Essays in Idleness

Once upon a time, I delivered a few informal lectures to aspiring financial journalists at Thammasat University in Thailand. This school was in an earlier phase of a transition into a batty, shrieking, left-wing nuthouse; but some were still sincerely teaching the little that was known about development economics. (Note, this involves supply and demand.) Today, the economic students at Thammasat and elsewhere are taught instead how to permanently disable and impoverish venerable nations, enslave unthinking populations, and spread chaos and violence in the cause of fashionable “revolution.”

Well, I was then young and naïve. I already knew that economic faculties in the West were under siege from what I call (accurately) “communists and perverts.” I was just learning that this is a universal phenomenon. The whole self-appointed “intellectual” world is on the left, and indeed, throughout the universities — probably since they replaced cathedral studia in the Middle Ages — they had not been a source of sober seminary training, but of dangerous revolutionary notions. We might think of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas as representative of the new academic institutions of the West. But rioting by spoilt, godless rich children was more commonplace, from the XIIth century, forward; and the young rioters then grew up into the professorial idiots who people the faculty associations. (Or perhaps I am being excessively sardonic.)

The example that is teasing me at the moment is the formula for calculating Gross Domestic Product. A whole Seyfert galaxy of cumulative evils, implicit in government spending, now counts as contributing to national wealth; and tax money is scornfully wasted that could have been spent productively. Inflation is everywhere.

The challenge I encountered then was not to advance this mad and maddening statistical game of GDP calculation, but to replace it with something meaningful.