Bernard Mandeville

Bernard Mandeville is introduced in 【旧番重听】蜜蜂经济学 through The Fable of the Bees. The episode uses his hive metaphor as an early economic imagination of how private appetite, self-interest, or even vice could produce public prosperity.

In the source, Mandeville is not treated as evidence about beekeeping itself. He is the first step in a sequence that moves from moral parable to James Meade’s positive-externality model and then to 张五常 / Zhang Wuchang’s empirical look at pollination contracts. That contrast makes him useful as background for Externality Internalization and Pollination Service Market rather than as an agricultural industry source.

Connections

• 【旧番重听】蜜蜂经济学 — source episode that uses Mandeville as the opening economic-history reference.
• James Meade and 张五常 / Zhang Wuchang — later figures in the episode’s theory-to-contract sequence.
• Externality Internalization and Pollination Service Market — concepts that emerge after the episode moves beyond Mandeville’s metaphor.