Shruti Rajagopalan: The Political Economy of Gulliver’s Travels

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Shruti Rajagopalan: The Political Economy of Gulliver’s Travels

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Shruti Rajagopalan: The Political Economy of Gulliver’s Travels

Henry Oliver

Nov 04, 2026

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Transcript

Last week, the day after the 300th anniversary of the publication of

Gulliver’s Travels

, I sat down with my colleague

Shruti Rajagopalan

to discuss Swift’s great novel. Shruti is an economist with a law degree, so her delight in the

Travels

is accompanied by a respect for Swift’s ability to think like an economist. We talked about progress, “improvement”, Adam Smith, watches, rationalism and EA, Game Theory, slavery, Ireland, whether Swift is a proto-libertarian, and more, including why Shruti doesn’t love

Middlemarch.

Shruti also kept passing me passages to read aloud. This was a lot of fun for me. Many thanks to Shruti!

Here’s one of many passages that I could have excerpted.

OLIVER:

There are some wonderful, wonderful passages in

Wealth of Nations

. I mean, he’s using exclamation marks. He gets angry. He makes jokes. Sometimes he gets very emotional. He’s actually a deeply humane and varied writer. He’s not this dry, technocratic economist. He’s very lively on the page.

RAJAGOPALAN:

He is. Actually, you know, a later edition—I want to say this is the fourth edition of

The Wealth of Nations

—he just takes the East India Company and the British Crown to the cleaners. He’s unsparing about what this kind of monopoly power has done, why it was given only to make sure that the public coffers of all these profligate kings seem to be functioning, and how that has destroyed an entire people.

OLIVER:

That’s where he says, isn’t it, he says, “Damn cheek, them telling us to mind how we spend our money when they’re constantly running a deficit. These people wouldn’t know how to keep a budget if their life”—he gets really sort of het up. It’s fantastic.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes. So he’s incredible in the sense that, like Swift, he can always see the practical point, which is the fellow human being and their prosperity and their well-being and their agency and their dignity. And that is at the center of everything Smith does. He can go into digressions of silver for, like, 55 pages and bore us to death.

OLIVER:

That, you can skip.

RAJAGOPALAN:

That’s how I feel about some passages in

Middlemarch

.

HENRY OLIVER:

Today I am talking to Shruti Rajagopalan. Shruti is an economist, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, where she runs the India program and the Emergent Ventures program. And she’s going to talk to me today about

Gulliver’s Travels

. And it was yesterday 300 years since the publication of this great book.

Shruti, welcome.

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN:

Thank you so much for having me, Henry. And we normally do this in the hallway, where I don’t feel intimidated, and I just randomly tell you stuff. [laughter] And now that we’re recording this, I feel terrified out of my mind talking to you about Swift with all your folded pages and marked-up books.

OLIVER:

Okay, good.

RAJAGOPALAN:

So I would say it’s a pleasure to be here, but it’s a little bit scary to be here.

OLIVER:

Swift would be pleased if we were scared to talk about his book. I think he would like that. So, you love this book.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I love this book.

Different Readings, Different Layers

OLIVER:

Yes. Tell me your history with the book.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I must have read it the first time when I was six years old. You know, these are those abridged classics that are six inches by six inches, very much a Lilliputian size, and they have illustrations on one side and the size 22 font on the other side. And I loved the book.

Of course, that was just the first two parts, which I didn’t know at that time. Part three and part four of the book are not in those little nursery stories. So this is just Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and it’s hilarious for a kid. I remember, they’ve got Gulliver tied up by his hair, and he’ll sneeze or they’ll run a broom up his nose or something, and then all the Lilliputians will go flying.

And this goes on for two, three pages with all those graphics, and I was just so amused. Like, he’s so tiny. He’s in a box, and an eagle takes him away. It’s all hilarious, you know? So that part really tickled me.

And then I must have read it as a teenager or maybe even late teen, early college. I read the unabridged version, which is when I realized that, oh, this book is about something completely different. And after that, I’ve read it maybe every five or six years, maybe not the whole thing. Sometimes I’m like, “Was this there in

Gulliver’s Travels

?” And then I go and I look that part up, and suddenly something will occur to me, and I’ll realize a new layer in the book.

The most recent layers that I have been genuinely enjoying are how I think people who work at Anthropic and OpenAI are like the people from Laputa. [laughter] And there are these portions in the Laputa section about how they are perennially in doomsday or gloomy, and they’re always thinking about the sun coming closer to the Earth and the degrees of heat and whether the comet is going to move a few inches and hit the Earth.

And they wake up every morning thinking about this and talking with each other, almost as if you are these teenage boys who want to hear terrifying stories. I think that’s the comparison that Swift makes. And I was like, “Oh my god, this is exactly like the EA [effective altruism], AI-doomer crowd who are all the time talking about how the world is ending and this is super dangerous.” And I got onto this passage while I was actually looking for the paper machine that writes books and publishes books.

OLIVER:

Oh, yes. Yes, yes, the LLM.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I was like, “That’s the LLM.” So when I was looking for the LLM is how I found this passage, and I was like, “Oh my god, maybe what we need to set these labs right is a bunch of flappers who will just

flap them out of whatever is going on with them.”

So, sorry, I don’t mean to take potshots at people. But I will literally enter

Gulliver’s Travels

through some vague memory of mine, and I’ll be like, “Oh, I should look that section up,” and then I’ll end up reading, like, half the book because I love it so much and it’s hilarious.

Politics, Law, and Economics

OLIVER:

It is hilarious, but it’s also very clever. How did you start reading it differently once you’d become trained as an economist, and you had all these ideas in your head that maybe you’d understood them earlier, but you hadn’t formalized them?

RAJAGOPALAN:

I think before I read it as an economist, I may have read it because through high school I thought I was going to be a lawyer, and eventually I did get a law degree. And so all the politics of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and especially the politics of Lilliput, which is so hilarious, right?

OLIVER:

Anyone who has worked in politics, I think, should read this book just because it is screamingly funny, but also because he knows how politics really works.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I know, yes. He really knows how it works. So you have the High-Heelers and the Low-Heelers, and this is

obviously the Whig and Tory politics of that time. But you could talk about that in any context. It could be the red team, blue team. It could be, you know, Democrats or progressives.

In India, we have the Communist Party of India, Leninist, and the Communist Party of India, Marxist. [laughter] Okay? And the Communist Party of India, Trotsky, I think appeared at one point in time, if I’m not wrong, or maybe it’s the International Party.

But anyway, you could apply that to anything. And he will take it to a point of absurd because the king has his loyalties between the High-Heelers and Low-Heelers, but the heir to the throne has one high heel and one low heel and walks with a wobble, which just tells you that some of this stuff is so petty, you can’t balance your way out of it. You have to reason your way out of how absurd the whole thing is.

