Your morning economics lesson

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

Economics and balls

From Larry, via an old fraternity brother.
The sport of choice in the inner city is BASKETBALL.
The sport of choice for blue-collar workers is FOOTBALL.
The sport of choice for white collar workers is BASEBALL.
The sport of choice for middle management is TENNIS.
The sport of choice for corporate executives and officers is GOLF.

Which leads to this conclusion: The higher you go in the power structure, the smaller your balls become.
There must be a ton of people in Washington playing marbles.