This morning, Larry was reading Greg Mankiw’s NY Times editorial on 45’s tax plan. Mankiw is an economics professor at Harvard. To familiarize me with Mankiw, Larry played a country western economics song, Dual Mandate for me. I guess he was directed to this from reading Mankiw, and I incorrectly reported it as Greg. An alert reader (thanks, Dan) caught the error, but the video is still worth watching.
And Mankiw’s editorial in the Times is worth reading.
I don’t know any good poems on economics or business. As Dana Gioia has pointed out, business is the last taboo subject for poetry. I have one poem about money, and so you don’t miss a Monday poem, here it is.
Meditation on Money
I am thinking about a day forty years ago
when we were down to our last fifty cents,
and our friends drove up
with a month’s rent and groceries,
and after we ate and talked, we sat together
on the edge of the dock, saying nothing,
and watched the barnacles
slowly open their feathery lips,
slowly close them.
Meryl Natchez
Cute, but that’s not actually Mankiw, that’s a goofball who calls himself Merle Hazard (pun on Merle Haggard and “Moral Hazard” which is what happens when a system makes it such that the benefits of doing something accrue to the doer but the costs associated with things going wrong are payed by someone else, like an insurance company or the government).
The picture on this page shows Mankiw: https://www.amazon.com/N.-Gregory-Mankiw/e/B001H6Q104
Hey, Thanks s much Dan,I will correct this. I saw that he was calling himself Moral Hazzard, but thought he was just being cute. I will correct this.
Yeah, Merle Hazard is pretty funny, and has done lots of songs about economics, and probably is inspired by Mankiw, but they’re not the same guy 🙂