And the Big-Enders and the Little-Enders on how to crack a boiled egg. This is every sectarian nonsensical battle which we’ve seen in India and South Asia and abroad. I mean, he’s talking about it in the context of Catholics and Protestants and Anglicans and so on, but Shias and Sunnis are the same, right? You talk about any kind of religious sect, and you end up in the same place.

So I think that was my first entry point to the book. The whole thing about the civil servants becoming civil servants by doing all these insane sports and getting different-colored medals and ribbons.

OLIVER:

Going under the bar, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

And that’s how you become cabinet secretary or whatever it is. I had watched and read

Yes, Minister

, so my entry point was really, “Oh, this is about party politics and law and civil service, and how the judiciary is crazy and how monarchy is dysfunctional,” and that was my entry point.

The economics—I think he’s a fantastic political economist, and when I say “he,” I don’t mean Gulliver. I mean Swift.

OLIVER:

Swift, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

He’s an incredible political economist. And that stuff came much later.

OLIVER:

And when you say he’s a good political economist, we’re obviously a generation before

The Wealth of Nations

. There is a lot of economic writing, but it is not codified or consolidated. We’re missing many insights. How has he become this? What is happening in this book?

RAJAGOPALAN:

So, couple of things.

The Wealth of Nations

hasn’t yet come out, but Mandeville’s

Fable of the Bees

has come out. And Mandeville wrote an early edition, which was a bunch of chapters under a different name, I think in 1705. Then in 1714, it becomes kind of

Fable of the Bees

, and the official first edition of

The Fable of the Bees

is 1723. And Swift’s first edition is 1726, which is why this week is the 300th year.

OLIVER:

That’s right. Here we are.

RAJAGOPALAN:

So he’s got Mandeville, and some of these ideas are brewing. And Mandeville has big sections on the division of labor. In fact, the examples he gives for the division of labor come from watchmaking. There are parts of Mandeville which we can discuss, but there is something about Mandeville which is a little bit like Swift. It’s very, very modern, but I’ll just give you a tiny part. Maybe you’d be better off reading it, okay? So just read—this is the fourth dialogue from Mandeville.

OLIVER:

Okay.

RAJAGOPALAN:

And I don’t want to get into the context of Mandeville and derail us because you and I are the kind of people who can get derailed quite easily.

OLIVER:

No, no, no, sure. That’s the whole podcast, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

And we don’t have a flapper. So just read maybe this first paragraph, and this is Mandeville talking about removing a spring from a watch.

OLIVER:

“These are very airy conjectures, but nothing of all this can be proved. The smallness of the parts, you will say, is the reason. But if greater improvements were made in optic glasses, and microscopes could be invented that magnified objects three or four millions of times more than they do now, then certainly those minute particles, so immensely remote from the senses you speak of, might be observed, if that which does the work is corporeal at all.”

RAJAGOPALAN:

That’s an incredibly modern bit, right?

OLIVER:

Yes. It’s very Swiftian.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes. And Mandeville not just knows how watches are made, but can imagine a watch being made without a spring. And also knows what are the inputs required to make a watch without a spring, and then is also able to understand what is the progress we need in other inputs like microscopes and optic glass, which will be required to then be able to magnify things and make them smaller and smaller and smaller, and then get into making a better watch.

So there is something about that time. I don’t think it’s just Swift. I think there’s something about that time when—as

Anton Howes

, one of our friends, talks about—the country turning into a country of tinkerers. This is science at its best. You’re talking about the Industrial Revolution, but the Industrial Revolution is really trying to figure out how to make a better watch, right?

Adam Smith has a whole bit on how watches are getting better and better and better, how the price of watches is falling and how they are becoming more accurate, which are the two things. The price falling and the quality improving are the two things by which you can very cleanly measure progress. So these are just things that are happening around that time, and I think Swift is very clued into what is going on, in some sense.

Swift’s View of Progress

OLIVER:

There is a sort of persistent view of Swift, though, that he’s some kind of Tory, maybe he’s anti-Enlightenment, he doesn’t like progress, he doesn’t like innovation. But there are a lot of watches, and he doesn’t hate the watches in the way he hates the circle of speculators in Laputa. So how do we break out, what does this book think about progress?

RAJAGOPALAN:

I think he’s against intellectual elitism and more specifically against scientism. But he’s all for progress. I mean, look at the book. The book is all about measurement. The book is all about, how can I get a better window for my tiny little cute cage that the Brobdingnagians have built for me, and how can the curtain move a little bit better, and how do I not get motion-sick when I’m on horseback in Brobdingnag, and how can I create a slightly better facility to relieve myself?

OLIVER:

Yes. He praises improvement a lot. It’s a very Smithian concept.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly. Exactly. So I think progress is about improvement and tinkering, and I think the way I balance those two elements that you’re talking about—I mean, first of all, I don’t feel the need to balance them because I think the critics are just wrong. I don’t think he’s anti-science and anti-Enlightenment. I think he’s anti people taking their science too seriously to a point where you can’t see the practical element of it.

It’s like, “Look, I’m from Ireland. There are people who are starving. We’re having famines, and I don’t need you to do this fabulous technocratic project to improve people. I need you to make a better horseback ride or a better potato or a better watch. I don’t need you extracting sunlight from cucumber seeds. I need you to maybe make better cucumbers that can feed the starving population.” So his idea of improvement is what would be the economist’s idea of improvement, frankly.

So, I don’t know. I disagree with a lot of the

Gulliver’s Travels

critics, and only now I’m realizing I disagree with them because until I read the Cambridge edition, I didn’t even know that all these critiques existed.

OLIVER:

I’m tempted into a view that, in Laputa and in the other places in book three where you have all these speculators, it’s a very Smithian description. The phrase “circle of speculators” is from

Wealth of Nations

. Laputa is a circle. But also, it’s with the court. It’s centralized. It’s got all the nonsense of politics. It’s got all the status-seeking.

Whereas the things that Gulliver carries in his pockets, like the watch, they have just come from the practical world, the improving world. And it’s not spelled out, but it’s actually pretty clear to see that what he dislikes is centralization.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes. One, he dislikes centralization, and second, I think he cares very deeply—look at all the points when he expresses discomfort. When the fancy tailor at Laputa was too busy taking measurements using protractors and degrees and angles but can’t make him a well-fitting outfit, and he’s just walking around in a terrible outfit. I can’t think of a better example than that.

So could you have made a machine that will magically print out outfits that people could use? Sure. And he would have marveled at something like that, I think. So anytime it is about carpentry or it is about actually making things cheaper and better, he does marvel at it.

