or small group of people, identified as “cultural entrepreneurs” by Joel Mokyr (2016), before spreading and undergoing “random mutations.” Like many an epidemiologist before him, Shiller called for mathematical modelling—“serious quantitative analysis of changing popular narratives”—in order to tame the viral load. Shiller hesitates, but ultimately labels the narratives he studies as “exogenous” shocks to the economy that can, in principle, be studied like other exogenous shocks.
Historians of economics are also aware of the importance of narrative in economics, although we have paid less attention to the ways in which economic actors create and are influenced by stories about the economy than to the ways in which economists use narrative to establish expertise and influence the trajectory and reception of particular economic theories. Deirdre McCloskey, for example, has explored the role of rhetoric in establishing economic knowledge for more than thirty years (McCloskey Reference McCloskey1985, Reference McCloskey1990, Reference McCloskey and McCloskey1994, Reference McCloskey2016). Her own work derives sustenance from earlier investigations in the history of science. We are conscious of metaphor and other literary tools through the work of Philip Mirowski (1989) and many others. More recently, historians of economics have borrowed ideas from historians of science who have engaged with narrative to move beyond a concept of science as grounded in natural laws. Examples include such works as Science without Laws (Creager, Lunbeck, and Wise Reference Creager, Lunbeck and Wise2007) and Mary Morgan’s The World in the Model (Reference Morgan2012). A special issue of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (vol. 62, 2017) outlines the research agenda of this group. Unlike Shiller, these historians do not see narrative as exogenous shocks created by outsiders but rather as intrinsic to the ways in which scientists and economists understand the world they study, as well as the ways they try to influence one another and, ultimately, the final users of economic knowledge.
There is, of course, at least one other source of narrative in economics. These are the storytellers of the profession—the “knowledge brokers” who try to mediate between those who consider themselves economists and the population at large who are the ultimate users of economic knowledge. Knowledge brokers include popularizers, public intellectuals, think tanks, journalists, bloggers, columnists, textbook writers, popular commentators, and, in earlier times, encyclopédistes, salonnières, and pamphleteers. The label “knowledge broker” is commonly used in public health and other applied sciences to describe those tasked with popularization, but the term has an ancient lineage. Émilie du Châtelet, eighteenth-century philosopher and polymath, described female translators as the “négocians”—the brokers—of the Enlightenment in the preface to her unpublished translation of Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (Forget Reference Forget2010).
We often imagine popularizers as engaged in a relatively simple task of “translating” somewhat arcane scientific language into easier to absorb forms, such as infographics, newspaper stories, popular texts, or podcasts. To the extent that knowledge producers cooperate with the brokers, this becomes a sort of “knowledge-push” form of dissemination—an interesting metaphor all on its own. However, knowledge brokers often take an active role in documenting gaps in knowledge among those who require information, and in soliciting particular kinds of work from knowledge producers to better meet the needs of knowledge users. That is, popularization can also be seen as “user-pull” (Lavis Reference Lavis2006).
A more sophisticated understanding of the contexts in which knowledge brokers work can help us to better understand the evolving and historically contingent roles they play. Knowledge brokers build relationships and networks between and among the producers and users of knowledge, and employ an array of context-specific tools to do so. The creation of knowledge becomes the joint product of teams of people engaged in parallel work. Economists do whatever it is that professional economists do in a particular time and place, whether that involves creating elaborate theories without empirical evidence, imperialistic adventures into nearby professions such as psychology, gathering and interpreting data, conducting experiments, or creating stories based on complex statistical methods. Economic agents go about their daily lives creating goods and services, caring for one another, saving and consuming, all the while making decisions based on whatever narratives they believe about how the economy functions. Knowledge brokers observe both the economists and economic agents, selling their services to whoever will pay. Sometimes that involves popularizing economic insights in bestselling policy books, occasionally it means working for a think tank and spending days distilling complex economic ideas into tweetable infographics, and sometimes it involves working for or with consumer, labor, or activist organizations to engage economists in what they believe to be practical problems. Side by side, economists, knowledge brokers, and economic agents build economic knowledge. Any one person might change roles or occupy more than one role at any time.
In previous work I’ve told the stories of several early women in the history of our discipline who were particularly skilled knowledge brokers—Jane Marcet, Harriet Martineau, Émilie du Châtelet, Sophie de Grouchy, and Clémence de Royer, among many others (Marcet Reference Marcet2009; Forget Reference Forget1996, Reference Forget2001a, Reference Forget2001b, Reference Forget2010, Reference Forget2016). Sometimes, their involvement in translation or popularization or textbook writing was merely a way to earn money in a world that offered few employment opportunities for educated women with literary and language skills. Sometimes, it was a back door into a profession that had little space for women. For some, it was no more than the often expressed “desire to be useful” that very often appears in the prefaces to their work (Marcet Reference Marcet2009; De Grouchy and Brown Reference De Grouchy and Brown2008).
II. THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF ECONOMIC KNOWLEDGE
What I’d like to do on this beautiful afternoon in Chicago is to suggest that, as historians of economics, much of our work is motivated by a theory of knowledge creation that is much too simple. We focus far too much on those we identify as creators of economic knowledge, and far too little on the other characters in the story. Specifically, we need to make room in our histories for knowledge brokers of all kinds, because otherwise our histories leave out too many of the people who helped to create and transform economic knowledge. We also need to better understand how economic agents—ordinary people who are the actors in our theories—make use of economics, because then we can understand not just how individuals behave in a particular time and place but why they behave the way they do and whether their behavior might change as circumstances change. For all these reasons, we need to understand the role that storytelling plays in communication between and among these various groups of knowledge creators—the economists, the knowledge brokers, and the economic agents.
In the spirit of being useful, I’d like to sketch out the knowledge gap in our historical narratives that needs to be filled. I leave it to historians working in particular times and places to document the details.
People who identify as economists of one kind or another generally do so because we want to influence, or at least to understand, the economy. We would like our work to be useful. We don’t necessarily agree with one another; in fact, there are very few things that all economists would now say we know for sure. Not very long ago, most economists would have pointed to the Phillips curve—the idea that if actual unemployment falls below its natural rate, rising inflation would surely result. Recent experience in high-income countries has called that into question for many economists. Not very long ago, most economists would have sorrowfully admitted that, while minimum wage increases would be beneficial for some workers, there would be a significant social cost for the many low-skilled workers priced out of the market. Again, recent experience (and recent economic analysis) has made that conclusion less certain. Government budget deficits crowd out private investment? Everyone benefits from globalization? There is not enough recent evidence for either to convince all economists. Most of the old certainties that bound our profession together and identified economists as distinct from other social scientists have been called into question. This state of affairs creates an opportunity for a brokerage business—survey writers, authors of advanced textbooks, conference organizers, journal editors, etc.—whose practitioners as a class tend to overlap with those who intermediate between professionals and the agents they study. So, we don’t agree with one another on many issues, but most of us still agree that the world would be better if more attention were paid to economists.
Economists and, by extension, historians of economics tend to downplay the importance of both knowledge brokers and economic agents in the creation of economic knowledge. On those occasions when economists consider the users of economic knowledge, it is often to bemoan the general lack of economic literacy with which they must deal. Who is in need of economic literacy? Many economists would argue that economic agents would make better choices if they understood how the economy works—consumers, investors, and workers would better understand the forces at play. Government policy would be founded on a clearer understanding of the costs and benefits of alternatives and the scope of unintended consequences. Better government policy would lead to more rational decisions on the part of taxpayers. All in all, many of us would still like to believe that the world would be a better place if people would only listen more to economists. This has given rise to a vast literature of the Freakonomics sort that tries to make economic theory both more accessible and more “fun,” as Jean-Baptiste Fleury has recognized (Fleury Reference Fleury2012).
Economic agents, however, are not economically illiterate. They have sometimes very sophisticated stories about how the economy in which they live and work operates. Their stories are not the same as the stories that economists tell about the economy, often because the issues that economic agents want to understand are different from the issues that economists focus on. This lack of communication is the market failure that gave rise to knowledge brokers—the intermediaries who use whatever media is available to them to bridge the gap between economists and economic agents. Knowledge brokers have been operating in the realm of economics as long as people have been thinking about economic issues. Jane Marcet’s Conversations on the Nature of Political Economy sold far more copies, and I’d venture to say helped more Members of Parliament understand the economy, than did David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy (Forget Reference Forget2016; Marcet Reference Marcet2009). It was through her efforts that the ideas of continental economists, including especially Jean-Baptiste Say, came to influence British policy. Her contemporary counterpart is surely the blogger, the podcast producer, and the “public intellectual” employed by policy schools to tweet about new reports and drive people to the infographics on carefully curated websites.
On my map, in Figure 1, it is clear that knowledge brokers build networks or bridges between economists and economic agents in their various roles, but the map is static. How, exactly, do they operate? What do they do? I’m going to suggest that we will better understand the roles that knowledge brokers play if we stop imagining them as simply taking ideas created by economists and communicating them to economic agents. Economic agents can sometimes benefit from knowledge created by economists, but the work that economists do can also benefit from a clearer understanding of the problems economic agents believe they face and the stories they tell themselves to motivate their behavior. Knowledge brokers are not engaged in a mechanical task. They identify the gaps in knowledge on all sides and the ways these gaps might be addressed, and engage in building connections among themselves, economists, and economic agents. Information flows in all directions. Moreover, knowledge brokers are, by their very nature, entrepreneurs. While they may want to be useful, as many claim, being useful is very often equivalent to being paid. Knowledge brokers are not volunteers; they do not work for free. Whether they receive payment in cash or in kind, the work they do will be influenced by its potential profitability. How does that influence what they do and the way they do it? We need to better understand the role that knowledge brokers have played, and continue to play, in the history of our discipline.
