I have just started to read 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang, a man who is out & proud as a non-free market economist. And one who is able to write about economics without any mathematics or even using terms such as GDP. Instead he uses startlingly vivid examples such as Sven, the Swedish bus driver who has never had to dodge a cow in his life, & the role of domestic servants in the novels of Agatha Christie.
I was wondering why 23 things, if that is just the number that fell out of the hat or one chosen for a deeper significance – for example one of its qualities as a prime.
Perhaps all will be clear at the end.
But then I thought of Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions with its 23 Meditations on the meaning of life & death, in sickness & in health. The explanation for his choice of 23 which I find most plausible is that it represents the tolling of the bell for each hour of the day - there can obviously be no meditation for the 24th because when that bell tolls you are dead.
Which ties up quite neatly with what Keynes said: "Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing the quantity theory of money] is probably true.... But this ‘long run’ is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."