The only time he pooh-poohs it is, “Hey, you had one job, and it was to improve the human condition, and you have failed at that job because you’re thinking about something completely different. And you’re kind of lost in the self-indulgence of how important this work feels.”

OLIVER:

He also, to me, seems to—I don’t know if he would put it like this, but he sort of endorses the idea of tacit knowledge. The tailor does not need the instruments and the fuss. He just knows how to do it. Everywhere Gulliver goes, he has to make something, fashion something, put his tools to new use. He just works it out, and it can’t be over-rationalized, right? This is what he’s against, the over-rational.

RAJAGOPALAN:

And he’s so grateful to the people in Lilliput because they go through this enormous effort. Like, it’s not linear, right? Just because he’s 100x bigger than them, they don’t just need 100x more people. The scale of everything changes a little bit. And he’s so grateful when they fashion a special kind of wheelbarrow for him or a special kind of thing to bring his hat that got lost.

He’s also seeing in other people—except we don’t think of that as science, necessarily. We don’t think of the Lilliputians as fashioning new, amazing things to deal with the giant. We think of them as little people. But all the things he’s grateful for are when they fashion him interesting things to make him more comfortable.

Gulliver and Game Theory

OLIVER:

Yes. Now, the other political economy aspect is game theory, deterrence. Tell me—because this, I think, is undertheorized in Swift. Tell me about this.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes. I’m so glad you mentioned this. So there is this discussion of Laputa. For those who are unfamiliar or read the book a long time ago or read the abridged version, Laputa is a flying island. It’s literally like a flying-saucer spaceship, and that’s where the king lives, and that’s where the elites are. And then Laputa will descend onto the rest of the kingdom at different parts. And now there’s a question of—

OLIVER:

As a means of oppressing them.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Oppressing them, both monitoring them and oppressing them. But Laputa is also creating all these fancy technocratic projects to improve them, right? It’s all kinds of subjugation of what they think is a lower class of people.

Now, the interesting thing is, they talk about, how do we discipline these people who are barbaric and the monarch wants to discipline them? And they talk about, you could first get the flying saucer closer and closer. You could cut off the sunlight. You could cause drought and famine and things like that. And then the nuclear option—he obviously doesn’t use the word

nuclear

, but the ultimate option is total destruction if Laputa just came and crashed on top of a place.

OLIVER:

Physically crushes, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Physically crushes the bottom city or country. And they’re like, “But there are limits to that because people know this.” The people below actually have this information, so sometimes they make stone houses and stone pillars, and sometimes those stone pillars are pointy, and it could actually destroy the base of the Laputan flying island. Which means you can come close, but if you go for total destruction at very high speed, then you might actually end up damaging the island, which is counterproductive and more destructive than just damaging the city.

So what is the equilibrium, as we say? [laughter] You come down very, very slowly and threaten a kind of destruction, but you don’t go all the way so that the people will comply with whatever the monarch wants. And this is very game theoretic, right?

OLIVER:

This is basically like mutually assured destruction.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly.

OLIVER:

These are the same dynamics we see in the Cold War. I see.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly. And what I love about this is, you don’t need to be able to fight fire with fire. You can fight this elite country with sticks and stones as long as the sticks—having this kind of crazy nuclear weapon also opens you to a threat, right? You’ve got this fabulous flying island, but that also means you’re a little bit fragile, and if someone damaged the base of your island, your island couldn’t fly and take off, right?

So there’s something really lovely going on there, and it’s also the politics of, there’s only so much you can oppress the people before they revolt. That’s the other political economy layer that’s going on. Again, you see this when, should Lilliput strike first or should Blefuscu strike first? You have all these war games going on, which are very game theoretic in nature just by description, but it’s so modern, Henry.

OLIVER:

I agree with that. And I think this also links to what we said before. When they’re making the stone pillars and everything, they don’t have great technology at their disposal, but they do have that innovism. They do have that kind of ability to think strategically. That’s basic economic improvement, right? It’s all sort of deep in the book.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly, and they can all think strategically. The dwarf can think strategically that there is a more curious pet that has taken away all the attention from the dwarf in Brobdingnag, right? So, whether it is jealousy, whether it is the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians or the High-Heelers and the Low-Heelers, they’re all kind of battling it out. And there’s some kind of equilibrium that starts forming, except for, of course, the crazy heir to the throne who’s walking with a wobble.

But each one of them lands in a particular kind of equilibrium, and I think he even discusses that there are more High-Heelers, but the Low-Heelers are in power or something like that. So there is that, too, which is, how does it work when the minority actually manages to grab a larger proportion of the power, but they’re checked by the fact that they can’t just run with it because there’s a much larger population that’s waiting to take you down. All of that stuff is—I wouldn’t even say it’s buried in there. It’s, like, right there.

OLIVER:

No, it’s part of the weave of the whole thing.

RAJAGOPALAN:

It’s part of the weave of the whole thing.

OLIVER:

It’s just throughout.

Language and Humor

RAJAGOPALAN:

I would have said “scaffolding,” but that’s such a Claude word [laughter] that I can’t use it anymore. I can’t say “load-bearing” and “scaffolding” anymore. They’re just everywhere on LinkedIn and Twitter. Have you observed this?

OLIVER:

I stay away from this. I’m spending less time listening to these things. I’m blocking it out.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Well done.

OLIVER:

It’s bad for you, I think. And Swift would’ve been horrified because one thing that this book is about is the correct use of language and how allowing yourself to be taken in by bad phrases is damaging to your own critical faculties, right? Which you’re doing by saying, “No, I can’t say that. I have to think like this.” Swift actually is useful to us in that way, too, these days.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes, but you are right. It is woven through everything. And when we started talking about it, you said, “It’s really funny, but it’s also really clever.” I feel he has a masterful technique. Some people are funny in, like, they’re literally telling a joke with a punchline. And he does that sometimes.

OLIVER:

Yes. Yes, very well.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Very well. Sometimes you can tell a joke just because it’s circumstantial and it’s funny, kind of like the wobble of the heir to the throne. You picture it and it’s ha-ha funny. And sometimes it’s funny because it’s so absurd just because of the way the entire system or society has been structured, and he’s a master at that. And there are very few people who can do this at all three levels.

OLIVER:

That’s right.

RAJAGOPALAN:

And also do potty humor. There is so much kind of juvenile teenage-boy potty humor in this book. I feel like he’s hit every level of humor there is to hit, which is also what makes it so clever.

OLIVER:

One thing I think the humor is doing is that he has this technique where he’ll build it up, and then he’ll twist at the end and get the joke. Like him when he says, you know, “The Arabians write from right to left, and these people write up and down, and they go like this. Or you could do it from corner to corner, as ladies do in England.” This is this wonderful little twist.

