What happens when the man who built Homo Economicus refuses to read the book that tries to take him apart?

In 1851, Britain throws the biggest party the world has ever seen — the Crystal Palace, half a kilometre of iron and glass, stuffed with everything the richest nation on earth can make. Homo Economicus strolls through it like he owns the place. Fifteen years later, a young economist named William Stanley Jevons stands up in Cambridge and says Mill got it all wrong: the economy isn't a story about human nature, it's a machine — and it runs on coal that will one day run out.

Why would a man who grew up watching his own family go bankrupt end up throwing weights across a room to measure fatigue? What does a strapping shop in Spitalfields have to do with calculus? And why does Mill, who praised Jevons's book in Parliament, refuse to even open his next one?

Along the way: Queen Victoria marvels at a sugar-purifying machine, a chemist starts timing how tired his own arm gets, and the question of whether a worker is lazy — or just exhausted — starts to matter.

History of Economic Species tells the story of the evolution of its main character, Homo Economicus. This is the first half of chapter two.

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Music and audio

• "Good Times" by Podington Bear, licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0)
• "Firelight Child", "Tamarinda", "Tyrano Theme", "Thoughtless Machine", "Slimheart", "Delham Corner", "Etude 9 Stefan", "Cabarnet" and "The Poplar Grove" by Blue Dot Sessions, licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
• "Aphelion" by Scott Buckley, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
• "Work Wonders (ID 999) – Remastered" by Lobo Loco, licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Voice over by Oliver Morrell, via Fiverr

Sources quoted in this episode

• Bagehot, Walter. "The Postulates of English Political Economy." 1876.
• Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.
• Jevons, William Stanley. The Theory of Political Economy. 1871.
• Mayhew, Henry. "Labour and the Poor." The Morning Chronicle, 1850. Reprinted in Voices of Victorian London.
• Mill, John Stuart. Principles of Political Economy. 1848.
• Victoria, Queen. Journal entry, 1 May 1851. Royal Archives (via queenvictoriasjournals.org).