Of Lists and the Dismal Science

 

I was walking Charlie Sunday morning around 8 a.m. (before the solar cauldron that is Texas in August overwhelms my poor friend in his fur coat) and I listened to a short video on, of all things, how to make a reading list.

Hey! I’m quite familiar with that.

In 2012 I made a list of Civil War books to read, and during Covid I made a list of WW II books to read. (I chose WW II because it kinda mirrored the scary uncertainty of that first Wu Flu month, but in the end the good guys won.) To date I’ve read 38 Civil War and 40 WW II books, following my reading plans loosely and flexibly.

In 2013 I spent the first five months reading through SF author Philip Jose Farmer’s bibliography, wading my way through fourteen of his works. The next year I read through an H. P. Lovecraft omnibus of 23 lesser and major tales. I’ve done similar excursions with theologian Derek Prince, SF author Robert Silverberg (who I enjoyed much more than Farmer), and eight of thirteen novels from English writer Bernard Cornwell’s Napoleonic saga.

Anyway, I was interested in this YouTuber’s take. He was using “Economics” as an example – how to create a reading list for the beginner in the field of economics.

This got me thinking. To me, economics literally is “the dismal science.” I took Micro and Macro 101 at Rutgers eons ago. I despised the in-the-trenches Micro but only mildly hated the birds-eye-view Macro. Later, at night school, I had to take one or the other again, and I have no memory of the course or my feelings towards it (but I doubt it changed). Back in 2016 when I took a little training course to be a tax preparer for H&R Block, I read a couple of books in the subject, emphasizing taxes, and somewhat sorta enjoyed it. The section on the National Economy of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics was tolerable, but that could be due to Sowell’s skills as a writer and teacher.

In my educated-but-not-specialized mind, economics is statistics mixed with Jeanne Dixon psychic fortune telling. Statistics can be bent, warped, twisted, and extorted to tell anything you want them to tell. Was it Mark Twain who said that thing about lies, damned lies, and statistics? And every economist seems to have his own agenda – an outcome or policy he wants to promote and propound that it’s almost worse than the free-for-all melee that it the history of philosophy. That guy Thomas Friedman, has he ever been right about anything? (Honestly, I don’t know, but I think I read a few things over the years about his less-than-stellar predictions that made me write the previous sentence.)

Hopper’s relationship with economics boils down to a handful of simple but intuitive aphorisms:

   

   * The more you tax something, the less you get. This applies to people’s earnings, too.

   * Trickle down economics work more often than it doesn’t (like, 60% of the time, depending on the state of the economy). Still, the best way to fire up the economy is to cut taxes.

   * The U.S. tax system screws the middle class – and by that I mean it does absolutely nothing to help grow it; it’s almost downright nasty to its millions of members.

   * The Democrats will mug you in broad daylight while the Republicans will only pickpocket you when you feel safest in a crowd.

   * The less government is involved in the economy, the better the economy will hum along.

   * Government programs NEVER go away.

   * The economy is a fragile spider web – one part snapping at the fringe can spell disaster to the entire latticework.

 

   * The government does not create jobs. Rich people with capital do.

 

   * Capitalism is the worst economic system devised by man – except for all the others.

 

   * Firms should only be interested in profit, not social engineering, not discrimination, not DEI, not pandering to (leftist) causes. When the GPS goes off of profit, you wind up in a lake with Michael Scott.

 

   * Stimulus checks have zero economic value.

   * Bubbles burst. When everyone’s talking about one thing, you’re in a bubble. Hear that, A.I.?

 

Sigh. Okay, I see what I just did to myself. Now I’m going to have to ride out the rest of the year working a reading list of books for people who hate economics but now feel the need to study the dismal science.