Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Best-Ever Economics Poem?

What is the best-ever economics poem? I would nominate Robinson Jeffers' "Boats in a Fog," available here. I quote only the climax:
A flight of pelicans
Is nothing lovelier to look at;
The flight of the planets is nothing nobler; all the arts lose virtue
Against the essential reality
Of creatures going about their business among the equally
Earnest elements of nature.
I wonder if there is a better.
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2 comments:

  1. The New York Crank6:16 PM

    I kind of like the Shakespearian sonnet that begins, "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action; and till action, lust is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame...."

    I mean, is this about deficit spending and the motivations surrounding it, or what?

    And by the way, who said economics ain't sexy?

    Yours crankily,
    The New York Crank

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  2. Mike G.11:34 AM

    Thomas Thornley, The 'Economic' Man (A Study in Deductive Political Economy):

    Companion of my wasted youth!
    With whom my infant fancy played,
    I took thee once for sober truth,
    In quaint habiliments arrayed;

    In thy strange 'laws' I loved to trace
    The custom of a vanished race.
    And, when maturer thought betrayed
    The fact that thou hadst never been,

    I let my former fancy fade,
    And set thee in a fairer scene,
    In prophet vision saw thee rise,
    In some industrial paradise.

    But now, as waking from a trance,
    I know thee for the thing thou art,
    A sordid hero of romance,
    A mummer with a foolish part,
    A joke economists have made,
    A ghost which common sense has laid.

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