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What is the role of the economy in our everyday lives?
Central Essay
Chatting with customers is for the good-looking young college-educated servers in the
downtown carpaccio and ceviche joints, the kids who can make $70–$100 a night.
What had I been thinking? My job is to move orders from tables to kitchen and then
trays from kitchen to tables. Customers are in fact the major obstacle to the smooth
transformation of information into food and food into money — they are, in short,
the enemy.
Classic Essay
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that
a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and
wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or broiled; and I make no doubt
that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
Other Voices
And as the captain of a ship is bound to be the last man to leave his ship in case of
wreck . . . so the manufacturer, in any commercial crisis or distress, is bound to take
the suffering of it with his men, and even to take more of it for himself than he allows
his men to feel; as a father would in a famine, shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice himself
for his son.
To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who
underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern
white man, who is their next-door neighbour, I would say: “Cast down your bucket
where you are” — cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of
all races by whom we are surrounded.
I live from the refuse of others. I am a scavenger. I think it a sound and honorable
niche, although if I could I would naturally prefer to live the comfortable consumer
life, perhaps — and only perhaps — as a slightly less wasteful consumer owing to
what I have learned as a scavenger.
We have been told for years to bow down before “the market.” We have placed our
faith in the laws of supply and demand. What has been forgotten, or ignored, is that
the market rewards only efficiency. Every other human value gets in its way.
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, What the Bagel Man Saw 443
His economist friends thought he had lost his mind. They made oblique remarks
(and some not so oblique) about “a terrible waste of talent.” . . . Driving around the
office parks that encircle Washington, he solicited customers with a simple pitch: early
in the morning, he would deliver some bagels and a cash basket to a company’s snack
room; he would return before lunch to pick up the money and the leftovers. It was an
honor-system commerce scheme, and it worked.
Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own
inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or
fix things. . . . It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still
for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.
The modern American Dream, for me, was this general prosperity and well-being for
the average person. European civilization had produced the great cathedrals of the
world. America had the two-car garage.
Poetry
Visual Text
Jeff Parker, The Great GAPsby Society (cartoon)
Jeff Parker, The Great GAPsby Society (cartoon)
Visual Text
Tom Tomorrow, This Modern World: A “Handy” Guide to the Housing Market (cartoon)
Tom Tomorrow, This Modern World: A “Handy” Guide to the Housing Market (cartoon)
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