It used to be, and maybe still is, that intro economics textbooks, in some early chapter or even the preface, refer to economics as ‘an art and a science.’ Paul Samuelson is widely credited with voicing the idea, but it’s rather ubiquitous.

Economics is not an exact science. It’s a combination of an art and elements of science. And that’s almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we’re improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.

– Paul Samuelson

In recognizing this fact, and to honor the many economists and other academics and scientists scrambling this week and into the foreseeable future to save he data and science being silenced and purged in the US, I’ve decided to focus on bringing more art to your day. I hope to keep doing this going forward with some regularity.

Today’s contribution: Ozymandias by Percy Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

One might also note that the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics went to a team who has worked for so long on the importance of inclusive institutions, level playing fields, development and prosperity of nations that they are widely known in the profession as “AJR”, or Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson. You don’t have to read esoteric economics journal articles to understand their increasingly relevant arguments. If you have somehow been untouched by their popular works like “Why Nations Fail“, “The Narrow Corridor,” or “Power and Progress” you can get a quick overview here

Poem and guide available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias

Image credit: Steve F-E-Cameron (Merlin-UK), CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons