We got back the other day from a Cape Cod vacation, and I was reading over the last few issues of the Financial Times to make sure I didn’t miss anything important.
And I had the odd impression that I was actually catching on to something.
Articles about Yemen, Germany, Bahrein. An article about the Durban summit on the environment (heard much about that in the American news, kids?). A commentary by Lawrence Summers.
It all began to feel like – well, do you remember that scene in “A Beautiful Mind” when the crazy genius mathematician John Nash (played by Russell Crowe in a very tight t-shirt) began to understand how everything fit everything together?
(Of course, John Nash was insane.)
But this little epiphany of mine doesn’t feel insane. This feels like the edge of enlightenment. It feels if, if I only knew a tiny bit more about the world economy, the role of Brazil, the intentions of India and China, I could actually figure out what was going to happen next.
It was exciting.
This is probably what economics is all about. I suspect this is what economists feel like all the time; they seem so dry and bookish, but they’re constantly in a state of orgasmic epiphany. A few months ago, when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was first accused of sexual abuse, the obnoxious Ben Stein did a piece on CBS Sunday Morning defending him (which he basically repeated in print, in the American Spectator), stating (among other things) that such a man wouldn’t do such a thing.
The implication was that respected economists don’t do sex.
I rather suspect that they do.
Another epiphany!
So give me the Nobel Prize already.
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