"An Economist"
Economists study how society produces and distributes its scarce resources.
An economist pretends to know
Why things are made and how they flow.
He studies men’s biggest woe,
He wants it all, what to forego.
Like a machine with unseen gears
Through greed a solution appears.
By making what men hold most dear
Profits are earned by serving peers.
To boost theirs and the common's gain
Become experts in their domains.
To make one thing well they attain,
Through trade the rest they obtain.
But their profits diverge by much.
Those with great tools earn a whole bunch.
Tools like machines, schooling and such
Boost production so very much.
EconRhymes @ Amazon
I should also give credit to Mankiw's Blog for introducing the poem to me.
Dates? Fellow Travelers? Hmmm. Today we analyzed some statistical data from a student's MEAP scores. I was surprised to learn that the student in question had answered 0/14 of his/her "geography" questions correctly. Our instructor pointed out that geography, unlike history, is no longer taught in most high schools, as if to suggest that the two fields are mutually exclusive!
ReplyDeleteHow can one teach about the transatlantic crossings of Columbus, for example, without situating him with the historical milieu of which he was a part. An important consequence of Vasco da Gama's 1498 voyage around the Cape of Good Hope (which is located on the tip of South Africa for those of us who are non-geography majors!) was that it enable Portugal to bypass Venetian merchants and dominate the spice trade with India. But what does geography have to do with history anyways?