guest blogger: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), while at Oxford, wrote a poem entitled "The Deserted Parks", protesting the conversion of Oxford parkland to cricket fields. His social criticism expanded into what seems to us an idictment of the effects of wealth generated by an economy based on easy money, bubbles, and finance. Remarkable that this was 1867, not today. The excerpt:

...Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen, who survey
The rich man's joys increase, the poor's decay,
'Tis yours to judge, how wide the limits stand
Between a splendid and a happy land.
Proud swells go by with laugh of hollow joy,
And shouting Folly hails them with "Ahoy!"
Funds even beyond the miser's wish abound,
And rich men flock from all the world around.
Yet count our gains. This wealth is but a name,
That leaves our useful products still the same.
Not so the loss ...