一个神童和他精神崩溃、发现浪漫主义诗歌的故事

《金钱星球》常常鼓励并邀请读者和嘉宾跟他们分享一些读过的书籍，特别是那些转变他们看世界的角度和方式的书。

在这集里，他们请来了著名经济学家,、博学者同时也是《金钱星球》的常客 Tyler Cowen ，让他介绍了约翰穆勒的自传（ The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill）。这位19世纪最重要的经济学家之一讲述了他如何发现浪漫主义诗歌、如何寻找爱情和应对精神崩溃危机的故事。Cowen说这本书会告诉你：当你开始意识到你认为是真实的事实并非那么“真实”的时候，你应该怎么办？

CARDIFF GARCIA, HOST:

Hey, everyone. It's Cardiff. We have a repeating segment on this show where we ask a guest to recommend a favorite book or a research paper or really anything else that changed how that guest sees the world. And then we ask the guests to convince us that we should read that book and that we should see the world in this new way.

And on today's episode in this series, we are featuring a picked by economist Tyler Cowen. Tyler is a frequent guest on THE INDICATOR, and he's also just one of the most eclectic and idiosyncratic thinkers we know. And for his recommended book, Tyler went old school. He picked a book about one of the most astonishing and influential minds of his time. That is coming up.

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TYLER COWEN: I'll pick an out-of-the-box book, and that's John Stuart Mill's autobiography published in 1873.

GARCIA: Wow - old school.

COWEN: Old school...

GARCIA: What's in it?

COWEN: ...Deeply personal, intimate, the story of how he changed his mind about so many things, the story of his nervous breakdown, the story of his eventually finding love, the story of Victorian England, what it's like to be a child prodigy all rolled into one short book, gripping from beginning to end and available online for free, not to mention Amazon.

GARCIA: So the autobiography of John Stuart Mill is Tyler's recommendation. A super-quick primer on John Stuart Mill - he was one of the most influential economic and philosophical thinkers of the 19th century. And he was way ahead of his time on issues of gender and racial equality. He's maybe best known for his ideas, though, about individual freedoms. And specifically, he argued that the only time a government can justifiably interfere with your liberty or take away an individual's liberty is if you're harming another person but not if you are harming yourself. You have the right to do things that are bad for you - OK, back to the chat.

Let's talk about a couple of those examples you just mentioned. You said that it was the story of how he ended up seeing the world. Can you sort of give us a version of that story?

COWEN: John Stuart Mill's father, James Mill, brought him up as a prodigy, trained him. By the age of 18, John Stuart Mill was quite possibly the greatest economist in the entire world. He knew everything that there was to be known about economic theory. But he was this kid, 18, really quite screwed up. And his dad had overseen his whole education. He could read Latin and Greek fluently. And then something happened. He discovered Romantic poetry. And how he begins to understand there are always alternate perspectives beyond the ones you have and how those can be these viewquakes (ph) to shake up everything you think you know. I think it's the single best book ever written on that topic.

GARCIA: Wow. So by age 18, he sounds like, from what you're saying, he was probably one of the best-educated people on the planet.

COWEN: Absolutely.

GARCIA: And it also sounds like a lot of his education was in a kind of mechanical thinking. Is that...

COWEN: It was lacking warmth. I think he had studied literature in a formal methodical way, especially the ancient classics. But it wasn't the same as actually allowing literature to touch himself and shake up, you know, all this Ricardian economics that had been pushed down his throat.

GARCIA: OK, everyone. Another quick fourth wall break here. When Tyler refers to Ricardian economics, he's referring to the ideas of David Ricardo. Ricardo is probably best known for his argument that the free trade of goods between countries works well because it allows each country to focus on making the goods that it specializes in. OK, back to John Stuart Mill.

So he found that moving when he finally came to it on his own, and then it changed how he saw the world.

COWEN: And it's a story of rebellion, of economics, of philosophy, of history, of, you know, parent and child. There's so much in the book. There are a few books where there are so many different angles in such a short book. And it's beautifully written. And his education shines through on every page. And you realize, for all his rebellion, he's still like the old John Stuart Mill, who was educated to be one of the smartest, best economists and philosophers in the whole world and the way in which he carries over from that earlier education while simultaneously rejecting it.

GARCIA: Do you remember where you were when you first read that book?

COWEN: I was a teenager. I probably was just sitting in my chair in my room at home. That would be where.

GARCIA: And it blew your mind?

COWEN: Blew my mind, absolutely.

GARCIA: What was your reaction to it?

COWEN: So many other books you read, they tell you what is true, which is fine, right? This is a book that tells you how you should react when you start realizing what you thought was true isn't so true.

GARCIA: Yeah. And so he grappled with that, as you eventually grappled with something like that as well?

COWEN: Life is a series of realizing all the things you thought were true are more complicated than you had realized. Even at my current age of 56, this keeps on happening every day. And John Stuart Mill is a kind of lodestar for me. I never had a nervous breakdown, didn't react the way he did. But he's the one who opens the door into this whole new way of viewing the world.

GARCIA: Do you think that it should influence people's views on parenting? That like people should read this book and that they'll come out of it thinking, you know, I can't just hammer home a bunch of facts and methodically sort of try to force a kid into like one pattern of learning, that actually I should let the kid learn a bit on his or her own.

COWEN: I never tell people to do that with their kids. But again, it's complex because James Mill did create Britain's greatest thinker in John Stuart Mill with his methods. And OK, it wasn't worth it. It wasn't fair to John. He had a nervous breakdown. He suffered a great deal. But on the other hand, we got the autobiography, "On Liberty," many other wonderful works. And I think we're supposed to go away with mixed feelings about strict education, not purely negative by any means.

GARCIA: OK. Tyler Cowen, always a pleasure.

COWEN: Thank you.

GARCIA: And that is the end of our chat with Tyler. Thanks to him again. We have a link to "The Autobiography Of John Stuart Mill" at npr.org/money - both the free versions and the Amazon link if you want to buy it. Or if you're curious about John Stuart Mill's life and ideas but you want something shorter than this book, we've also posted links to a few articles about him that I really enjoyed. Finally, this podcast was produced by Darius Rafieyan and edited by Paddy Hirsch.