Econometrics, The Musical

I was given an assignment. Write a profile of the economist. I didn’t know anything about the economist. He had done something related to systems. How do we understand systems? What is a system? Is a system something that can control your life, or is it better if you devote your life to trying to control the system? These were the questions the economist seemed to be posing. I tried hard to research the economist, a task I kept failing at. I didn’t like the man. He was ugly. I don’t mean that he was physically ugly. I mean to say that when I thought about him, I thought: ugly. Objectively, however, he was quite good looking. I was jealous of how thin he was. He rode a bike everywhere. He studied “happiness outcomes” and concluded that riding a bike improved them. I could not consider him a snob.

The world is ugly. The world is ugly, and this man makes the world uglier by pretending he is trying to understand something unseen about productivity and happiness and systems. I hated the assignment. But I needed the money. I couldn’t pay for some important things, like food and rent, if I didn’t write this profile of the economist. But I was getting older, and it hurt to type. It even hurt to hold a pencil. And the truth is I didn’t want to profile the economist. I wanted to write a play. Where inspiration comes from I have no idea. I don’t care much about “form.” At the same time, I understand that writing emerges through sheer force of will. The force of will is not possessed by the writer, it is possessed by the writing. The writing pours out of your body and once it starts moving there is not much else you can do but to serve as a conduit for its spillage.

Funny word, “conduit.” It was first used in the twelfth century to refer to an “escort.” Add a “c” and “conduit” becomes “conduct.” The centuries went by and conduits became things that were affiliated with water. Everything, in the end, is about water.

I tried to write the profile of the economist. He was born in another language. That is, he was born in data. He developed regressive models to explain recurring relationships. He turned seemingly unimportant actions, like what shoes you wear and how many times a day you urinate, into theoretical statistics. He used procedures. He used linear multiple regressions, explanatory variables (income, age, taxation, etc.). He didn’t do experiments. He was against experiments because they limited your ability to imagine.   

There is a waking dream (an insomniac’s dream, a vision) I have about “things” falling off bodies (not specific things, just things). This has to do with incentives. If you are motivated to achieve more, a voice says in my vision, then less “things” will fall off your body. Is the quantity important? What is important in the insomniac’s dream is that keeping your “things” is directly related to “achievement.” Some people lie and say you can achieve anything as long as you work hard. This is, perhaps, why I didn’t want to profile the economist. A fear of “things” falling off your body is not irrational. Writing, too, falls off the body.

I set aside my assignment and wrote the play. It was a “hybrid.” I don’t mean this in the sense of literary genre. Not exactly. What I mean is: the characters were hybrids. Head of Gandhi, torso of Golden Retriever, voice of James Earl Jones. That kind of thing. You could build your own combinations. The parts were interchangeable, and the audience members could choose, either randomly or deliberately, how they wanted to build the characters. This was fun for some, nervous-making for others.

As I wrote the play, I tried to avoid using terms that were affiliated with the field. It was hard not to say “capitalism.” It was hard not to say “incentive.” It was hard not to say “econometrics.” I developed codes. Is there an economy of torquing, twisting, manipulating things? Be more specific. No, not really.

Here is an important monologue from the play:

Hello. The key question I am trying to ask today is about crisis. Does crisis really spur innovation? I was brought up with this belief. My parents believed that if they didn’t give me dinner for a week then I would teach myself to cook. I didn’t learn to cook. Instead, I learned to shoplift from Whole Foods. I would go to the self-checkout line with four things that were cheap and one thing that was expensive. For example: an apple, a banana, a granola bar, and an oversized hot bar container stuffed with roasted chicken, pulled pork, sweet potatoes, macaroni, kale, etc. It weighed three pounds. The hot bar was nine dollars a pound. I didn’t have twenty-seven dollars to spend on dinner. I was just a teenager. And my parents’ experiments with crisis and innovation did not involve giving me money to purchase my own dinners. I had four dollars and I needed to get dinner. They, meanwhile, ate takeout (Thai, Peruvian chicken, etc.). I scanned the cheaper items and placed them in my tote bag. In between the apple and the banana, I pretended to scan the hot bar container, but I never placed it fully down on the beeping machine. There was no beep. I figured if I was caught I could just claim it was a mistake since I had actually paid for the other things. No one ever stopped me, even though there are video cameras recording your movements. I did this forty times and got away with it forty times. I don’t feel guilty. Whole Foods is still on top regardless of my twenty-seven dollars for the hot bar. Were my parents correct about their experiment? I think so. I did innovate. I learned a useful skill to help me survive. Moreover, I learned about risk management and, inevitably, about social solidarity.

The play was progressing. All the doctors at the public hospital were “eliminated.” Other times, they were, as the British like to say “made redundant.” Redundant: from “re”—to do something again, plus “undare”—“to rise in the waves.” To rise in the waves again. Every piece of literature, in the end, is about water.

The doctors from the public hospital were blindfolded, their hands were tied behind their backs with rope. The mayor blew a whistle, and the doctors fell to their knees at the edge of the stage. The audience had to decide: Should the mayor shoot them in the head, push them in a hole, or sing a song of their choosing? “I Want to Live in America” from the hit Broadway Musical West Side Story is often a success with older crowds.

Did you hear the one about the pregnant economist who gave birth to a revolutionary plan to destroy the global economy?

What frame should your body be stored in? This is an important dramatic question. One. Two. Three. The characters open their mouths. Receptacles float in an out. The play is forever stuck in the cracks of a broken system that contaminates all other systems with a single, accidental touch.

We can’t develop experiments to understand the nature of this contamination, said the economist, so we must creatively formulate analogous problems.

All plays are like this. They have characters in them that the author hates. They speak words that the author cannot control, like: “The horizon is a prison for those who starve.” Or: “The walls they live in are always leaking fluorescent letters that are oblique signals that shelter currencies from the financiers who will eat them as they destroy the crowds and reincarnate themselves as scalded bureaucrats whose bodies open and whose innards are bathed with other bodies and/or with vials full of Coca-Cola that cleanse the liver and skin.”

I tried hard not to write the profile of the economist. I wrote a play instead, which in the end turned out to be a profile of the economist. The economist believed that it was impossible to study a system if you are a part of the system. The economist said: God stitched the world together in strange ways. I don’t believe in God. But I deeply admire his stitching.

Luke said: By your standard of measure, it will be measured to you in return.

Love: It’s a game for the economic people They hedge their bets on which body will die first. They invest in our humaninmal leakage.