Figure 1. The Infrastructure of Economic Knowledge
In the spirit of narrative economics, I’m going to advocate for this suggestion by telling you a story–actually three stories that evolved side-by-side over the past 2,500 years. It is an intellectual history of sorts, but not directly about economics except insofar as economics is about the study of human beings “as they move and live and think in the ordinary business of life.”Footnote 1 In this story, you will see that knowledge is never static; that even scientists with access to the best tools available tell stories about their findings that borrow values from the world around them; that “economic agents” (that is, ordinary people) have their own sources of wisdom that sometimes surpass professional knowledge, at least in some particulars; that common language doesn’t necessarily mean common understanding; and that knowledge brokers are an absolutely essential bridge between professional and lay audiences, but that these individuals are themselves subject to particular motivations that we need to better understand.
I’m going to tell you about honeybees.
III. THE BEEHIVE METAPHOR; OR, SEX, DEATH, AND TAXES THROUGH THE AGES
The beehiveFootnote 2 has always been a metaphor for human society, acting as a mirror that reflects our own social preoccupations back to us. My story is confined to European history, since that is what I know best. It involves three types of knowledge, each type produced and protected by knowledge keepers, roughly equivalent to professional knowledge producers, knowledge brokers, and economic agents. In this case, the professional knowledge producers are the philosophers, scientists, priests, and economists who published theories about honeybee society. The knowledge brokers are the youngest of our three categories: these are the individuals who began to appear during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and wrote practical beekeeping manuals aimed, most often, at gentlemen farmers. More recently, they have been displaced by agricultural extension officers. The third group, the economic agents of our story, are the European farmwives who, for millennia, kept bees to produce honey without the help of beekeeping manuals or philosophical discourse. Each type of knowledge reflects different ideas about gender, the economic agent, rational behavior, social reproduction, and growth.
Before I begin my story, let me share some basic information about honeybees that I think is now widely understood to be accurate, although I do recognize the irony of saying we know these things for sure. In particular, I should note that the way we talk about bees today is every bit as conditional on the society in which we live as Aristotle’s discourse was situated in his. Sex expression, for example, is biologically and socially much more complex for bees than for humans. However, we are limited by human language and human concepts. Every beehive contains 40,000 to 60,000 bees that fall into three genders: the queen, the workers, and the drones. Each hive has a single queen, and the queen has a single task in life: she goes on a mating flight, once, soon after birth, mates with many different drones during that flight, and returns to her hive to lay eggs for the rest of her life. The queen lays two types of eggs: fertilized and unfertilzed. Fertilized eggs create bees with an ovary and these can become either queens or workers. The worker bees who care for the eggs will decide which. If the queen is aging, they may decide to make a new queen to replace her. They do this by manipulating the diet of the larva. If the hive is very strong and needs to be divided, they may also create a new queen. If a new queen develops, the old queen will either fight with the newly emerged queen until one of them dies, or the old queen will leave the hive with a subset of workers to create a new colony, leaving the newly emerged queen as her successor.
If the newly laid egg develops into a worker, she will have several tasks over the course of her life. She will, in turn, be a nurse bee taking care of the newly emerged bees, she will tend the queen, she will clean and guard the hive, and, eventually, she will become a forager who leaves the hive to collect nectar, pollen, and water. Worker bees have ovaries, but these are suppressed by the pheromones of the queen. A strong queen will preside over a hive in which workers do not lay eggs. Laying workers connote a hive in disarray; the queen has lost control and must be replaced.
The queen can also lay unfertilized eggs, which develop into drones. Drones are larger than workers, and do little except stand by to fertilize passing queens on their mating flights. They are tended, fed, and tolerated by workers during seasons of plenty. When autumn comes, or when the hive faces shortages for other reasons, the drones are driven from the hive by the workers or killed. The hive will not support drones during times of scarcity, giving some support to Baden-Powell’s homily.
The Wisdom of Philosophers
Over the course of human history, philosophers have been as likely to read human society into beehives as to draw lessons from beehives for human society. See, for example, this Shakespearian example:
So work the honey-bees:
Creatures that, by a rule in Nature, teach
The art of order to a peopled kingdom
They have a king, and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the Summer’s velvet buds;
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading-up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding-in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone.
– Henry V, Act 2, Scene 1For millennia, philosophers (among whom I count economists) have always been perplexed about sex, gender, social reproduction—and the nature of society, both human and apian.
Let us begin with Aristotle because—why not?Footnote 3 Aristotle carefully observed the bees he wrote about, and his writing on the subject was more sophisticated than much that came later. He attributed one interesting characteristic to queen bees: their gender, in his mind, was fluid. Sometimes he referred to a king, sometimes a queen, and most often a monarch. In the context of scientific knowledge at the time, gender fluidity for the monarch makes some sense because biological sex had no meaning. That is, Aristotle had no understanding that bees reproduced through copulation. He could not know that queen bees had an ovary and laid eggs; that discovery was centuries in the future and required the assistance of a microscope for confirmation. Aristotle either hadn’t observed a mating flight or, if he had, didn’t recognize it for what it was. If bees do not reproduce sexually, then it makes little sense to assign sex, or even gender, to the inhabitants of a hive.
