Good news for rich uncles and orphaned heirs.

You may remember that I've been working my way through murder mysteries this winter. It turns out that one Agatha Christie mystery is fun, two are interesting, but once you get past three or four they start to raise real questions about the economic incentives of the early 20th century.

If Jane Austen made a pretty good case that an economic system dependent on inherited wealth is a bad idea because it might pressure your brilliant daughter to marry her idiot cousin, Agatha Christie added the compelling argument that the idiot cousin is probably going to kill you next. time you invite him for a long weekend.

I have been reading for the past month The ABC murders, The murder of the leftall “Poirot investigates” stories, Death on the Nilelike The evil under the sun And The murder of Roger Ackroyd back in early December. (Maybe there have been others too? After a while they all start to fade away.)

And with surprising regularity, the perpetrators' elaborate plans of murder and deception are designed specifically to gain an inheritance.

Perhaps they marry and repel heirs to finance a later marriage to their impoverished true love, or kill a childless brother or uncle before he has a chance to remarry and have another heir. Occasionally they invent baroque curses to explain the deaths of entire male lines; what looks like the wrath of a vengeful demigod turns out to be a nebulous cousin with mounting debts and too much time on his hands.

Our economy today is of course far from perfect. But while I know that taxation and inheritance laws have not been reformed to change the incentives of the slaughter-prone, it strikes me that today's equivalent of the upper middle class and landed gentry probably hasn't. to have a murder-based path to riches: by the time you've paid off debts and inheritance taxes, you'd be lucky if your dastardly crimes netted you enough for a down payment on an apartment in a big city.

(I am of course aware that Christie's books were fiction, not anthropological studies of the socio-economic structures of the early 20th century. But my point is that the plots wouldn't even be plausible today, not that this was actually a typical economic strategy in the past.)

Isn't it nice that amoral, penniless twenty-somethings can now channel their murderous instincts into, say, private equity jobs, instead of finding an heiress to marry and then murdering on an exotic mode of transportation? I never expected to be grateful that penniless younger brothers with a passion for exploring the 'Far East' can now become only mildly problematic travel influencers instead of engaging in multi-city killing sprees, or that charming young ladies with being able to sell real estate of modest means rather than commit murder and pin it on a romantic rival. Fiction really opens your mind to new perspectives on the world.

Reader Comments: Books you recommend

MJ Keyser, a reader in Portland, Oregon, recommends: “The age of uncertainty” by Astra Taylor:

Your newsletter on the design and complexity of infrastructure, and how when it falters it introduces uncertainty, is reminiscent of Astra Taylor's 'The Age of Insecurity'.

Taylor underlines how the insecurity caused by capitalism and individualism drives our modern experiences and further divisions. In essence, insecurity is the psychological impact of the uncertainty that arises when systems do not always work as expected or make meeting essential needs more difficult (or virtually impossible).

What are you reading?

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