Can you think of any novels in which an economist plays the hero? No?

What about stories in which economists, or their ideas, are pilloried? Bet you don't have much trouble.

Environment minister Greg Hunt will have to acknowledge that greenhouse gases have declined thanks to the carbon price. Credit:James Boddington

There's the dialectical thug Nicholas Rubashov in Koestler's Darkness at Noon; the unsympathetic Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens' Hard Times; Napoleon and Snowball in Orwell's Animal Farm. If you categorise Marx's Das Kapital as an unfinished literary masterpiece, as Francis Wheen has done, then there's no shortage of grotesque figures in there either.

My suspicion is that you won't find an economist 'hero' in much literature outside of Socialist Realism.