As odd as this may seem from our contemporary perspective, this was to some extent a literary reflection of the religious infrastructure of ancient Greece. At the Ephesian Temple of Artemis, the virgin priestesses were called Melissae (or bees). The eunuch priests were called Essenes (or drones). The chief priestess was known as the Hymen (Roller Reference Roller1999; Elderkin Reference Elderkin1939). Aristotle brought a sophisticated social vision to honeybee society, without drawing heavy-handed moral lessons for human society, although he did reproduce a number of biological myths.
Aristotle’s lack of knowledge of bee reproduction raises an interesting question: If bees do not reproduce sexually, how do they reproduce? Ancient stories are more poetic than contemporary tales. One widespread story is illustrated by the graphic on an old Lyle’s Golden Syrup can, where bees are pictured swarming from the abdomen of a dead lion. This is a variation on a story that appears in the Bible, Judges 14, verses 5 through 9. Samson, in search of a wife, goes to a nearby town where a potential bride lived. On the way, he and his party are attacked by a lion. Samson kills the lion and travels on. Several days later, Samson travels to visit his betrothed and checks on the dead lion. He sees a swarm of bees in the lion and gathers honey to take back to his mother. This furnishes the basis for a riddle he poses during his wedding feast (verse 12):
Out of the eater comes something to eat.
Out of the strong comes something sweet.
This story is, in fact, a version of an even older Hebrew tale, and furnishes the Lyle motto: “Out of the strong came forth sweetness.” Somehow, the dead lion gave birth to honeybees, no doubt generalized from the observations that rotten meat “gives birth to” maggots. This theory actually represents a step towards modernity in the sense that it is at least consistent with what people imagined they were observing. Earlier representation—for example, that of the Egyptians—were even more poetic and less observation based. Bees represented royalty and were frequently portrayed in Egyptian tomb art. Egyptians imagined that bees were born from tears of the sun god Ra when they fell on the desert sand (Ransome Reference Ransome2004).
The Roman Catholic Church incorporated the poetry of the ancients with a characteristic moral imperative. St. Ambrose (patron saint of beekeepers, beggars, and Milan) was born in 340 CE. He shared the ancient belief that bees reproduced asexually. In fact, he believed bees coalesced from dew on flowers and were carefully gathered by older bees and brought back to the hive, which was ruled by the king bee. It was, however, chastity rather than governance that attracted his attention. He drew a lesson for his female parishioners:
The bee feeds on dew, it knows no marriage couch, it makes honey. … How I wish you, my daughter, to be an imitator of these bees, whose food is flowers, whose offspring is collected and brought together by the mouth. (Sacra Virginitas) Footnote 4
A century later, St. Augustine followed the teaching of Ambrose in De Civitate Dei, emphasizing chastity and noting the religious symbolism of the hive:
Among bees there is neither male nor female. … The wax of the candle produced by the virgin bee from the flowers of the earth is as a symbol of the Redeemer born of a Virgin Mother.Footnote 5
Celibacy was an important issue for these priests; the apparent celibacy of bee society seemed to validate celibacy within the little society they created for themselves and to carry larger lessons for all of humanity. In fact, clerical celibacy was a contested topic precisely during this period. In 304 CE, the Council of Elvira advocated for clerical chastity, but in 325 CE, Constantine convened the Council of Nicea, which rejected a ban on priests marrying (Frazee Reference Frazee1988). The controversy persisted for many centuries.
Ten centuries closer to our own time, intellectual life in Europe was less centered on the Roman Catholic Church and its internal dilemmas no longer dominated policy debate. Governance of political states was the emerging issue, and the nature of the monarch was an essential concern. Shakespeare saw the beehive as a highly ordered society in which each derived meaning from performing his or her preordained task. His contemporary, Thomas Hill, characterized the king bee as “a fair and stately Bee, having a majestic gate and aspect…. [who] commands and orders all. His government is absolute” (Hill Reference Hill1568).
However, gender was already beginning to upend philosophical certainties about bee life. Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, ruled England from 1558 to 1603. If the monarch of such an important country as England could be female, could we be certain that the bee king was male? Charles Butler, in 1609, wrote The feminine monarchie, in which he struggled with the gender of the monarch. He argues that the king bee still rules but notes, “The speere … is but little, and not halfe so long as the other bees: which, like a king’s sword is borne rather for shew….” Therefore, he asks the forbearance of his readers “to straine the ordinarie signification of the word Rex … to translate it Queene sith the males heere bear no sway at all, this being an Amazonian or feminine kingdome” (1609).
