One of H. P. Lovecraft’s most famous works is The Shadow out of Time, in which a 1908 professor of economics has his mind mentally switched with an inhuman being belonging to a civilization that lived millions of years ago. The foreign being’s mind lives in his body, and he lives in the foreign being’s body back in the remote past.
The switch happens when the professor is giving a lecture in economics to his students. He’s suddenly faints and, when he is brought round, it appears to everyone that he has a case of amnesia. (It’s really the foreign being who has no knowledge of the professor’s life.)
The being’s job is to research human culture in the early 20th century, and it stays five years at the task. But in 1913, it concludes that it has learned all it can and returns to its own time, simultaneously returning the economist to his own body.
In the story, the professor describes what happened he he first awoke after the being’s departure, having no memory of what had transpired:
About 11.30 I muttered some very curious syllables–syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just afternoon–the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned–I began to mutter in English.
"–of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of–"
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back–a spirit in whose time scale it was still Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on the platform.
When I first read the bit about linking the economic cycle to sunspots, I laughed. I figured it was just a joke on Lovecraft’s part. Though initially very conservative, Lovecraft by this late point in his life (in the middle of the depression) was impoverished and entertaining a form of socialism. I reckoned he was just spoofing the economics of the earlier period by making up a fantastically absurd theory.
But he wasn’t!
It turns out that the "Jevons" he mentions was a real guy–William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882)–a real economist, who really did advocate the idea that the economic cycle is linked to sunspot activity:
In 1875 and 1878, Jevons read two papers before the British Association which expounded his famous "sunspot theory" of the business cycle. Digging through mountains of statistics of economic and meteorological data, Jevons argued that there was a connection between the timing of commercial crises and the solar cycle. The basic chain of events was that variations in sunspots affect the power of the sun’s rays, influencing the bountifulness of harvests and thus the price of corn which, in turn, affected business confidence and gave rise to commercial crises.
Jevons changed his story several times (e.g. he replaced his European harvest-price-crisis logic with an Indian harvest-imports-crisis channel). However flimsy his explanations, Jevons believed that the periodicity of the solar cycle and commercial crises — approximately 10.5 years, by his calculations — was too coincidental to be dismissed. Needless to say, all this was a bit on the cranky end and, ultimately, the statistics did not bear him out.
Nonetheless, it remains a significant piece of work as this was perhaps the first time that the phenomenon of the business cycle was identified. Economists had long been aware that business activity had its ups and downs, but not that they necessarily followed any regular pattern. They generally believed that "crises" arrived haphazardly, punctuating the smooth advance of the economy at irregular intervals. Jevons was perhaps the first economist to argue that the phases of business activity had a regular, measurable and predictable periodicity [SOURCE].
Don’t that beat all!
What Lovecraft says about Jevons being characteristic of the economists of the period trying to link economics with science is also true. Economics was then being constituted as a social science and there was a lot of borrowing of terms and concepts from other sciences (e.g., physics, mathematics, biology). Jevons’ sunspot theory may indeed represent a kind of apex to this process.
Two points to Lovecraft!
BTW, this is going to be economics week here on the blog. I hope to have a string of (hopefully entertaining) pieces of economics, putting up one each day.
Y’know, if my high school econ teacher tied this in to his lessons, I wouldn’t have fallen asleep so much.
Wait’ll you see the economics posts that are scheduled to drop in the next few days. 😉
Anyone else think that pic looks like David Blaine? 🙂
Chris
http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/
The really crazy thing about that theory is that it isn’t actually all that crazy. It’s been documented that increased numbers of sunspots = less power from the photosphere of the sun reaching earth. While the correlation to weather isn’t direct, there’s no doubt the solar cycle has some large effects on the global climate. Cooler temperatures = shorter growing season, especially in europe and high latitudes. Less growing time = less produce, which corresponds to lower productivity for human beings. Hey, that sounds like economics. Of course, the correlation is a lot less important as technology improves–nevertheless, it’s real.
There was a high-school science activity I took part in where we had to analyze global average temperatures or something over a century. It seemed that temperatures cycled every 22 years(IIRC), which supposedly matched up with sunspots.
I no longer trust such activities, having learned that the notoriously shoddy education departments at universities also grant degrees in science education.
It took me a couple days but I realized what Lovecraft’s story of trans-temporal amnesia-inducing mind-switching reminded me of…
Quantum Leap!!
Wasn’t that such a great show?