Exploring Tolstoy’s Timeless Parable on the Perils of Unchecked Ambition and Its Relevance to Modern Economic Inequality
by Nick Romeo
Following excerpts adapted from author’s news book, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy, published by Hachette Book Group
In 1886, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote a short story called “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” The protagonist is a poor farmer named Pahóm who dreams of becoming a wealthy landowner. “If I had plenty of land,” he muses early in the story, “I shouldn’t fear the Devil himself!”
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| Leo Tolstoy |
The Devil, however, is listening. Seeing in Pahóm’s craving a chance to gain power over another soul, the Devil orchestrates a series of events. At first, everything seems to go well. Pahóm borrows money to buy more land. He raises cattle and grows corn and becomes prosperous. He sells his lands at a profit and moves to a new area where he can buy vast tracts for low prices.
He’s briefly content with the bustle of building and settling down, but as he grows accustomed to this new prosperity—he’s ten times richer than before—Pahóm becomes dissatisfied. He still must rent land to grow wheat, and there are quarrels with poorer people who want to use the land or leave it fallow to regenerate. Owning more himself would make everything easier.
He soon hears of a distant tribe called the Bashkirs, who live on a fertile plain by a river and will sell huge parcels of land for almost nothing. He buys tea and wine and other gifts and travels to meet them. They welcome him warmly, giving him kumiss to drink and killing a sheep to share the meat with him.
After he presents them with gifts, they ask which of their possessions he likes best, so they can reciprocate his generosity. “What pleases me best here,” he says, “is your land. Our land is crowded, and the soil is exhausted; but you have plenty of land and it is good land. I never saw the like of it.” Their chief explains that they sell land by the day. For the minuscule price of a thousand rubles, he can have as much land as he can cover in a day of walking. Starting at sunrise from the top of a small hill, he can walk the perimeter of the land he wants, marking boundaries by digging small holes and piling up the dirt. If he returns to the starting point before sunset, the land is his. If he does not, he forfeits the thousand rubles.
After a sleepless night on a bed of feathers in a Bashkir tent, Pahóm sets out the next morning through the high grass of the steppes. In the cool of the morning he makes good time, pausing periodically to dig holes and look back at the tribe on the hilltop. The farther he goes, the better the land seems. He slips off his uncomfortable boots to walk even faster. By noon, he is hot and tired, but after a brief rest for some bread and water, he continues. If he can just suffer through one day of pain, he thinks, he will have the rest of his life to enjoy the benefits.
He pushes through the afternoon heat and his growing fatigue to trace another side of an envisioned square. He’s about to return when he sees an especially appealing hollow of lush land. He marks it and starts back to the hilltop shimmering in the distant haze. The sun is already sinking toward the horizon, and he’s still miles away.
Just when he needs to quicken his pace, his fatigue is mounting. His bare feet are cut and bruised, he’s exhausted from the heat, and the muscles in his legs are faltering. He starts to realize he should have returned sooner. But he manages to quicken his pace, tossing aside his boots and water flask and coat.
Soon he is struggling to breathe. His shirt and trousers are soaked with sweat, his heart is hammering in his chest, and his lungs are heaving like the bellows of a blacksmith. He is near enough now to hear the Bashkirs shouting encouragement. The sun, huge and blood red in the evening mist, is almost completely below the horizon. From where he stands, it appears to have vanished, but on the hilltop he sees the Bashkirs still illuminated by light. With a final ferocious push he charges up the hill, reaching the point from which he started just as the sun dips below the edge of the sky. “He has gained much land!” the chief exclaims with admiration.
Pahóm collapses with hands outstretched. When his servant comes forward to help him rise, a stream of blood flows from his master’s mouth. The Bashkirs click their tongues in pity. His servant takes the spade and digs a simple grave six feet long. With Pahóm’s death and humble burial, the question in the story’s title is answered: that’s all the land a man needs.
It might seem odd to begin a book about the shape of a just economy in the twenty-first century with a fictional story about peasant life in the nineteenth century. A book that aspires to illuminate the structure of a more fair and sustainable economy today must explore plausible solutions to wealth inequality, environmental collapse, the evaporation of good middle-class jobs, the casualization of a growing number of workers, the outsized influence of investment capital, the erosion of democratic governance in the private and public sectors, and more. The following chapters explore these subjects in detail.
Yet Tolstoy’s short story strikes directly at the economic dogmas that have contributed to all of these contemporary problems. He shows the dangers of rationality divorced from moral purposes. He grasps the psychological mechanisms of acquisitive mania and shows how it causes suffering. He hints at the ecological effects when such behavior permeates society: Pahóm alone is not responsible for the “exhausted” soil, and the story’s description of individuals pursuing private gain and depleting a vital resource anticipates game theorists’
collective action problems. He depicts an arrogant disregard for traditional ways of life and a brazen attempt to profit by their destruction.
Tolstoy was not an economist, yet in one story he illuminated more about wealth, psychology, and ethics than most professional economists do in a lifetime. Pursuing growth at all costs, Pahóm behaves with the profit-maximizing rationality of orthodox economic models, expanding into new regions of perceived opportunity and ignoring negative externalities like the exhausted soil and his damaged relationships. For a time, this cycle of expansion looks like success. But the idea that an externality—indirect costs or benefits of economic transactions—can remain external is soon exposed as a beguiling myth. He’s ultimately unable to escape the consequences of his own greed.
At a subtler level, Tolstoy shows just how seductive flawed choices can be. At every stage, Pahóm has apparently good reasons for expanding: his neighbors are obnoxious, not renting is more efficient, the land’s prices are low, its quality is high. In a narrow sense of the term, he’s behaving rationally. Yet a series of seemingly rational decisions somehow culminates in catastrophe.
At each new level of wealth, instead of enjoying the resources he already has, he quickly becomes dissatisfied, returning to a previous level of happiness in a pattern sometimes called the hedonic treadmill. Even very late in the story, Pahóm still has the option to forfeit the trivial sum of a thousand rubles, rest in the grass, and walk leisurely back to the tribe. Yet by this point, he is in the grips of a deadly sunk cost fallacy. He has already invested so much effort; it would be foolish to stop now! So he continues pouring more energy into a doomed endeavor. Moments before his death, he realizes this. “I have grasped too much and ruined the whole affair,” he thinks. Like the heroes of ancient Greek tragedy, he recognizes a vital truth only when it is too late.
Copyright © 2023 by Nick Romeo
Nick Romeo covers policy and ideas for The New Yorker and teaches in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The MIT Technology Review, and many other venues.
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