Poetry and Economics: Maintaining our link to humanity
It might seem that poetry and economics have little in common and can complement each other on even less. This is not so. The experience of poetry allows the economist to understand more fully what it is to exist within that which the economist studies.
Between the picture and the reality falls the shadow. Patrick Richards here reminds me of Godel. Between logic and truth lies the shadow. Between the machine and the human falls the shadow.
The shadow of our ignorance of how to express what it is to be human.
Thomas Nagel speculated that we shall probably never be able to express what that shadow is. That is, prose may never be capable of expressing what it is that makes us human; to fear, to hope, to desire, to need, to love and to live.
Neither can poetry. But poetry can evoke it. Poetry by its very nature can stir in us the passion of the human spirit.
Far cry from staid economics no? Not at all.
Economics is not the stuff of dry statistics and dead mathematical models of the economy. Statistics and mathematics are important tools which help us reason, but what we reason about is the very stuff of poetry. The stuff of economics is humanity.
We concern ourselves rightly with human fears, hopes, desires, needs, loves and lives. Our science, as Marshall said, is the science of everyday life.
There is a role for the economist as dispassionate, disinterested, detached scientist. There is a role for the application of the cold clear light of reason to strip away detail to get to the core of the matter. But even austere physical scientists are best when fired by the passion of wonderment to seek to understand great beauty in the natural world. The best economist is the economist who knows deeply what it is to fear, hope, desire, need, love and live and to be subject to the systems economic science studies.
To not know deeply what it is to fear, hope, desire, need, love and live is to not know what it is to be that which economic science studies: humanity.
It is the purpose of poetry to bring the experience of fear, hope, desire, need, love and life out of our hearts and to display it on the page to whip the streams of memory up at any moment into a torrent of experience.
That is why poetry is somewhere between vitally important and utterly necessary for the economist. It shows us what it is to be what we study.
Between a conjecture and a proof: “Nugget” Coombs and Judith Wright
A great proof of this (at least to my mind’s conjecture) is the life of H. C. “Nugget” Coombs. Not the great British or American economists in the halls of academia (though Keynes with his Bloomsbury group could serve), but in the life of a quiet bureaucrat at the end of the world.
Nugget Coombs studied economics as an undergraduate at the University of Western Australia and dutifully completed his PhD at the London School of Economics on Central Banking. He studied, as it happens, with one of the foremost Marxist economists of all time, Harold Laski. But after finishing he did not take up an academic job, instead he came home to Australia to work on the economic policy of the Australian government.
He will be best known to Australians as the first governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, established in 1959. He was in this role watcher of a Golden Age of security, prosperity and hope in the lives of Australians. Almost serenity. This was the “humane” era in Australian economic history.
His career didn’t end here, but he took what might appear to some to be an unusual route after stepping down as governor of the central bank. Rather than strictly “economic” positions in the Commonwealth Treasury or Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet he became a great advocate of issues not traditionally highly esteemed by economists. For that matter, he became a great advocate of issues not traditionally esteemed by the bulk of his fellow Australians.
He became a great advocate of the arts as a member of the Australian Elizabethan theatre trust, later persuading the Prime Minister to institute what became the Australia Council (which provides Federal support for the Arts) and to support the now vibrant Australian film industry. He (a white Australian) became a great advocate of the dispossessed aboriginal people, seeking ways to alleviate their plight, serving on the Australian Council for Aboriginal Affairs. He spent months at a time in the poverty-stricken and desperately remote communities of North Australia.
This advocacy was not the traditional path for an economist, but it did a great deal of good for Australia and Australians. Why did he do it? Why commit yourself to a life (not an easy one) of putting hard theory and statistics at the service of causes not well esteemed by economists, let alone your fellow countrymen?
I believe it was Coombs’ deep humanity, and I believe this was inspired by his deep relationship with poetry and art. I believe, in point of fact, that Nugget Coombs was one of Australia’s greatest public economists because of the influence over his life and thinking of Australia’s greatest poet, Judith Wright.
