Of Economists and Sense of Humour

Before I pack my readings for this semester and leave them on some shelf to gather dust in the faint hope that they may be picked up again someday for providing further enlightenment, I want to quote Mr. Solow, whose arguments I had to critically examine in my examination today.

In the chapter Circumstantial Evidence of his book, The Labour Market as a Social Institution, Robert M. Solow writes:

"I want to sidle up to my subject indirectly by first saying something about the relationship of academic scholarship to common sense. On the whole, scholars enjoy confuting common sense. They like to show that what "everyone thinks" is all wrong. We all take obvious pleasure in creating a sensation by nonplussing the conventional wisdom. It feeds our sense of doing something of value. You can see this happening in subjects as diverse as history and astronomy. There is particular pleasure in demonstrating that Thomas Jefferson was not a virtuous man, or that there are objects, like black holes, with amazing properties. So also in economics."

Another chapter in JNU comes to a close.