Bees build a sweeter economy
But, Oh, ye Gods! What Consternation,
How vast and Sudden was the Alteration!
In half an Hour the Nation round,
Meat fell a Penny in the Pound;
The Price of land and Houses falls;
Miraculous Palaces, whose walls,
Like those of Thebes, were raised by Play
Are to be let ...
The building Trade is quite destroyed;
Artificers and not employed;
No Limner for his Art is fam'd,
Stone Cutters, Carvers are not named.
Not Merchants now, but Companies
Remove whole Manufactories.
All Arts and Crafts neglected lie;
Content, the Bane of Industry,
Makes them admire their homely store,
And neither seek nor covet more.
Vain costs are shunn'd as moral Fraud;
They have no forces kept abroad,
Laugh at the Esteem of Foreigners,
And empty Glory got by wars ...
The Show it gone, it thins apace,
Bare Virtue can't make Nations live
In Splendour. They that would revive
A Golden Age, must be as free,
For Acorns as for Honesty.
Luxury employs a Million of the poor
And odious pride a Million more.
Envy itself, and Vanity,
Are Ministers of Industry;
Their darling folly, Fickleness,
in Diet, Furniture and Dress -
This strange ridiculous vice made
The very Wheel that turned the Trade.
I wish I could have come up with this nice fable, but didn't. And
if you thought this is some Wall Street, libertarian, Republican
limerick - guess again.
You can find the above lines, written by Bernard de Mandeville
(1670-1733), and more, in (hold your breath) John Maynard Keynes'
General Theory. He explicitly states that de Mandeville "saw the
truth" about what makes societies "click" whereas economists
relying on "easy logic and hypothesis inappropriate to the facts"
went all astray. In fact the above fable is just a very small part
of a massive treatise, where Mandeville does in-depth historical
analyses to justify each of the fable's lines...
Reuven Brenner holds the Repap Chair at McGill's Desautels Faculty of Management. the article draws on his books, Betting of Ideas, Labyrinths of Prosperity and Force of Finance
Read full article: , October 1, 2011
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