An Indian Upon God

I passed along the water's edge below the humid trees,
My spirit rocked in evening light, the rushes round my knees,
My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the moorfowl pace
All dripping on a grassy slope, and saw them cease to chase
Each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak:
Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong or weak
Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky.
The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from His eye.
I passed a little further on and heard a lotus talk:
Who made the world and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk,
For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide
Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide.
A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes
Brimful of starlight, and he said: The Stamper of the Skies,
He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He
Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me?
I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say:
Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay,
He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night
His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.

W. B. Yeats 

Stop Press: No One Wins Nobel Economics Prize

Yet again, press reports that someone has won the Nobel prize for economics are misguided. There is no such prize. There is a prize given by a bunch of bankers which, in typically dishonest banking style, they named after Nobel despite it having no connection with the fund that he set up to reward actual scientific progress.

This prize is handed out every year to which ever political economist (to give the field it's full name) has managed to publish work which most defends the status quo of the banking world. This is generally done by choosing a political stance and then finding a mathematical model which, by dint of ignoring everything that doesn't neatly fit, seems to give a "scientific" reason for why the real economy must actually work that way, thereby giving support to unelected advisers to dim-witted politicians who want the world to be run that way (and by a sheer coincidence, line their own pockets).

This years arsehole is a bloke called Angus Deaton who has been lauded for saying what the rich always like to hear: success is down to hard work and you don't want to stop people from working hard, now do you?

Of course, success is largely down to luck. The world is full of people working so hard that it kills them and who die in poverty. Birth (starting with the big one: country of birth) is by far the biggest element in success, followed by the ability to eject all morality as soon as it becomes inconvenient. Unlimited greed helps too. Basically, everything the Tory party (whether as part of the Conservatives or Labour) stands for. Angus acknowledges that he himself was lucky (more specifically, that his father was) but is careful not to say that this luck is more important than his presumably amazingly hard work sitting at a desk and thinking about stuff that he will never have to prove or even really defend in any serious (ie, job-threatening) way.

Angus has never been poor in his entire life but he's happy to tell us why other people are poor and how we can fix that - mainly by making money for ourselves and sharing the crumbs. No wonder the banks thought he should get a prize.