Butler also questioned the asexuality of bees, which was emphasized by the ancients. He knew that bees reproduced sexually, and that drones were male and workers female. However, he was still unaware of the procreative role of the queen, who remained virginal in his story. He thought that eggs were laid by workers and, although they were not asexual, Butler argued that bees still remained chaste. In the spirit of Baden-Powell, he noted:
Their chastitie is to be admired…. They only suffer their drones among them for a season, by whose masculine virtue they strangelie conceive and breed for the preservation of their sweet kind.
(Butler Reference Butler1609)Drones were killed, not because they were unemployed but because they soon became superfluous.
Jan Swammerdam observed queens by using a microscope between 1669 and 1673. He soon learned that queens “had an ovary,” mated with drones, and laid eggs. This scientific breakthrough, however, did not mean that human beings stopped projecting human society onto the hive. According to Swammerdam, workers “had no ovary” and “like women who have lived virgins till they age past childbearing, serve only the purpose of labour” (Swammerdam Reference Swammerdam1758).
All this brings us to the best-known colony of honeybees in the history of economic thought; Bernard Mandeville first published a 433-line poem entitled The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest in 1705. This was to serve as the basis for The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, which grew over a period of twenty-four years, reaching its full form in the sixth edition of 1729. Despite the discoveries of his compatriot Swammerdam, Mandeville maintained the conceit that the monarch was male—a king—who was constrained by legislation. That is, his bees lived in a constitutional monarchy:
No Bees had better Government,
More Fickleness, or less Content.
They were not Slaves to Tyranny,
Nor ruled by wild Democracy;
But Kings, that could not wrong, because
Their Power was circumscrib’d by Laws.
(Mandeville Reference Mandeville and Kaye2014, stanza 1)But by the end of the century, constitutional monarchy in European society was under threat as the French Revolution reverberated across Europe; all was disorder within the hive (Bourque Reference Bourque2006).
In the wake of political upheaval, it was soon discovered that bees were really republicans all along. In fact, throughout the eighteenth century, French republicans had increasingly adopted the beehive as their symbol. Science and natural law were seen as the foundation of all rights, including those that animated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the founding document of the revolution. But enlightened minds were troubled by the role of the queen. At the École Normale, an entity created by the revolution, intellectuals held a debate to clarify the matter. A student named Laperruque raised the issue:
Laperruque: Last time you said that the lion was not the king of the animals because in nature there is no king. We applauded the idea, taken from nature, certainly, but nevertheless, citizen, as I look around me … I see in nature something worse than a king; that is to say, a queen. And what is even more extraordinary, a queen in a republic! … I should therefore wish that natural history should take another step toward republican principles or that it should modify the characters which, according to you, belong to royalty.
(Guedj Reference Guedj1988, p. 35)Professor Daubenton, head of the École Normale, had an answer that was preserved in the record of the debate:
Daubenton: The worker bees are the most numerous and the most powerful in the hive: they do everything apart from fertilize the queen and her eggs. Earlier, when it was believed that this female was male, it was called the king, which proves that its actions were understood no better than its sex. Since the discovery that the king pretender was female, she has been called the queen. I use this as an example of how an initial error can have its consequences. It is obvious that in nature there can be no king nor queen.
(Guedj Reference Guedj1988, p. 35; see also Ramírez Reference Ramirez2000, pp. 20–21)From absolute to constitutional monarchy, through republicanism, beehives changed governments as often as the human societies that studied them.
Lest you believe that our own scientistic century has escaped from such anthropomorphism, beehives continued through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to reflect political sensitivities. Beehives have many characteristics. Priests emphasized chastity; and Egyptians, romance. Ancient Greeks and French Republicans saw republican utopias, while traditional monarchies emphasized peaceful order. By the twentieth century, repression in state regimes was on the radar. The clearest and most recent example I’ve found is not yet twenty years old. John Whitfield, in a 2002 article published in Nature called “The Police State,” wrote: “Murder, torture and imprisonment—these are the standard tools of repressive regimes. But if you imagine that human societies have a monopoly on such tactics, think again. Social insects perfected the police state long before people got in on the act” (Whitfield Reference Whitfield2002, p. 782).
Much of this audience, however, may be more familiar with the twentieth-century German comic and cartoon show Maya the Bee.
Maya was the main character in a children’s book first published in German in 1912 by Waldemar Bonsels and subsequently translated into many languages and made the subject of a Japanese anime, several films, a puppet show, a video game, an operetta, and a cartoon series in several languages. In the original book, Maya is born into a hive that is beginning to swarm as a new queen emerges and divides the inhabitants. Maya is an independent bee and decides that she wants to leave the hive to explore the outside world, which is an unforgivable crime in her collectivist society. During her adventures, she is taken hostage by hornets, the sworn enemy of bees, and she learns that they plan to attack her home hive. She faces the choice of returning home and warning her hive but also bearing punishment for leaving in the first place, or keeping silent and allowing her home to be destroyed. She is a loyal bee and returns to warn the hive, which survives the attack and ultimately rewards Maya for her loyalty by forgiving her for the crime of independence.
