The economist’s take on The Wizard of Oz.

With all the hype over Wicked and the recasting of the Wicked Witch of the West as someone, well, more potentially Pop-u-lar, I just want to take this opportunity to highlight one of the more entertaining papers of the dismal science, Hugh Rockoff’s 1990 paper “The ‘Wizard of Oz’ as Monetary Allegory,” Journal of Political Economy 98(4).

In short, the paper discusses how the story is an allegory for the Free Silver movement in the United States at the end of the 19th Century. The Wicked Witch of the West is President McKinley, and William Jennings Bryan is the populist politician aka The Cowardly Lion. While the Free Silver movement – aimed at restoring bimetallism to the backing of US currency – was hoping to counter deflationary pressures that were punishing debtors like Western farmers (the Scarecrow) and Eastern manufacturing employees (the Tinman), and can’t be seen as a real analogy to current economic chaos, it was definitely a period of economic transformation, growing industrial power poorly countered by government, and ripe for lasting artistic creations. I suppose one Silver lining of the coming troubles might be some fantastic art, touching even the dismal science of economics.

Photo credit: “The Western Sky” https://www.flickr.com/photos/thewesternsky/