And to begin with, it’s all very funny. It’s charming. It’s a little bit sexist, but it’s okay. It’s all in sort of good nature. By book four, the twist is becoming so dark that he’s using the humor technique, but to horrify you. And it’s the opposite of humor, and the book has trained you to wait for the twist, but then the twist is really nasty. And he’s using that satirical technique, and it gets darker as we go.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Oh my god, yes.

OLIVER:

So Laputa’s pretty funny, but it’s also oppressive and sinister. And when he switches into lamenting the poverty and everything, the twist is nasty. But when we get it with the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos—chilling.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Oh my god, by the time you get to the Yahoos, it is chilling. That scene where—is it the Yahoos’ skin that is being used to sail?

OLIVER:

He goes to the council of the Houyhnhnms, and he says they never debate anything because they’re rational, and they don’t need to debate because they’re so clever. But there’s this one question that they perennially debate, which is, should they have a genocide of the Yahoos?

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes.

OLIVER:

And he doesn’t react to that. He just says that’s what they do, these clever horses.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes. That wasn’t the horrifying thing for me.

OLIVER:

Then later on, when he leaves, which is shortly after that, he says, “I got into my canoe.” And this is the genius of Swift. He just puts it in a little subclause in the middle and moves on, and he says, “The canoe is made out of the skin of Yahoos.”

RAJAGOPALAN:

I know. And my heart stopped when I read it the first time.

OLIVER:

It is hideous.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I remember reading it, and I was like, “Oh my god, the horror of this.” And it’s not funny at all at that point.

OLIVER:

No, but it is a twist. Unexpected.

RAJAGOPALAN:

He’s taking the dagger and turning it, really. And the humor or the absurdity is that Gulliver barely notices it and is not at all horrified by it.

OLIVER:

But the thing is, he does notice it enough to narrate it. So that’s the horror, is he just tells you, and it’s like he’s seen it without really seeing it.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Seeing it. Because he’s stopped seeing the humanity in Yahoos, even though they look almost exactly like him.

OLIVER:

He is a Yahoo.

RAJAGOPALAN:

He’s a Yahoo.

OLIVER:

We’re all Yahoos. That’s the point, right? We’re the Yahoos.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I actually find the end of the book very disturbing. And I feel like I’m almost grateful that I didn’t read it as a kid because I would’ve never read the book again then. I’m glad that the kids’ abridged version only has the first two parts in summary.

OLIVER:

It’s a lot for a child, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

It’s a lot. And you don’t want to get into genocide and things like that. But I also think it’s very disturbing because what ends up happening through the book is we are constantly conflating Swift’s voice and Gulliver’s voice. Because Gulliver’s making these observations, but Swift is the one writing it, and Gulliver is not a great observer, let’s be clear. Swift is the impartial spectator, almost, and Gulliver is just a regular guy. He’s a Yahoo.

OLIVER:

Barely a spectator sometimes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Barely a spectator sometimes, and doesn’t know when he’s saying something horrifying or doing something horrifying and so on. But as we get to the end of the book—till part three, it’s clear that Swift is the one who is making all of this absurd and laughing at it through Gulliver. But by the end of the book, because the jokes are not ha-ha funny—they’re just absurd, dark satire—you feel like whatever Gulliver’s feeling is the human condition by the end of all these crazy travels. And I don’t think that’s true.

I think Swift is trying to tell us something: that the more you get away from humanity, and if you start talking to dead people and horses more than you interact with humans, you’re going to lose all your humanity inside. You’re going to be repulsed by humans. You’ll never be able to see them as a fellow human. And I think that’s where the book is finally ending, and it gets lost because the humor takes this weird—do you know what I mean?

Balancing Reason and Passion

OLIVER:

Yes, definitely. A lot of people think that you’re supposed to disapprove of Gulliver at the end, and we’re supposed to be repulsed, and he’s turned into this monster or whatever. I think that, to begin with, he has maintained some sort of balance between reason and feeling.

And particularly in book two in Brobdingnag, which is like the ideal court, this balance exists, right? By the time of Laputa, there’s a great distortion, and they’re blind to their wives having affairs, and they have no idea. They have a complete lack of feeling.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I love that, though.

OLIVER:

Oh, it’s fantastic. It’s so funny.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I love that Laputa is very elite and scientific, and the only place that doesn’t have slavery within, and the only place which is feminist and progressive for women, where women just go have affairs with footmen and it’s totally fine. And nowhere else has that, but of course, they’re oppressing someone else. Sorry, that’s a random tangent.

OLIVER:

No, but exactly, because the rationality that they have achieved, they haven’t really achieved. And then by the time you get to book four, he is so overimpressed by the hyper-rationality or the sort of desiccated rationality that he becomes the monster. And actually, we should feel sorry for him because having watched this great descent he’s gone into, it’s kind of tragic for Gulliver.

RAJAGOPALAN:

It’s very tragic.

OLIVER:

And I just feel sad. I just feel this poor man has become a kind of nonhuman.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Nonhuman, exactly. My first reaction after horror is grief for Gulliver because something inside him has died because of all these experiences. But it’s also how he gets taken in, you know? There is some sympathy I have for that because, okay, let’s go to the Houyhnhnms. What are they really? They sound like every eugenicist. Who are the eugenicists? They don’t show up with, like, swords and guns and things like that. That is terrorists. We have a word for that.

OLIVER:

Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Eugenicists are scientific.

OLIVER:

John Maynard Keynes. George Bernard Shaw.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly. George Bernard Shaw, Karl Pearson, Bertrand Russell to some extent. All these people are eugenicists, but they are very rational, and they’re very scientific.

And this is where, if you get into the Enlightenment project, whether it’s David Hume, whether it’s

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

, the thing is always about balancing our reason and our passions. And Yahoos are all passion, no reason, but Yahoos identify him as one of them. They’re willing to do things for him. They want him to be comfortable. They want to figure out that he has clothing, right? Whereas—

OLIVER:

They’re improvers.

RAJAGOPALAN:

They’re improvers, and they want to improve him because they don’t have reason, and he looks like them. So there is a role for passion in society because from passion comes loyalty for the fellow human being, right?

That’s where empathy comes for the fellow human being. That’s why you’re willing to go to war against someone else to protect a complete stranger. So there’s a role for passion in society, and if you only have reason and no passion, then you turn into this crazy monstrous eugenicist who don’t even know they’re doing something bad.