It is a travesty that Wright never won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was not only Australia’s finest poet, she was one of the greatest poets in the English language. Ever.
The passion of her work and the simple understated character of her writing is uniquely Australian and could only ever have been written by her. I for one was entranced from the very first stanza of “the Company of Lovers” in her own collection of her work, A Human Pattern
We meet and part now over all the world
we, the lost company
take hands together in the night, forget
the night in our brief happiness, silently.
We, who sought many things, throw all away
for this one thing, one only,
remembering that in the narrow grave
we shall be lonely
Between the model and the human lies the shadow and in that shadow lies that which makes us human, and a great poet like Judith Wright puts on the page what it is to live in that shadow.
We now know publicly the worst kept secret in Canberra for a half century. The greatest poet of Australia and the world was for a half century the passionate lover and every part intellectual partner of Nugget Coombs. Separated for months at a time while Nugget was traveling the length and breadth of Australia in public service, they would come together at Wright’s farm to be reunited. They would walk in the bush, bathe in the rivers and billabongs and read (and live) poetry.
I find it very difficult to imagine that this had no effect on Coombs’ life and thought. And I find it extremely difficult to imagine that it would have had no influence on his thinking about economics, the science of everyday life. I have no doubt at the very least that Coombs’ compassion (in the old sense of that word) was deepened and matured by the influence Wright had on his thinking by her poetry and her taking of what it is to be human and putting it on a page.
Australia I believe has benefited greatly from the influence of its poets over its economists. The manner in which its poets (powerful men and women of the likes of Banjo Patterson, Henry Lawson, Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Les Murray) have inspired passion and compassion in its economists and shown them what it is to be so fully that which they study.
The same argument I think could be made for Keynes with respect to the influence of the Bloomsbury group and his wife the great ballerina Lydia Lopokova.
To live and to feel that, to know what it is to have human life is to know what the numbers of the statistician, and the models of the mathematician are showing. To know what it is to have human life is to know why they matter, and how the reason of the economist is not about dead matter but about life. To know what it is to have human life makes the economist a better economist.
The poet and the economist: a valuable pair
Frank Hahn once dismissed a dear advisor of mine as an “economic poet” for the lack of equations in his beautiful writing. Certainly the argument could be made that the economist and the poet would be a valuable pair for the sake of teaching the economist how to write! Albert Hirschman was said to write better in his third language than most economists do in their first.
But I think the value of the poet for the economist goes deeper than that. The poet can’t explain what it is to fear, hope, desire, need, love and live. Probably no one can. But the poet can express it on the page and move the spirit of the reader to know more fully what it is to be human. I think that’s vital for us as economists because that is what we study. Humanity in the everyday business of life.
I remember George Orwell in Politics in the English Language showing that the poet can make a point more powerfully in a few lines than any academic in paragraph after paragraph. Think of William Blake:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise
Or Shakespeare, though it is gauche to quote him:
To be, or not to be — that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.
Or Les Murray:
Snobs mind us off religion
nowadays, if they can.
Fuck thém. I wish you God.
Or TS Eliot:
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor –
And this, and so much more? –
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
I must admit TS Eliot is a particular favourite of mine. I believe that no economist can read Ash Wednesday without being moved to know what it is to live in a world of uncontrollable vagaries and have to seek solace in trust the conviction of one’s actions in the face of that to a higher being.
No economist worthy of the name can read Hesiod’s Works and Days or Xenophon’s Oeconomicus without being moved by the vision presented of a bucolic existence in a retired country life working at agrarian industry. It can’t but challenge us to consider what it is to be happy, and be pushed to defend the importance of modern industry to it.
The poet has much to value offer the economist. No economist is a good economist who does not know deeply what it is to be a human subject to the economic system; to fear, hope, desire, need, love and live. The poet offers us a means to know these things more deeply. The poet shows on the page to the economist what it is to be what it is that we study.
