Aging & Wisdom Quote by Alfred Marshall

Marshall is giving away one of the quiet tricks of social change: you don’t move a public by spreadsheets, you move them by ancestor worship dressed up as morality play. The line flatters “poets and social reformers” as civilizational coaches, but it also gently needles them. “Enchanting stories” is doing double duty. It acknowledges narrative’s power while hinting that these tales are, at least partly, spellwork - selective memory, polished legend, a bit of necessary illusion.

As an economist writing in late-Victorian Britain, Marshall watched a society strained by industrial capitalism: urban poverty, labor unrest, widening class divides, and a rising belief that markets needed moral scaffolding. His “nobler life” isn’t abstract virtue; it’s social discipline, civic-mindedness, and a willingness to accept reform without tearing the whole system down. In that context, hero-stories become soft governance. They offer a shared script that can temper resentment and recruit people into patience, duty, and incremental improvement.

The subtext is almost anthropological: every era raides the past to argue with the present. Heroes of old aren’t just admired; they’re deployed. By invoking them, reformers smuggle contested values into the bloodstream as tradition rather than politics. That maneuver makes change feel less like coercion and more like continuity.

Marshall’s intent isn’t to dismiss reformers; it’s to explain their method and, implicitly, to legitimize it. If economics is about incentives, he’s reminding us that moral imagination is an incentive system too - one that pays in belonging, meaning, and the promise of being worthy of the story.