And I think the Houyhnhnms are—I think the horse example or the metaphor is great because I started riding horses a couple of years ago, and I started reading more about horse psychology. And the most important thing about horses, I think, or their psychology, is that they are prey animals. They’re not predators. They can never be predators. So even when a horse ends up hurting another creature, it’s because it’s skittish. It’s because it got scared. Something startled it, and it’s just large in size. So horses can kill you, they can do a lot of damage, but it’s not because they are out to be predators.

Dogs are not prey animals, but they’re domesticated. So a dog can be super sweet, but a dog could also turn on you and bite you and things like that. Horses could never do that. So you find the most benign animal, which has all these metaphors and associations in Greek philosophy and mythology of being wise and calm and reasonable. But if you take away all the passion and the fellow humanity, they’re going to end up doing the same horrible thing that the crazy, passionate people do when they go to war.

And that is such a deep insight in Swift, and I think it’s top-class philosophy. I haven’t read better moral philosophy than that, at some level. I think it’s just the entertainment which makes it all disappear.

Slavery and Subjugation

OLIVER:

What do you think about slavery in this book?

RAJAGOPALAN:

It’s everywhere. There is literal slavery.

OLIVER:

Well, that’s the Yahoos.

RAJAGOPALAN:

That’s the Yahoos. It’s also Gulliver. He’s kind of a slave, hanging around in a tiny box being carried around as a curiosity.

OLIVER:

The farmer wants to breed him and keep the children captive, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly, right? And there’s slavery in Laputa. I mean, not in Laputa itself, but in Lagado and everywhere else that the Laputans are trying to—what is it called, Balnibarbi? Is that the country?

OLIVER:

Yes, Balnibarbi. And Swift has written pamphlets describing Ireland as being in slave state to England and things like—same thing, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly. So I think the explicit slavery, people owning other people, it’s crystal clear. But there’s another layer, which is not directly slavery but subjugation. And that is all over the book, right? So even in Laputa, which technically doesn’t have slavery, you have this subjugation of people who are servants and women who are doing nothing, and you have all of those things going on in the book.

And I think what he does, whether you look at it through the lens of slavery or subjugation or class or colonialism—basically I think what Swift is trying to tell us is, once you truly look at a fellow human being, if you can’t see them as equal without conditions and you don’t see them as having agency and dignity, the entire project will collapse under its own weight.

It doesn’t matter what the intention is. Are you colonizing? Is your excuse that they’re barbaric? Doesn’t matter. Is your excuse that you’re smarter? Doesn’t matter. Is your excuse that you’re mightier and larger? Doesn’t matter. Do you have gunpowder? Do you have better microscopes and better tailors? Better cucumber seeds?

None of that matters if the basic project by which you look at a fellow human being and you think they don’t deserve agency, which is where slavery and colonialism and the civilizational project comes from—if you miss that, it’s over. So I think that, to me, is the crux of Smith. It’s a deeply humane book. He really sees the fellow human.

OLIVER:

To what extent is this an early instance of a liberal idea, something that Smith goes on to write about? Smith then becomes a kind of starting point for some of the abolitionists, and the early pamphlets are quoting Smith saying similar things.

Or to what extent is it’s just Christianism, it’s Christianity, and Swift is just in an angry way saying, “We all say that we think this. We all profess this, but really we’re much more concerned with Little-Ends and Big-Ends while actual degradation, actual subjection is happening. And it’s against the revealed truth of the Bible.” Or how do you read it?

RAJAGOPALAN:

I don’t read it in a Christian way at all. Not because it’s not Christian, but I think it’s so much more universal than that, and I think Swift would agree. He knows the crazy petty politics, but he’s able to step outside of it and make fun of it. How many people who are deeply religious or deeply enmeshed in a particular kind of politics can you—I mean, you can be deeply critical of the church, but you can also be deeply critical of the people who are critical of the church, right?

So I feel like it’s a much more universal project in some sense than just, “Hey, you guys aren’t real Christians because you’re fighting about Big-Ends and Little-Ends, and you’re forgetting humanity.” I think this is a much more universal message. But I think it’s a much more universal message because at the core of it, it’s like, just because we are Christians doesn’t mean non-Christians are a project for us that we need to civilize.

OLIVER:

Right, right, right.

RAJAGOPALAN:

You know what I mean? And I think that’s the crux of it. Who is a barbarian and who is civilized? If you think about what’s happening in Brobdingnag—the king of Brobdingnag is one of my favorite people in this entire thing. He might be the true giant, the true gentle giant in all of this. And every time Gulliver is bragging about the courts and the monarchy and our politics, he’s quite horrified. He’s like, “Hey, this sounds like an extremely corrupt system with lots of petty politics.”

Gulliver thinks—Gulliver’s bragging. He doesn’t know that it’s petty, right? When he tells the king that there’s something called gunpowder and I’ve got to introduce you to it, and you could wipe out half of humanity, and he’s horrified. The king of Brobdingnag is horrified. Why would I want a technology that’s going to wipe out half of humanity?

So who is civilized? Is it the Europeans who are civilized? Is it this British guy who is coming with their politics and their fiat money and their party system? So who is civilized and who is barbaric and who gets to teach whom, is the crux of it. And now, whether you want to look at it through a Christian lens or through an Irish lens or through a colonial lens, I think it doesn’t matter.

Swift as Libertarian?

OLIVER:

Do you think there’s a way of reading it as a kind of proto-libertarian book? Or am I dragging too many ideas from the future into the past there?

RAJAGOPALAN:

A proto-libertarian reading of this would be, “Be a little bit suspicious of establishment,” I think.

OLIVER:

I see various things like the court is always bad. The central power is always domineering. People need some kind of basic infrastructure to keep them liberal with each other because there’s an inherent wish to domineer or to dominate. Trade is good. Improvement is good, right? Material conditions have to be bettered, but the individual has to be respected, even if they are a Yahoo or whatever they are, some kind of person in poverty. Aren’t these the sort of essential ingredients of what later gets called libertarianism?

RAJAGOPALAN:

I completely agree with the entire list. I’ll tell you where I might proceed with caution. All of this doesn’t lead to a great emergent order that a lot of proto-libertarians take for granted. A lot of this leads to horrible situations and politics and barbarism and war and drama, which is not the emergent order that the proto-libertarians promise us when you have all those great things, right? Brobdingnag’s court politics is far superior to the other places. But that is not the place where you have the greatest improvements and the greatest prosperity and the greatest of anything.

OLIVER:

It’s also the place where he’s the most enslaved because he’s put in the cage. Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly. So you’re this tiny thing in this great society of giants, and now what do you—you still have a good life. They treat you very well. But is that the emergent order that the proto-libertarians impress upon us? I don’t know.

