Can a species be invented? And if someone did it, why?

In 1836, a zoo opened near Manchester, Charles Dickens published his first book, and a man was born in London who wanted one thing: to be rich, and then richer. He didn't evolve like the rest of us. The philosopher John Stuart Mill invented him — and called him Homo Economicus.

What kind of job needs a man like that? Why build a hero out of greed? And what does Dickens's A Christmas Carol have to do with it?

Along the way we meet David Ricardo and his theory of industry and machines, the Corn Laws that divided Victorian Britain, and the Cambridge scientist William Whewell, who said the whole thing wasn't science at all. Can a greedy man be the key to a fairer world? Mill thought so.

History of Economic Species is a podcast on the history of economic thought. It tells the story of the evolution of its main character, Homo Economicus. This is the first chapter._

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Music and audio

• "Good Times" by Podington Bear, licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0)
• "Florentiner Marsch, Op. 214" by Julius Fučík (1907), performed by the United States Marine Band, a work in the public domain
• "Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9, no. 2" (1832) by Frédéric Chopin, performed by Aya Higuchi, a work in the public domain
• "Frankincense and Myrrh" by Scott Buckley, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
• "Grand Septet in Eb, Op. 62 – Allegro Vivace" by Conradin Kreutzer (1816), performed by the European Archive, a work in the public domain
• "Step Over It", "Delham Corner", "Gallant Fantasie" and "Toaudella" by Blue Dot Sessions, licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
• Excerpt from "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, narrated by Simon Stanhope (Bitesized Audio): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZk9vpJkeNA

Sources quoted in this episode

• Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. 1843.
• Whewell, William. "Review of Richard Jones, An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth: Rent." British Critic 10 (1831): 41–61.