On a post about Caroline Lucas and how her expertise in Elizabethan sonnets leads her to not understand perhaps the finer points of the economics of food retailing we get, as a comment:
Shall I compare thee to a Somerfield?
Thou art more grandly built with wider bays:
Fair winds do bargains for the shopper yield
And our consumers profit all their days.
Well done to Victor Southern.
In fact, I like that idea enormously. Rewrites of famous bits of poetry to explain economics to humanities graduates.If we can get enough pieces together I even know a publisher who would put it out.
Could even have some spoofs of prose pieces as well.
Start with the A level economics syllabus perhaps and then make sure there\’s a piece or two explaining each point….
Or maybe just look for decent spoof pieces.
Hell of a lot of work though, unless it can be crowd sourced…..
I have a degree in English Tim and I called the over spend of this government and the unsustainablity of the model a long long time ago. Before miost Economists , so much for them.
A couple of months ago I read the OU Economics degree course andf I was staggered that you could actully get points for something that I could pass in about a month,.
You would have alot more trouble with English . Caroline Lucas is only making a point that Conswervatives also worry about which is that the market can act like a Combine harvester when you have spent thirty years getting your lawn all perfect.The market does not ‘care ‘ for past of future
It can shut deep mines , destroy pools of skill , sweep away communal values and erode trust , the very things that it relies on . The same problem applies to farming.
In this case its a matter of evidence isn`t it ? Are the supermarkets operating as acartel or not , I have seen no evidence of it
Some need no invention.
The Deil’s Awa Wi’ The Exciseman
The deil cam fiddlin’ thro’ the town,
And danc’d awa wi’ th’ Exciseman,
And ilka wife cries, “Auld Mahoun,
I wish you luck o’ the prize, man.”
Chorus-The deil’s awa, the deil’s awa,
The deil’s awa wi’ the Exciseman,
He’s danc’d awa, he’s danc’d awa,
He’s danc’d awa wi’ the Exciseman.
We’ll mak our maut, and we’ll brew our drink,
We’ll laugh, sing, and rejoice, man,
And mony braw thanks to the meikle black deil,
That danc’d awa wi’ th’ Exciseman.
The deil’s awa, &c.
There’s threesome reels, there’s foursome reels,
There’s hornpipes and strathspeys, man,
But the ae best dance ere came to the land
Was-the deil’s awa wi’ the Exciseman.
The deil’s awa, &c.
As usual Mr Worstall is flippant and out of date with his neverending coat trailing;this time about the superiority of “scientific” Economics. Sorbonne and Cambridge students mutinied against the over mathematical Economics they were being taught in 2000/2001.They called it Autistic Economics and rallied round the Post-Autistic Economics banner.They were complaining not so much that the Autistic curriculum was boring but that it rested on the totally value-free play of numbers where if the figures worked out it did n’t matter if people did n’t have anything to live on.( In the same way Austrian propeller heads call for” the markets to clear” of their own accord ,never mind if the banks go bust and nobody has any money .Tough titty!The formulae are perfect !Mises got run out of town the only time he got anywhere near power.) Just to make matters better there was the Nobel Prize for the Black Scholes option pricing formula,which fulfilled the autistic dream of letting you feed complex information into a computer while you arrange much cherished Dinky toys in rows until it churns out answers.Wrong as it happened and causing the Long term Capital management fiasco. The formula for the Gaussian copula also
had the maths bods turning cartwheels of delight.Did n’t work either.
I would not like to be in the position Economists were in when the Queen confronted them with the question “If you’re so clever why did n’t you see the Credit Crunch coming?”At least Henry George who lacked education of any kind was able to predict that economies based on property bubbles would go bust and put his ideas into good English.