OLIVER:

Because this gets back to the progress question. I’ve tried to write a kind of “how much of a libertarian was Swift,” and I end up always with this idea that he’s a kind of depressed libertarian, that the libertarian answer is the right one, but somehow it’s just not working. People suck. They want to be mean to each other. They get hyper-rational. They get hyper-political. All the things libertarians warn us about, yes, that’s real, and we haven’t found a way out of the trap, so here we are.

Whereas obviously later libertarians could take economic growth for granted, in a way. They had the kind of benefit of a century of GDP, two centuries of GDP growth, so they could say that the emergent order is here. Whereas Swift is looking at it saying, “Well, it’d be nice if we could, but the material constraints or the resource constraints, whatever, just do not allow for it.” And in a way, Brobdingnag is shown up as this utopia because that’s where he’s put in the cage, and they want to breed him, and he’s like, “It can’t happen.”

RAJAGOPALAN:

I think it’s also because he’s from Ireland.

OLIVER:

Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Right? So the Irish are—this has always puzzled me a lot, especially because there’s this deep connection between the Indian nationalist struggle against the British and the Irish home rule struggle. So actually, you know, a lot of the Fabians are talking to each other, and the Irish are helping the Indians, which is how I learnt for the first time . . .

I always thought of Ireland as a European country, right? They must be on the side of the colonizers. In fact, oftentimes they are drafted into the efforts of the British colonizing other places. But the truth of it is, Ireland was itself colonized in a pretty horrible way.

OLIVER:

Very badly.

RAJAGOPALAN:

But because they don’t look that different, and the digs about them being barbaric or poor or whatever it is are very subtle and made in a very English way, and they’re not written as horribly as they wrote it when they described the people of India or Africa and so on, we just don’t see Ireland as this colony that has deeply suffered.

OLIVER:

There’s also this political difference, which is that India is ruled by people who are sent from Westminster to rule at a distance, but Ireland is part of the United Kingdom.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly. It’s right there.

OLIVER:

It has seats in Parliament, and so it’s a colony within a country, in a way. Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly. So you have this situation where he’s deeply skeptical of this kind of overwhelming powerful state, but he also knows that you need the overwhelming powerful state to keep some kind of order.

But it in no way guarantees the progress of the people. It in no way guarantees that people will actually prosper, their lot will get better. You’re still having famines in Ireland after he wrote this book. It is horrifying. The starvation in Ireland is in itself a horror, given that the neighboring countries were so well off. Isn’t that horrifying in some sense?

OLIVER:

It is. No, it still is. Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

So it’s a lot like what’s happening with Laputa and what Laputa is doing to other places next to it.

OLIVER:

Yes.

Swift’s Pessimism

RAJAGOPALAN:

The lack of equality is very glaring. So sorry to come—this is the long answer to your question of, is he a depressed libertarian? I think he’s an Irish libertarian. He’s the ultimate insider-outsider, right? He’s involved in politics. He has a kinda-sorta seat at the table, but he knows that this is not an equal seat at the table because it’s Irish politics, which is never going to be the same thing as English politics and how important that whole system is and how many ribbons those guys get.

OLIVER:

Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

So I think that’s where the depressed element may be coming from. And I think this is sharper in some of other Swift’s books.

OLIVER:

Yes. Well, in some of the other books, I think he gets almost Randian. The way he talks about beggars and other sorts of people, there’s a kind of really hard edge to that. But I think in a way—

RAJAGOPALAN:

But it’s also frustration with his own people, right? He’s like, “Guys, come on. Rise. We can do this. We can make something of ourselves. We don’t need to just depend on our colonizer to show benevolence.”

OLIVER:

Exactly, which is a very libertarian response to a crisis.

RAJAGOPALAN:

It is a very libertarian response, but he also sees how tough circumstances are for them and how subjugation really works.

And I think that’s the deep insight in

Gulliver

, which is once you subjugate people and you impoverish them and you put them in these horrible circumstances, kind of like the Yahoos, then you’re going to have no empathy for them. You’re never going to be able to see them as an equal, and they will never see themselves as an equal and be able to rise up. Which is why the humanity, the dignity, the agency is so critical to his proto-libertarian idea, I think. So I really think he’s more Adam Smithian, even though he precedes him by 30-plus years.

OLIVER:

No, he’s quite Smithian. Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Right? But he’s really more of a classical-liberal Enlightenment scholar. In fact, I think I would go one step further, and I would say

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

, when he talks about sympathy and the impartial spectator, that is Adam Smith theorizing the idea. Gulliver has shown us—I mean, Swift has shown us in practice how it should work through

Gulliver’s Travels

. What does sympathy mean, and what does it mean to be an impartial spectator?

OLIVER:

And I think Swift is getting some of that from Locke. Locke is very good on—there’s a philosopher—Rebecca Lowe’s father was a great Locke scholar, and he talks about how Locke says we can only have a kind of quasi-perception of each other. We’re only sort of part aware of each other. This is obviously an important precursor to Smith. But Swift, I think, is essentially in the middle.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Is the bridge, yes.

OLIVER:

What does that really mean? How does quasi-perception work? What are the mistakes we make about each other? How do we use imagination and rationality to overcome that? And then how are we led into these errors of perception and reasoning about each other? Swift, in a way, is, again, more pessimistic than Smith. Smith is like, “It works great. We have fellow feeling.” He kind of has a free market in emotions. It all just works itself out.

RAJAGOPALAN:

He’s not Irish. He’s Scottish.

OLIVER:

Right. And he has a comfortable life, and his mother cooks his dinner, and that’s all great. But Swift is like, “No, no, there are hard limits on what we can achieve.”

But in a way, if you read this as a critique of—he’s a libertarian, but he’s critiquing it from the inside. That’s actually true. The libertarians have always overclaimed what can be done and what we can do without the state. And Swift’s trying to make compromises in the real world because he understands from Locke that we can never get this perfect knowledge. We’re constantly poking around.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes, and also that a stateless society is no party

either. And lots of crazy wars and anarchy and constantly fighting with each other to get order is not a great state of affairs.

OLIVER:

Right. The problem is in us.

RAJAGOPALAN:

The problem is in us.

OLIVER:

It’s not just in the government, right? We are the problem.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes. And the Yahoo in us is the problem, essentially.

Teaching

Gulliver’s Travels

OLIVER:

Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So should we start giving this book out on economics courses?

RAJAGOPALAN:

Absolutely.

OLIVER:

Should we be teaching this? I say “we.” It’s not going to be me; it’s going to be you.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I think it should be taught everywhere. So, okay, I have this major problem, and you can help me out here because you write about great books and literature. I don’t understand why this is not on every great book list. It’s not on most of them.

OLIVER:

Is it not?

