Philosophical musings on economics and optimism with no concrete allegations

manage them. This book doesn’t say how. It will open that can of worms, and others too, and try to track some but not all to their destinations. One look leads to another. This shows that I’m not an optimist in the sense of making rosy predictions. But I seem to show that bias in evaluations. I’m two thirds Panglossian. (Doctor Pangloss was the guy in Voltaire’s Candide who said that this is the best of all possible worlds.) I side with the good doctor in that I cannot imagine an improvement to this world or to the human race. I see the dangers and evils, such as Armageddonists, as somehow part of the scheme. The world would not be better if it posed no threats and challenges to solve. To solve them is not to wish them away. The stories of Aladdin’s lamp and the monkey’s paw tell us that each wish after the first is to undo the one before. I think that’s what Shaw was telling us in Don Juan in Hell. Don Juan and the others are free to go to heaven whenever they like, and occasionally do. They come back because they can’t stand the boredom. Where I find fault, and differ with Pangloss, is as to the doctrines we are taught. Whatever | study, I seem to find a good measure of nonsense taught along with wisdom. This book is about what | find of both in economics. And a problem | try to solve, not wish away, is the danger of losing sight of the points on which Pangloss was right. My verse and music try to remind us. And [Il admit a bias for the surprises my title promises. I love upending what we had all assumed. Fun! And all the more fun when | can show that famous economists had already seen and said some of the same things I do when we read those economists again. Surprise need not be true novelty. My free growth theory is really John Stuart Mill’s, although no one seems to have noticed the paragraph I quote from him. My next generation theory really belongs to my 17%-century rhymesake Sir WilliamPetty, who happens to be my nominee for greatest economist of all time. In a way, I could also credit it to the period of production theorists John Rae, Nassau Senior, William Stanley Jevons and Eugen von Boehm Bawerk. They need only to have considered human and total capital as explained by Petty two centuries before. Forward By The Author 04/18/16 3 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010915