Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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It made Dickens’s depictions of businessmen as cretins or predators, workers as zombies, and successful manufacture as rigid repetition look ridiculous. The undisputed fact that American productive power was growing at an unimaginably rapid rate meant that businesses must be doing more, at least in the aggregate, than exploiting Peter to line Paul’s pockets or merely repeating the same operations from one year to the next. On his visits to factories, Marshall was especially struck by managers’ constant search for small improvements and workers’ equally constant search for better opportunities and useful skills. Both seemed obsessed with making the most of the resources at their command.
Naturally, Marshall recognized that companies also exist to generate profits for owners, managerial salaries for executives, and wages for workers. Adam Smith had pointed out that to maximize their own income in the face of competition, firms had to benefit consumers by producing as much and as cheaply as possible. But Marshall introduced the element of time into his analysis. Over time, firms could remain profitable and continue to exist only if they became more and more productive. Survival in the face of competition not only implied incessant adaptation. Competition for the most productive workers meant that, over time, firms had to share gains from productivity improvements.
This is precisely what Mill and the other founders of political economy had denied. They had maintained that advances in productivity were of little or no benefit to the working classes. In their imaginary firms, productivity might grow by leaps and bounds, but wages never rose for long above some physiological maximum. Working conditions, if anything, worsened over time. Marshall saw not only that this was not so in fact, but also that it could not be so. Competition for labor forced owners to share the benefits of efficiency and quality improvements with workers, first as wage earners, then as consumers. The evidence confirmed that Marshall was right. The share of wages in the gross domestic product—the nation’s annual income from wages, profits, interest, and proprietors’ income—was rising, not falling, and so were the levels of wages and working-class consumption—as they had been in most years since 1848, when The Communist Manifesto and Mill’s Principles of Political Economy appeared.
Chapter III Miss Potter’s Profession: Webb and the Housekeeping State
She yearned for something by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions . . . what lamp was there but knowledge?
—George Eliot, Middlemarch1
Every year in March, the “upper ten thousand” descended on London like a vast flock of extravagantly plumed and exotic migratory birds.2 During the three or four months of the London “season,” Britain’s elite devoted itself to an elaborate mating ritual. Mornings were spent riding along Rotten Row or the Ladies’ Mile in Hyde Park. Afternoons were for repairing to Parliament or to clubs for the males of the species, shopping and paying social calls for the wives and daughters. In the evenings everyone met at operas, dinner parties, and balls that provided opportunities for magnificent displays. Every few days, an obligatory race, regatta, cricket match, or gallery opening introduced a slight variation to the schedule.
As with so much else in Victorian high society, this frenetic and seemingly frivolous pursuit of pleasure was serious business: during the season, which began when Parliament resumed its session, London became the epicenter of the global marriage market. Wealthy parents thought of giving a daughter two or three London seasons in the same way as sending a son to Oxford or Cambridge. The expense and effort of participating in this extraordinarily intricate mating dance were certainly comparable. If the family had no permanent “town” house, an imposing mansion had to be found at a fashionable address. A vast quantity of expensive items had to be purchased and conveyed, what with “the stable of horses and carriages . . . , the elaborate stock of garments . . . , [and] all the commissariat and paraphernalia for dinners, dances, picnics and weekend parties” considered de rigueur. Needless to say, socializing on so ambitious a scale demanded an executive to oversee “extensive [plans], a large number of employees and innumerable decisions”—in other words, the lady of the household.3
These were the reflections that occupied Beatrice Ellen Potter, Bo or Bea to her family, the eighth of nine daughters of a rich railway tycoon from Gloucester named Richard Potter. The carriage she was sharing with her father on a raw February afternoon in 1883 rolled to a stop in front of an imposing terrace of tall, cream-colored Italianate villas. The slender young woman with an air of command surveyed number 47 Princes Gate coolly. It was meant to serve as the social headquarters of the sprawling Potter clan, which included her six married sisters and their large families, for the season. The five-story mansion had a sumptuous façade with Ionic columns, Corinthian pilasters, tall windows, and swags of fruit and flowers, and it faced Hyde Park. At the back, visible through French doors, was an expanse of terraced lawn furnished with classical statues and enormous pots with masses of scarlet pelargoniums tumbling over their sides. The houses on either side of theirs were similarly grand. Her father had chosen Princes Gate precisely so they would be flanked by neighbors as wealthy and powerful as he. Junius Morgan, the American banker, leased number 13. Joseph Chamberlain, a Manchester industrialist turned Liberal politician and the father of Neville Chamberlain, had taken number 40 for the season. It was a perfect setting for Potter’s brilliant daughter.
At twenty-five, Beatrice was the veteran of more than half a dozen London seasons but had never been in love. Until now, her duties had consisted of enjoying herself at some fifty balls, sixty parties, thirty dinners, and twenty-five breakfasts before society packed up and retreated to the country in July.4 She’d had nothing whatsoever to do with “all that elaborate machinery”5 that was required backstage. This year would be different. Beatrice had been the only one of the Potter sisters, except for thirteen-year-old Rosie, who was still living at home in Gloucester when their mother died the previous spring. Suddenly she was promoted to lady of her father’s house.
Before leaving Gloucester, Beatrice had made a solemn vow “to give myself up to Society, and make it my aim to succeed therein.”6 By “succeed,” she meant marry an important man, as each of her older sisters had done, although her use of “give myself up” suggests that the price of success was self-immolation. The latest to do so had been her favorite sister, Kate, who had waited until the advanced age of thirty-one to marry a prominent Liberal economist and politician, Leonard Courtney, currently serving as Treasury secretary. Her father did not doubt that Bo would follow suit. Besides beauty, breeding, and a large fortune, she had the gift of commanding attention. Her long, graceful neck, fiercely intelligent eyes, and glossy black hair made people seeing her for the first time across a crowded room think of a beautiful, slightly dangerous black swan. Men were charmed by her, especially when they realized that she refused to take them seriously.
For a while after the Potters’ arrival, all was chaos and confusion. More retainers, extra horses, and additional carriages appeared. When the servants finally withdrew and her father had gotten some supper, Beatrice went upstairs and found the bedroom in the back of the mansion that she had determined would be hers. Now she could think of something besides seating plans and menus—namely, the books that she had brought to read; the things she meant to learn. Beatrice saw nothing inherently contradictory in her various desires and duties. After all, a happily married woman sat on the throne, and George Eliot reigned as the most successful writer of the day. When Beatrice was eighteen, she had spent more time studying Eastern religions than preparing for her “coming out.”
Her bedroom window overlooked the Victoria and Albert Museum. It suddenly struck her that the great monument to human ingenuity stood in the very center of London yet managed to remain wonderfully “undisturbed by the rushing life of the great city.”7 Beatrice wondered whether she might do the same, maintaining a Buddhist-like detachment in crowded drawing rooms and theaters. Might she not she fulfill society’s expectations while still cultivating the “thoughtful” part of her life, the part that drove her to constantly to ask herself, “How am I to live and for what object?”8
The question of her destiny had preoccupied Beatrice since her fifteenth birthday. Her mother and sisters had always regarded