RAJAGOPALAN:

No. And it’s astounding to me. My theory is that it’s because it’s funny, and I don’t know what form of literary criticism came about when, which decided that unless a book is, like, 700 pages thick and boring and you have to plod through it, it’s not a great book. Like, oh my god, we have to talk about people slowly unraveling and becoming mediocre in

Middlemarch

, and that’s what’s going to be a great book. We have to trudge through it.

OLIVER:

You’re one of the

Middlemarch

haters. [laughs]

RAJAGOPALAN:

I’m not a hater. I see the point of narrowly focusing on something very, very tiny because then you can really study the human condition, but I don’t think it’s the only way to, right? And I certainly don’t think you need these long monologues about disintegration of marriages to really understand the human condition. It’s a bit of a schlep, that book, let’s be honest, right?

OLIVER:

That’s not my experience of

Middlemarch

, but I understand.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Sure. No, but what I mean is, it’s unclear to me why a book that is written so well, that is so modern, that is so laugh-out-loud hilarious, is not part of a great book just because it’s funny. So I think it’s not on the list because people think it’s funny and it has potty humor.

OLIVER:

I don’t know what syllabuses it is and isn’t on. I know they read it at St. John’s on their Great Books Program.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Okay, good.

OLIVER:

I do think the 18th century is less interesting to most people, right? In the 16th century you have Shakespeare; 17th century is civil war, people killing, it’s always crazy, John Milton, whoopee; 19th century, all the novels everyone loves, Jane Austen, everyone goes to town on that.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Jane Austen ruined it. I love her, but . . .

OLIVER:

Well, maybe. But 18th century is just this big period that is actually kind of out of favor. People don’t read those novels as much. It’s—

RAJAGOPALAN:

Is it because our idea of what’s a novel changed?

OLIVER:

Hugely. Hugely.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly, right? This is what I learned from you.

Smith’s

Wealth of Nations

OLIVER:

But also just the 18th century generally, it’s so rational, it’s so—I have the same thing. Just not that many people are reading

Wealth of Nations

. It’s clearly one of the great texts in English. Forget the disciplinary boundaries. It’s one of the great books in English. But not that many people are reading it.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I think people don’t know how readable it is. So my recommendation to your listeners and to everyone is, usually

The Wealth of Nations

shows up with a great introduction by a great Smith scholar that runs 100 pages. Pretty much every edition. Please don’t read it. [laughter] Start with book one, chapter one, “Of the Division of Labor.” That’s where you should start reading the book.

So that’s my recommendation, and once you read it—it’s about a trifling manufacturer where they are making pins, and how you go from if one person had to do all 20 tasks, then you would get scarcely 20 pins a day, but if you divide it between 18 people, or the 18 tasks between 12 people, you can get 48,000 pins in a day. You start with that, I promise you it’s a page-turner. You will finish the book.

OLIVER:

There are some wonderful, wonderful passages in

Wealth of Nations

. I mean, he’s using exclamation marks. He gets angry. He makes jokes. Sometimes he gets very emotional. He’s actually a deeply humane and varied writer. He’s not this dry, technocratic economist. He’s very lively on the page.

RAJAGOPALAN:

He is. Actually, you know, a later edition—I want to say this is the fourth edition of

The Wealth of Nations

—he just takes the East India Company and the British Crown to the cleaners. He’s unsparing about what this kind of monopoly power has done, why it was given only to make sure that the public coffers of all these profligate kings seem to be functioning, and how that has destroyed an entire people.

OLIVER:

That’s where he says, isn’t it, he says, “Damn cheek, them telling us to mind how we spend our money when they’re constantly running a deficit. These people wouldn’t know how to keep a budget if their life”—he gets really sort of het up. It’s fantastic.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes. So he’s incredible in the sense that, like Swift, he can always see the practical point, which is the fellow human being and their prosperity and their well-being and their agency and their dignity. And that is at the center of everything Smith does. He can go into digressions of silver for, like, 55 pages and bore us to death.

OLIVER:

That, you can skip.

RAJAGOPALAN:

That’s how I feel about some passages in

Middlemarch

.

OLIVER:

[laughs] The Lydgate marriage is the silver digression to you.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I don’t know. Maybe some of it is useful, just like the silver digressions. But some of it is pretty exhausting. I’m like, “Oh my god, 50 pages of this is excruciating inner monologue. No, thank you.” But I read it.

But my point is, Smith can keep his eye on the ball, as Swift has been telling us to keep the eye on the ball. In Smith, I was reading about watches recently. I’ve become obsessed with watches, I was telling you, right? There are lots of watch examples in Smith.

OLIVER:

Smith loves watches.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Smith loves watches. Apparently that entire time period was fantastic for watches. Watches were the GPUs, okay? [laughter] No, really. I’m not making this up.

OLIVER:

Sure.

RAJAGOPALAN:

So, okay, this is another passage I’m going to request you to read. And someone’s written a QJE [

Quarterly Journal of Economics

]

paper on it

, which we can add in the transcript and the show notes based on this single passage.

OLIVER:

Oh, really? Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

This is Adam Smith, book 1, chapter 11.

OLIVER:

This is

Wealth of Nation

s?

RAJAGOPALAN:

The Wealth of Nations

.

OLIVER:

“This diminution of price has, in the course of the present and preceding century, been most remarkable in those manufactures of which the materials are the coarser metals. A better movement of a watch than about the middle of the last century could have been bought for 20 pounds may now perhaps be had for 20 shillings.” That’s great. That’s great.

RAJAGOPALAN:

That’s great, right? And someone tested it.

OLIVER:

Really?

RAJAGOPALAN:

And the way they tested it is, I want to—I don’t think I’m misremembering—the other one, too. I think I have another Smith passage here that I want you to read out to us. But they did this really incredible study where they get data from criminal cases of stolen watches. Because in watches, the only quality element that matters is accuracy. So it’s their size and their accuracy. And you know the price, because for stolen goods there’s a price.

OLIVER:

They write it down, yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

And so they actually look at whether this exact amount, what is the—

OLIVER:

The 20 pounds and 20 shillings.

RAJAGOPALAN:

—the 20 pounds to 20 shillings, that magnitude of improvement was made. It’s slightly lesser, is what they find.

OLIVER:

Oh, really? But he’s close.

RAJAGOPALAN:

He’s pretty close. He’s pretty close.

OLIVER:

Oh, that’s good.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes, it’s not too far off. Then there is this incredible passage which I want to find on export controls. That’s why I call them modern-day GPUs. So here is the passage I found for you on export controls, and you can just read these two, the middle and the last paragraph.

OLIVER:

Middle and the last. “Woolen yarn and worsted are prohibited to be exported under the same penalties as wool. Even white cloths we subject to a duty upon exportation, and our dyers have so far obtained a monopoly against our clothiers. Our clothiers would probably have been able to defend themselves against it, but it happens that the greater part of our principal clothiers are themselves likewise dyers.

Watch cases, clock cases, and dial plates for clocks and watches have been prohibited to be exported. Our clockmakers and watchmakers are, it seems, unwilling that the price of this sort of workmanship should be raised upon them by the competition of foreigners.”

RAJAGOPALAN:

So you have—watches require lots of different inputs, which require a lot of precision. British watchmakers are some of the best in the world. And you have this situation where British watchmakers don’t want the people who are making the inputs for those watches to be able to export those inputs to other countries because then the price of those inputs will go up, and watches in other countries will get cheaper and better. Tell me this is not the modern-day GPU and the export controls.

The Miracle of the Watch

OLIVER:

That is the GPU. That is the GPU. But also, things like this are why Gulliver has a watch in his pocket, and it’s why when he gets to Lilliput, they’re obsessed with the watch.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I know.

OLIVER:

Because in fact, it was a miracle.

RAJAGOPALAN:

It is a miracle.

OLIVER:

It was an incredible thing that was happening.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I have that passage too. There you go.

OLIVER:

So he’s thinking like an economist even in—

RAJAGOPALAN:

Here is the passage from

Gulliver

on the watch, and you know it well.

OLIVER:

[laughs] I love this.

RAJAGOPALAN:

So, to our dear watchers and listeners and readers, I will be walking around in the hallways or getting a cup of coffee in the office kitchen, and I will mention something to Henry, and he will just recite passages like this from memory.

OLIVER:

I don’t think I recite, exactly.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Close enough.

OLIVER:

Close enough.

RAJAGOPALAN:

But now you can actually recite it.

OLIVER:

“There were two pockets which we could not enter. These he called his fobs. They were two large slits cut into the top of his middle cover but squeezed close by the pressure of his belly. Out of the right fob hung a great silver chain with a wonderful kind of engine at the bottom.

We directed him to draw out whatever was fastened to that chain, which appeared to be a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal. For on the transparent side we saw certain strange figures circularly drawn, and thought we could touch them till we found our fingers stopped by that lucid substance. He put his engine to our ears, which made an incessant noise like that of a water mill, and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal or the god that he worships.

But we are more inclined to the latter opinion because he assures us, if we understand him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly, that he seldom did anything without consulting it. He called it his oracle and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life.” I mean, that is such a good satire. That’s like us and our phones.

RAJAGOPALAN:

It’s also such a beautifully written passage. Like, what better description of a watch to someone who may have never seen a watch?

OLIVER:

“A wonderful kind of engine,” yes. This reminds me, there’s a story in Aubrey, whose

Brief Lives

predate Swift, when a man had a watch, and it was obviously a new thing. And the maids come into the bedroom, and they are very scared because this strange object is making this noise, and they don’t know what the noise is. They’ve never seen a watch. No one’s ever spoken about a watch. What could this noise be? And they assume there must be a devil trapped in whatever this object is.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Or a god.

OLIVER:

So they get the fire tongs, and they pick it up at a distance, and they fling it out of the window because they’re terrified of being in the room with the devil contained in the box. And of course the watch is worth an awful lot of money, but thankfully it catches on a twig before it goes into the river below, and they manage to retrieve it later.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Well, I love this bit.

OLIVER:

So this to me is recalling that, and that kind of wonderment. Because there is in here the wonder at technology, right? Some of the way people react to LLMs is this kind of, you know, at the wonderful engine. I mean, that’s what people have been saying.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly. Oh, the LLMs part, I think—I hope I have printed it out for you. Here we are.

OLIVER:

This is from book three.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes, exactly. This is from book three, the Laputa parts.

OLIVER:

The machine.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Yes, I printed out a section for you called “Laputa and Anthropic.”

OLIVER:

[laughs] This is so funny. The Laputans’ constant fear of comets and the destruction of the Earth. Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN:

No, but the one after that, on the next page, is—

OLIVER:

The machine that automatically produces books at the Academy of Lagado. “The first professor I saw was in a very large room with 40 pupils about him. After salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a frame which took up the greatest path of both the length and breadth of the room, he said perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations.

But the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness, and he flattered himself that a more noble, exalted thought never sprang in any other man’s head. Everyone knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences, whereas by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge and with as little bodily labor, may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology without the least assistance from genius or study.”

I mean, they’re still saying this.

RAJAGOPALAN:

It’s incredible.

OLIVER:

These are the exact words that they come out with, right?

RAJAGOPALAN:

Exactly. We should tweet it.

OLIVER:

This is fantastic.

RAJAGOPALAN:

There should just be a

Gulliver’s Travels

Twitter account.

OLIVER:

I mean, “at a reasonable charge.”

RAJAGOPALAN:

“At a reasonable charge.”

OLIVER:

That is the language. He’s such a genius for that.

RAJAGOPALAN:

And he’s marveling at it. We are able to marvel at things because Gulliver is looking through that lens to be able to marvel at things.

OLIVER:

Yes. Great.

RAJAGOPALAN:

You can also become very quickly inured to any kind of great progress taking place in front of you.

OLIVER:

Yes. Well, “without the least assistance from genius or study.” I mean, that’s a nice little twist.

RAJAGOPALAN:

That’s a lovely twist, yes.

OLIVER:

Yes. This has

been fantastic, Shruti.

RAJAGOPALAN:

I know, and I hope everyone reads this book. And the thing, again, I keep saying again and again that I get out of it is the size and the perspective that I enjoyed as a kid, because it was so funny. The older I get, the more I realize that Gulliver is a giant in Lilliput because he behaves like a giant. He doesn’t trample over little people. He subjects himself to their rules. He asks permission of the king to stay or to leave. He does that everywhere he goes, actually.

And the king of Brobdingnag is a giant because he’s horrified by petty politics, and he acts like a giant. He would never use gunpowder and artillery against fellow people or animals and so on. And it’s easy to lose sight of that. Who is truly a good human being is something Swift is telling us through size and perspective. But at the end of it, the person who’s a really good human being is the person who has sympathy and who can see the—

OLIVER:

Yes, fellow feeling.

RAJAGOPALAN:

—fellow feeling, and who recognizes another human being. And that fellow feeling can’t just come from reason. It also needs to come from passion and sympathy, and if we can’t do that, then the purpose of our project has just collapsed.

OLIVER:

That’s the perfect ending point.

RAJAGOPALAN:

Excellent. This was such a pleasure.

OLIVER:

Shruti, thank you very much.

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