I have just sent this note off to a publisher about a book I would like to edit. I recently wrote a rejection for an article on John Stuart Mill that was sent back to me three times after which they asked me to write a reply since they were going to publish it anyway. I was coincidentally also refereeing another article at the time for a different journal which has come back for a second time since I think the other referee must have liked it and they will publish notwithstanding anything I might say which is also about Mill. It was then with the two of them together that I finally worked out that no one knows what Mill wrote or what he means. I very strangely fell into Mill’s economics as just part of my reading things that seemed interesting and was immediately captured by his logic and good sense. I didn’t read it the way most academics do, as a kind of deciphering exercise with modern economics as the standard of excellence. I instead read it with an open mind just for interest. My Free Market text is almost literally an amalgam of Mill, Henry Clay and a smattering of more modern gadgetry. So this is the note I wrote:

I copied you in on an earlier email in which I mentioned an idea I had proposed to you quite some time ago. As I noted, John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy is the least accessible economics text from amongst the whole of the economics literature. It is not just that it is long-winded, but it contains so much that is completely foreign to a modern economist that it is straightforwardly impenetrable. It also delves into vast oceans of explanation that exhaust even the most patient reader. And there are chapters one after another that deal with issues that might have been current in 1848-1871 but which are of no relevance today. My wish is to put together a more compact Mill that is directed at people who would like to understand what Mill was saying that is relevant today but do not have any idea where to start. And to tell the truth, I think there is hardly anyone else alive who could do it. I will attach an article of mine on Mill’s “Fourth Proposition on Capital” which I have described as economic theory’s version of Fermat’s Last Theorem. No one has been able to make sense of it since 1876 although many have tried, including Marshall, Pigou, Taussig, Keynes and Hayek, not to mention modern commentators such as Harry Johnson and Sam Hollander. No one can even make it make sense, whereas I just included it in my Free Market Economics and teach it to my students who find it perfectly straightforward. They wouldn’t even know there’s a controversy or why it’s controversial since really, it makes perfect sense. Therefore in editing Mill, each of the chapters that I would want to include would also require some kind of introduction so that someone could get past the 150-word sentences and see the point. It is, of course, hard for me to judge whether this would be a commercial proposition for you but for me it would represent an important contribution to the economics literature and for that reason may also sell.

What has made this seem more urgent than before was a paper I recently refereed which I rejected three times before being told that based on the other referee they had decided to publish but invited me to write a response which I have now done. You will see the kinds of things in the article that are found in Mill but which are incomprehensible today. Even scholars who write on these issues are unable to comprehend what classical authors believed and why it might be relevant today. But the thing is, Mill is the comprehensive answer to so much of what is wrong with economic theory today. I just find myself surprised to discover that I am one of the few people around who can explain what Mill wrote. I read others who write on Mill and almost no one seems to read Mill directly but only in second-hand form, much the same as with Adam Smith. Anyway, this would interest me to put together and I would like to think of this as my next major project.

What gets me is that if you merely apply Mill to current economic events and policies, the outcomes are perfectly obvious.