There are militaristic elements to the original book that are significantly downplayed in adaptations after WW II. A new character, a lazy drone by the name of Willy, is introduced. Maya’s independence and curiosity are portrayed as strengths rather than crimes to be punished, and militarism itself is parodied in the cartoon by the incessant and pointless marching of incompetent ant armies.
I could continue into the future. Beehives continue to provide fodder for science fiction and fantasy stories, some from a militaristic dystopian and others from a feminist utopian aspect. Others, of course, explore feminist dystopias. See, for example, the fascinating discussion by Lauren Wilcox in the Feminist Review, entitled “drones, swarms and becoming-insect: feminist utopias and posthuman politics.” But, instead, I’ll travel back in time to the Middle Ages and talk about a second stream of consciousness about bees: What did the economic agents who raised bees to produce honey and mead know about bees? As we shall see, honeybee society was understood and represented in a very different way by these economic agents from that by the philosophers, and these distinctions help us to understand how differently agricultural society was experienced on the ground than it was understood by those with greater education. In particular, the communal nature of agricultural life and the roles of women in household production were regularized in ritual and had important economic consequences that were not acknowledged in philosophical discourse.
The “Lived Experience” of European Farmwives
In some social sciences, it has become almost reflexive to suggest that the people who know a subject best are those with lived experience who can correct the biases, draw attention to the blindspots, and challenge the preconceptions of “experts.” As historians, our subjects with “lived experience” are the economic agents who went about their everyday lives in particular economic regimes. The records of what ordinary people knew or believed about how the economy functioned are often sparse and need to be pieced together from a variety of sources, but there are some interesting artifacts in the case of beekeeping that suggest that the economic farmwives who, for centuries, raised bees as a form of household production had a somewhat different understanding of bee society from the learned philosophers.
One artifact is the survival of “swarm charms.” Beekeeping, remember, is a form of agriculture and, in the era before industrialized farming, output was dependent on factors well beyond the control of individual farmers. In societies that respected unseen forces that seemed to have so much control over their lives, it is not surprising that farmers appealed to heaven or other supernatural forces. Swarm charms are one such instance.
When a hive divides after the emergence of a new queen, about 60% of the inhabitants of the hive follow the old queen into exile to make a new home. Thirty thousand bees in a swarm is a noticeable event for a beekeeper. It represents a potential loss of capital, so a beekeeper will do whatever she can to prevent a swarm in the first place, or to capture the swarm and rehive it on her own property. Capturing a swarm was the principal way to expand production. Therefore, farmwives who noticed an imminent swarm would sometimes invoke the supernatural to capture the swarm. Austin E. Fife (Reference Fife1939) gathered 900 such swarm charms. From 800 or 900 CE comes this charm from Switzerland:
I bid thee, mother of bees
By God, King of heaven
Not to rise up on high.
I have prepared thee a good hive.
(cited in Crane Reference Crane1999, p. 591)This reference to the “mother of bees” seems quite at odds with philosophical speculation during the period, which was quite fixated on the king bee, and it is repeated in an Austrian charm from the same era that refers to a “humble little bee; little womb-mother.” Anglo-Saxon, pre-Christian charms used the word “sizewif,” which has been variously translated as “Victory women” (Ransome 1937; Holton Reference Holton1993), “my ladies” (Fife Reference Fife1939), and “Victor dames” (Fraser 1938). The word “beomoder” (bee mother) was used in 900 CE, and Welsh laws in 1200 referred to “modrydaf” (mother of the bees) (Crane and Walker, Reference Crane and Walker1984–85 and Reference Crane and Walker1985–86).
It would be a mistake to imagine that European farmwives of this period were preternatural scientists who knew better than the philosophers that the monarch of a hive is female. Instead, what we can learn from these swarm charms is that for the farmwives, the individual bees in a hive, whether they were monarchs, drones, or workers, mason bees, or philosophers, were of no interest whatever. The hive was the capital investment. The hive, the entire bee colony, was clearly female because it gave birth to bees and honey. There was no need for microscopic verification.
For ordinary Europeans, unlike kings and queens, individualism had no real meaning until much later; Jean-Jacques Rousseau is usually identified as a marker for the birth of individualism among ordinary people (Viroli Reference Viroli1988). Before the eighteenth century, common people adopted particular roles in a society, and virtually everything that happened in their lives was primarily a reflection of the role they adopted. In a collectivist human society, individual bees in a hive would hardly be a matter of speculation or concern. Swarms matter; hives matter. “Maya the bee,” or, for that matter, the “king who might as well be queen” in Butler’s analysis, would be inconceivable. It follows that, from the point of view of European farmwives, reproduction has nothing at all to do with the queen’s ovary or sexual proclivities; it is the reproduction of the hive that is of interest.
