Teaching Markets and Morality

At the start of a new school year, tensions run high. An election looms. Markets waver. The war in Gaza grinds on. Ukraine invades Russia. And all of it comes back to campuses, where students face each other across entrenched differences with a great deal at stake.

Students care about all these issues. And at the same time, they are looking down the line, farther ahead. They come to college wondering what it is for—how it sets them up for the life they hope to achieve. What is the purpose of this education, and where does that purpose meet their ideas of a life well lived? These questions stretch across a landscape of larger macro conditions and the desire to land a good job.

The need to prepare our students to thoughtfully approach the touch points between big moral questions and the various markets in play—whether political, institutional or financial—feels more pressing than ever. One way to do so is to ask larger questions about the stories that frame our values, purposes and moral positions. Literature offers a rich way to open such questions and reflections, even (or especially) in settings where stories are seldom assigned.

In his book on narrative economics, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Schiller proposed that stories drive economic events. To understand financial panic, Schiller argues, we must pay attention to the spread of narratives much in the same way as we would need to account for the spread of a virus between people to understand public health.

The power of stories can be found in anything from tales spun across a dinner table to narratives crafted by politicians and great works of literature. Each campaign at the current moment, for example, seeks a story that will stick—a story about America, about the last presidency, about the present candidates and the future of this country. Seeing story everywhere, Schiller recently quipped, “I’m starting now, with my more recent work, to think that we have to look at the humanities as well.”

Literature and Business

In a popular course called Markets and Morality at Washington University in St. Louis, we do precisely that. Paying attention to the power of story, we move students across social science research, literature and modern market dilemmas. This combination allows us to ask students a host of hard questions about ethics, success, purpose, meaning and happiness as they are lived out in a world of markets. Part of the university’s Beyond Boundaries program, the course caps at 75 students and regularly has a wait list.

Beyond Boundaries, by design, draws together professors from two or more disciplines to address big issues from radically different perspectives. The results can be astounding. In our class, for example, we begin by asking students what they think counts as a successful life. Many have assumed a certain story of success—usually based around a career that rises into power, wealth and prestige. Still others tend to see such trajectories as mere projects of vanity. But across different worldviews, few have asked how their narrative of success relates to happiness, what costs it might entail, where it comes from or whether other possibilities exist.

To test students’ alignment with different stories of success, we begin by comparing Benjamin Franklin’s vision of the good life in his Autobiography with Henry David Thoreau’s view of simplicity in Walden. Then we use both to consider the protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, a story where the central character rises to massive wealth without seeming to find happiness. What has gone wrong? At one point in the story, dining on wine, tiny chocolates and a plate of exotic berries in a fancy seaside hotel, he thinks, “This must be success.” The “must be” is telling. Is this what he always wanted? Has he made it?

Like many of the stories we explore, Hamid’s novel involves both financial rise and financial loss. But the protagonist’s happiness seems unrelated to either. The Rise of Silas Lapham, written in 1885 and considered by some people to be the first real novel about a modern businessman, leaves open-ended what actually constitutes Silas’s rise. Is it his coming to wealth before the book opens? Or is it the new courage of his convictions that arises in the face of bankruptcy?

Each of these stories allows us to bring into the classroom relevant social scientific research. For these books, we look into the links between income and happiness. Since an influential paper by Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton in 2010, scholars have assumed a kind of a flattening impact of income on happiness above salaries of $75,000. More recent extensions have added nuance, showing that experienced well-being can continue to rise even while greater wealth has no ability to mute events of heartbreak or bereavement. How might careful attention to these realities—explored in both science and literature—shape the choices of an 18-year-old freshman in college?

Exploring Unexamined Assumptions

In each case, questions of purpose and relationship become central to the larger tale. Our course does not drive an angle on what counts as success. Instead, we try to open possibilities and opportunities in order to explore unexamined assumptions. We want our students to consider deeply the narratives they have always taken as fact, and we do so by giving them a multitude of new stories to consider alongside rich resources from social science research.

Consider A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles’s best-selling novel. In this novel, a Russian aristocrat loses everything during the revolution and ends up confined to a hotel in Moscow. For all its charm, the book ultimately turns on deep and sometimes dark questions of purpose: Can the count find meaning under endless house arrest? And how? What he finds, ultimately, is lower-class labor: He becomes a waiter. And through that work he makes close friends. He builds community. He even, it seems, begins to thrive.

This movement across time is another pillar of the course’s value. In Towles’s book, the count’s adventure inside the hotel also opens up a keyhole to the human consequences of the Soviet Union’s economic project of the 1920s. James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain provides a route to explore the 1930s’ racial capitalism of Harlem from the perspective of a 14-year-old boy, all the while raising larger questions about the role of religion and self-determination within the market. In Ayad Akhtar’s play Junk, we move forward to the 1980s and experience a leveraged buyout of a family-owned steel company.

In each case, the stories we assign open difficult ethical dilemmas. In reading Hamid’s novel, for example, we ask a seemingly simple question: Is it wrong for the poor to steal from the rich? Is it ever wrong? Always? Sometimes?

As we tease out answers, qualifications arise: It depends on how much is stolen, or the manner of theft, or the object stolen, or whether it was really needed (a loaf of bread versus a television). We then ask students to define who counts as poor, who counts as rich. The top 10 percent? The top 1 percent? We show what counts as the top 10 percent, 5 percent and 1 percent in Missouri, and we share the median family income of the students at our university. Then we ask: Is it wrong for a poor person to steal from a student in the top 5 percent?

The resulting disagreements, when experienced in a classroom of empathy across difference, are what make the class thrive. Each disagreement is an opportunity to ask bigger questions about underlying moral frameworks and overriding narratives of success, purpose and meaning. Such disagreements become especially productive because students come equally from the business school and Arts & Sciences. Stereotypes should be avoided, but it is safe to say that undergraduates drawn to the business school tend to differ from undergraduates who major in English. When you include racial, socioeconomic and geographical diversity, perspectives rapidly multiply. Hamid’s novel reads quite differently for a student from Cairo than for a student from the suburbs of New York.

Each student brings their own narrative identity to the course. And that becomes its own special session. Using research from our colleague Dan McAdams, we ask students to reflect on the stories that shape their lives and the shape of the story they present to others. One of the final small writing assignments is to compose a preliminary statement of purpose for life in light of the texts we have read. Ultimately, we want students to begin their college careers thinking about higher questions of purpose and meaning—what counts as a successful life.

In that way, we join other booming courses on the good life and life design across the country—at the University of Notre Dame, Stanford University, Yale University and many others. Students seem hungry for courses organized around such questions. We satisfy that hunger by setting ultimate questions in the context of morality and markets through a unique combination of business and literature. The more we teach Markets and Morality, the more our wait lists grow.

Based on our own experience, we would strongly encourage cross-collaboration first-year seminars focused on big questions. Thinking imaginatively across disciplines and subject areas, professors from very different starting points can together meet contemporary students where they are, exploring the complications of our moment and opening the riches of college to the deepest issues these first-years face—from their first semester forward.