kids v. economists

[Doug Henwood]

"The amateur of such things must be content to wrestle with the 
professors, seeking the violet of human interest beneath the 
avalanche of their graceless parts of speech. A hard business, I 
daresay, to one not practiced, and to its hardness there is added the 
disquiet of a doubt.... [Economics] hits the employers of the 
professors where they live. It deals, not with ideas that affect 
those employers only occasionally or only indirectly or only as 
ideas, but with ideas that have an imminent and continuous influence 
upon their personal welfare and security, and that affect profoundly 
the very foundations of that social and economic structure upon which 
their whole existence is based. It is, in brief, the science of the 
ways and means whereby they have come to such estate, and maintain 
themselves in such estate, that they are able to hire and boss 
professors."

   -- H.L. Mencken, "The Dismal Science"