TY - JOUR AU - Subramanian, Sreenivasan PY - 2017/03/01 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - A Leacockian View Of Economics Today JF - The New School Economic Review JA - NSER VL - 9 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - UR - https://nsereview.org/index.php/NSER/article/view/37 SP - 29-37 AB - <p>Stephen Leacock published a book called Nonsense Novels in 1911. Drawing mainly on the stories in that volume (and indeed employing the same titles), and also on some other of Leacock's writings, the ensuing oerings are a re-telling of the Leacock pieces employing themes in economics and economics-related matters. It is worth recalling that Leacock himself was an economist, being, in real life, Professor of Political Economy at McGill University, Canada. The excuse for the present set of imitations of imitations is that the author, like Leacock, was also a professor of Economics who had to retire for reasons of growing old but not (just as in Leacock's case) for reasons of growing up: as Leacock said in his Preface to his Nonsense Novels, 'The reviewers...were good enough to express the thought that when the author grew up and became educated there might be hope for his intellect. This expectation is of no avail. All that education could do in this case has been tried and has failed. As a Professor of Political Economy..., the author admits that he ought to know better.' So ought the present writer, but what contributed to Leacock's Literary Lapses (if not to his Political Economy) should be bad enough to contribute to the present writer's own lapses, too.</p> ER -