“Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments, when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labors of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff, fortified by facts and figures, is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing … a statistical inquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind … is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments…” (1)I personally find neither economics nor writing to be easy enough, as evidenced by the scarcity of posts here this semester. I did find time, however, to read two of Dr. Leacock’s classics.
In Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich the eponymous targets are easy ones to satirize. Yet among the caricatures of an avaricious, inept, and hypocritical leisure class is a brief insider’s look at academia. In one story after a geology professor makes what seems a huge gold discovery, he shakes “with excitement; not of course, for the gold’s sake as money (he had no time to think of that), but because if this things was true it meant that an auriferous vein had been found in what was Devonian rock of the post-tertiary stratification, and if that was so it upset enough geology to spoil a textbook. It would mean that the professor could read a paper at the next Pan-Geological Conference that would turn the whole assembly into a bedlam.” (2) Citation count implications, of course, trump any financial or practical implications.
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town has more nuance but on the surface even less economics. Still, Dr. Leacock displays an economist’s grasp of nonjudgmental euphemism. (Ever since reading Hortaçsu and Syverson’s QJE article, I’ve been repeating the phrase “investor with high search costs.”) One of the sketches is about an activity of the Knights of Pythias which “are by their constitution, dedicated to temperance. [Attending is] Henry Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, also a Knight of Pythias, with a small flask…in his hip pocket as a sort of amendment to the constitution.” (3)
Stephen Leacock is compared frequently to Mark Twain, but Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town reminded me more of the present-day radio storytellers Garrison Keillor and Stuart McLean. Yet, perhaps his work is better regarded as a natural extension of “the Great Humorists from Chaucer to Adam Smith.” (4)
(1) Leacock, Stephen. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Page 6 in the Norton 2005 edition.
(2) Leacock, Stephen. Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich. Page 36 in the 2001 Canadian Critical Edition.
(3) Leacock, Stephen. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Page 40 in the Norton 2005 edition.
(4) Leacock, Stephen. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Page 68 in the Norton 2005 edition.
