Carl Remick wrote:
From: Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
michael perelman wrote:
Department of Economics 6106 Rockefeller Hall
That's a nice touch, isn't it?
It would be a nicer touch if it were 666 Rockefeller Hall.
This reminded me of a passage from Mencken I quoted in the intro to Wall Street:
I must confess that I am not a "trained" economist. For someone not initiated into the priesthood, several years spent exploring the sacred professional literature can be a traumatic experience. One of the finest glosses on that experience came long ago from, of all people, H.L. Mencken, in his essay "The Dismal Science": "The amateur of such things must be content to wrestle with the professors, seeking the violet of human interest beneath the avalanche of their graceless parts of speech. A hard business, I daresay, to one not practiced, and to its hardness there is added the disquiet of a doubt." That doubt, Mencken wrote - after conceding that in things economic he was about as orthodox as they come - was inspired by the fact that the discipline
<blockquote>
hits the employers of the professors where they live. It deals, not with ideas that affect those employers only occasionally or only indirectly or only as ideas, but with ideas that have an imminent and continuous influence upon their personal welfare and security, and that affect profoundly the very foundations of that social and economic structure upon which their whole existence is based. It is, in brief, the science of the ways and means whereby they have come to such estate, and maintain themselves in such estate, that they are able to hire and boss professors.
</blockquote>
Apostates, Mencken argued, were far more unwelcome in the field than in others of less material consequence (like, say, literary studies).