The collectivist nature of society from the perspective of these farmwives is also apparent from the implicit contracts that governed traditional beekeeping. Bees forage widely and benefit from the gardens planted by neighbors, just as those gardens benefit from the activity of the bees that pollinate crops. For a beekeeper, this often devolved into unwritten rules such as “three free swarms; the fourth belongs to your neighbor.” That is, healthy hives will swarm and create new hives. A beekeeper can increase her initial investment by 300% by capturing the first three hives. The fourth swarm should be a gift to her neighbor. This represents compensation for the benefit her bees gained from the neighboring garden, but it also cements social bonds and recognizes that the survival of a community dependent on the highly uncertain output of agriculture requires sharing rather than individual optimization.
The world view of European farmwives—the economic agents in my story—departs significantly from the evolving scientific world view of the experts. Philosophers focused on the roles played by the monarch and puzzled over her gender. Meanwhile, European farmwives cared no more about who rules the beehive than they cared about the interactions of palace courtiers. They used the tools at their disposal, including resort to the supernatural, to regularize the reproduction of hives. While philosophers wondered about the governance of hives, farmwives focused on the social relationships forged in human society by gifts of capital in the form of beehives.
The Role of the Knowledge Broker
Knowledge brokers emerged relatively recently in the history of beekeeping. After the colonial adventures that introduced cheap cane sugar into Europe, honey became less important to subsistence farmers. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, beekeeping increasingly shifted from the village farmwife to gentlemen (and, to a lesser extent, gentlewomen) farmers keeping bees out of scientific curiosity. For generations, farmwives had built and shared a body of lore about beekeeping. As the nature of beekeepers changed, there arose a market opportunity for practical guides to beekeeping. By the twentieth century, and especially in North America, these practical manuals were supplemented by advice on beekeeping from agricultural extension offices, as beekeeping became part of industrializing agriculture.
These knowledge brokers investigated the “wives’ tales” that governed traditional beekeeping with the intention of distilling fact from error and providing information on best practices that would optimize output and the health of an apiary. They also observed apiaries and sought to understand the practice of beekeeping, both to bring information back to the experts and to understand why beekeepers sometimes chose to ignore the best advice they had to give. While styles and standards changed over time, the utilitarian goal of providing scientific information to practical beekeepers continued alongside a second goal: to understand what beekeepers did and why they did it. Those who wrote beekeeping manuals and the university extension offices that supplemented their work attempted to build relationships that allowed information to flow between the entomologists (who had come to replace the philosophers in university agriculture departments) and beekeepers.
It is easy to imagine that beekeepers might gain something worthwhile from exposure to the latest scientific information about bees, but what do experts have to gain from the experiences of beekeepers? To the extent that beekeeping has become part of industrial agriculture, the carefully documented observations of beekeepers about local climate, odd events, and even the natural history of diseases within a hive can provide data for scientific extrapolation. Beekeeping, though, continues to be an activity carried on by hobbyists who may be less careful about following directions on pesticide packages and documenting their experiences. Varroa mites are a common plague, and treating hives for mites is an important activity for beekeepers. Apiarists with a thousand hives or more are quite careful when they do so. Hobbyists with a hive or two, however, tend to grow attached to their bees and hesitate to use harsh pesticides to treat for mites because some bees will die while the hive is more likely to survive. In the same way that some parents choose not to vaccinate their children despite scientific evidence of efficacy, some beekeepers choose not to treat their hives, hoping their bees will survive. Some resort to the Internet to share home remedies; others share horror stories about “big agriculture” in the same tones that “big pharma” is reviled.
If entomologists want to have an impact on honeybee populations, then they should know something about how compliant beekeepers are to their directives, how exactly they understand the science behind hive management, and what, exactly, they are doing with their hives. Beekeepers can gain from the scientific knowledge of entomologists, but entomologists trying to raise the productivity of apiarists, or to improve the health of honeybee populations, need to understand not only how large-scale professional beekeepers think and behave but also how the much less homogenous group of hobbyists behaves.
Just as entomologists need to understand the world view of beekeepers, economists need to understand the world view of economic agents. Oddly enough, one example comes from the recent history of economics and actually involves honeybees. If we do not understand the world view of economic agents, it is very likely that we will misunderstand their behavior and get the economic analysis incorrect.
In 1973, Stephen Cheung published “The Fable of the Bees: An Economic Investigation” in the Journal of Law and Economics. This was arguably the most important economic analysis of bee society since Mandeville, and it was an early example of Implicit contract theory. Cheung was responding to a problem posed by James Meade. Suppose, Meade said, that apple orchards and beekeepers produce alongside one another. Together, both industries exhibit constant returns to scale: double the inputs and the outputs for both will double. However, without coordination, both beekeepers and farmers have an incentive to produce too little. If the farmer increases his investment in apples by 10%, he produces more apples but also some additional food for the bees for which he cannot charge the beekeeper. If the beekeeper increases his investment by 10%, he will not increase his honey output by 10% unless the farmer also invests more in apple production. The beekeeper, then, will invest too little from a social perspective, but so too will the apple producer because he cannot monetize the benefit he provides for the beekeeper. This, Meade argued, is an externality that would benefit from a subsidy.
Cheung was unconvinced. Suppose, Cheung said, a number of apple orchards exist close to one another. Apple orchards benefit from pollination by honeybees, and honeybees feed on the apple blossoms. In the abstract, it is unknowable whether bees benefit more from orchards or orchards from bees, and there seems to be an externality that would benefit from intervention. However, Cheung argues that, in reality, we do know that apple blossoms produce relatively little nectar. Orchards benefit more from bees than bees do from orchards, and both the farmers and the beekeepers share this information. Since both would gain from greater investment in bees, farmers will soon offer to pay a rent to beekeepers to locate hives in the orchard. This easily becomes regularized, and farmers and beekeepers enter into contracts with one another, with no need for government intervention. However, Cheung suggests, suppose there are many orchards near one another. Under such circumstances, it becomes impossible for the orchard grower to keep his rented bees from pollinating his neighbor’s apples. Each individual orchard owner has an incentive to free-ride on the rents paid by his neighbors. Cheung’s insight was to recognize that implicit contracts exist alongside explicit contracts: the “custom of the orchard” imposes social pressure on all orchard growers in a region to rent the appropriate number of hives so that, in the aggregate, profits are maximized. If any neighbors refuse to abide by the “custom of the orchard,” they will be penalized by their neighbors in a variety of ways that make life inconvenient. Cheung’s insight was that implicit contracts exist in beekeeping and that the individuals involved do not require government intervention in order to optimize production.
This example makes clear the potential value of knowledge brokers. There are two very distinct streams of knowledge in these examples: the economic theories of Cheung and Meade on the one hand, and the way that beekeepers behave in a particular time and place, circumscribed by unwritten rules that are nonetheless well understood by all producers, on the other hand. Cheung benefitted from knowledge about how beekeepers actually behave in a particular time and place, and no doubt he was aware of the importance of this knowledge because he grew up around beekeepers. Without that personal knowledge, his insight may not have led to theoretical insight. There is a role for knowledge brokers who can make such knowledge more generally available, and, in this case, these knowledge brokers take the form of agricultural extension agents who build networks between the two solitudes. It is less clear whether either apple growers or beekeepers benefitted from the economics of Meade or Cheung, but perhaps they do benefit from the work of entomologists. If so, they too will welcome the knowledge broker.
IV. BACK TO THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF ECONOMIC KNOWLEDGE
I began this saga by arguing that historians of economics would benefit from a more sophisticated understanding of the ways in which knowledge about the economy is created and shared. I argued that economists do not, or at least should not, work in isolation, creating knowledge that must somehow be disseminated to an undifferentiated public. Rather, economists, who bring a variety of different perspectives and orientations to their work, are embedded in a world of knowledge creation. They share that world with other intellectuals, such as philosophers and psychologists, with bankers and financiers, with policy-makers of different orientations and affiliations, with a variety of civil society organizations each bent on pursing its own set of goals, with businesses large and small, and, most importantly, with ordinary people in all their glorious heterogeneity as they go about their lives, creating, consuming, working for pay or not, saving, and spending. Knowledge brokers of various kinds are part of that world, building networks between subsets of individuals and organizations and helping them create sets of competing narratives that make sense of the world around them.
As historians of economics, we have focused almost exclusively on the narratives created by people who identify as economists. We occasionally venture into nearby disciplines or listen with greater or lesser respect to the economic ideas of bankers and business people. We sometimes listen to politicians and policy-makers, but most often we share the view of economists and think the world would work better if people just listened more to economists. We pay remarkably little attention to the ways in which ordinary people understand how the economy functions, and only slightly more to the proliferating groups of people and organizations I’ve called knowledge brokers.
Economic theories are useful guides to the economy only if economists understand how economic agents behave in particular contexts. If economic policy is based on these theories, it can be adequate only to the extent that the underlying assumptions accurately reflect the most important components of human behavior. If the behavior of economic agents is based on world views that differ in concrete and predictable ways from the assumptions of economic theory, then our policies will have unintended consequences and our predictions will be worth very little. As historians, we need to understand not only the stories that economists have created but the ways in which these stories either reflect or differ from the narratives of their contemporaries. We also need to make space in the history of economics to understand the complex and evolving tasks of knowledge brokers, whether we are talking about the elegant salonnières of the eighteenth century, or the people creating infographics at Deloitte. All of these streams of knowledge complement one another.
Robert Shiller’s presidential address conceptualized narratives as viruses—economic threats to be contained. That reaction rests on the assumption that the economist has cornered the market on useful information about the economy. I think that assumption is questionable. However, whether or not we accept Shiller’s view of the role that narrative plays in economic theory, we as historians of economic thought must develop a broader understanding of how and by whom economic knowledge is constructed. Storytelling is central to what we do as historians of economics. Let’s capture all the stories.
