Academic

TIM CAVANAUGH: Dickens is back. Watch your wallet. ?If you want to understand the economy, don?t ?

By Glenn Reynolds

TIM CAVANAUGH: Dickens is back. Watch your wallet. “If you want to understand the economy, don’t turn to the author of Oliver Twist for answers. . . . There are feudal elements in Dickensomics, a fondness for a universe where everything stays in its proper place. G.K. Chesterton shrewdly praised one of Dickens? literary virtues that others might treat as a vice: that his characters by and large do not change in the course of the story. But what comes across most clearly is a journalist?s fake sophistication about money, a belief that the wealth just somehow exists and needs only to get to the right people (or be returned to them, sometimes after being retrieved from Jews and moneylenders). It?s a boom-time mentality, the kind of thing you can only believe when you are, as Dickens was, well into a period of massive wealth creation, so that you have come to take good fortune for granted. If that?s Dickens? lesson for our Hard Times, somebody ought to call CNBC.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on June 16, 2009 (boomark / email).