CHICAGO. This city’s gritty South Side is famous for its blues and economics, a source of pride for patrons of Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap on 55th Street.
“We come here to listen to the blues and to discuss how microeconomic analysis can be extended to non-market behavior,” says the University of Chicago’s Douglas Diamond, a Nobel Prize winner.
“Thass right, man,” says Luther “Guitar” Macon as he takes a sip of his Heileman’s Special Export beer. “People think Harvard’s got good economists, but my man Doug here can kick John Kenneth Galbraith’s ass, and not just because Mr. Affluent Society is dead!” he adds with emphasis.
So Diamond and Macon have put together an interdisciplinary major that will be the first among American liberal arts colleges to combine intensive training in both the sadness of the blues and economics, its academic counterpart long known as “the dismal science.”
“What is economics but the blues?” Macon asks. “You talkin’ about a man and a woman, and the return on investment of buyin’ that woman a fur coat when you consider her propensity for takin’ her business out on the street–you know what I mean?”
“Precisely,” says Diamond, who came up with the concept of the undergraduate course of study while listening to a Jimmy Witherspoon song one night. “Spoon was singing ‘Money’s getting cheaper–prices getting steeper’,” Diamond recalls. “It reminded me of one of Milton Friedman’s favorite gags–‘Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.’ That always cracked me up.”
“Now you talkin’,” says Macon. “I don’t care what Paul de Grauwe and Magdalena Polan said in their June, 2001 monograph published in the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven’s International Economic Working Papers–Miltie’s still the King!”
Friedman was for three decades a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, located at ground zero of the urban blues explosion on the city’s South Side. He is considered the founder of the “Chicago School” of economics, with its recurring theme of money supply as a determinant of the nominal value of output over hard-driving guitar, piano and harmonica and a rhythm section of electric bass and drums.
Macon considers himself a Friedman fan, even though he wishes one of the Nobel laureate’s most famous economic truths were false. “I come in here every day at noon and say ‘Jimmy–give me a pulled pork sandwich’,” he observes ruefully. “And Jimmy–he just say ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch!’”
Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Chicago: Not Just for Toddlin’ Anymore.”