Jacob Sider Jost is a professor of English at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit Oxford's Website. https://academic.oup.com/eic/article-abstract/66/3/301/2352595?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Sider Jost, Jacob. The Interest of Crusoe. Essays in Criticism 66, no. 3 (2016): 301-319. https://academic.oup.com/eic/article-abstract/66/3/301/2352595?redirectedFrom=fulltext

MARX PROFFERS THIS IRONIC ASIDE as a comment on
the history of economic thought (he is thinking, his footnote explains, of David Ricardo):
As political economists love Robinson Crusoe stories
[Robinsonaden], let us first look at Robinson on his island.
Undemanding though he is by nature, he still has needs to
satisfy, and must therefore perform useful labours of various kinds: he must make tools, knock together furniture,
tame llamas, fish, hunt and so on. Of his prayers and the
like, we take no account here, since our friend takes pleasure in them and sees them as recreation.
The same observation would have served him well had he
added it to his long list of prophecies: according to William S.
Kern, the golden age of economic Robinsonades was in the generation following Marx. For a succession of neoclassical theorists interested in the microeconomic choices made by isolated,
rational individuals, Crusoe’s island setting proved to be a congenial laboratory for thought experiments. Crusoe survives as
a microeconomic exemplum today, for instance in the
Principles of Economics textbook written by the professional
economist and amateur moral philosopher Gregory Mankiw,
who asks his students to apply the concepts of opportunity cost
and comparative advantage to ‘Robinson Crusoe’, who ‘can
gather 10 coconuts or catch 1 fish per hour’, and ‘his friend
Friday’, who can ‘gather 30 coconuts or catch 2 fish’ in the
same amount of time.