David Burchell, John Maynard Keynes, pyramids, government expenditure, and sound and fury signifying little

(Above: believing pyramid building to be the way forward for economic recovery, this site is quietly developing plans to sculpt Uluru into the shape of five cascading pyramid shapes. It will require government funding of course, but it will solve indigenous issues in central Australia).

How to write a pretentious newspaper column, as cleverly demonstrated by David Burchell in An economist's laugh, but joke's on us:

1. Start with a fine flurry of purple prose, full of portentous significance:

Today we live, like a colonial outpost in some vast unfamiliar jungle, amid the luxuriant profusion of professional and technical languages, which have spread, like creeping vines, into every crevice of our lives.

2. Having abused the English language with an elaborate excessive almost vinous metaphor, immediately accuse others of doing the same, preferably with a reference to an exotic tribe with a fondness for tearing out still beating hearts:

Prime ministers, premiers and public servants drone on in a mechanical chant that resembles nothing so much as the rites of a long-lost Andean religion. Inasmuch as they wish us to understand what they're saying, it's only by inducting us into the private mysteries of their particular vocation, a territory in which, as they well know, we're on an insecure footing.

3. Recall the old verdant green days of the English vernacular, as spoken by assorted famous writers. Name dropping here is crucial, though whatever you do don't suggest we should return to the days of Chaucer. That would be pushing it:

There are people still living, though, who can recall the day when business people and public officials - even scientists and economists - liked to use some version of that vernacular English which has come down to us from Shakespeare and Donne, Addison and Pope, Thackeray and Dickens, and the rest. After all, the British experienced World War II through the rhetorical updrafts of Churchill's Georgian literary vocabulary, while Americans learned about it through the relaxed Victorian cadences of Franklin Roosevelt. (Even our own Ben Chifley, a more prosaic orator, spent his straitened adolescence immersed in lending-library copies of Plutarch, Gibbon and the Victorians.)

4. Having yearned for the great days of Churchill and relaxed cadences or rhetorical updrafts (perhaps while musing on how Obama is a mere orator, given to fancy speeches but no substance), perhaps it's time to yearn for economic treatises written as great literature, rather than as meaningful economic treatises. Remember, better fine words than actual insight:

Why, in those days even economics tracts could be worth reading, if only for the manner of their writing. A literary critic of today, presented with J.M.Keynes's famous General Theory of 1936, would immediately recognise it, not as a piece of technical writing in the manner of the productivity commission or the reserve bank, but as a literary satire in disguise, after the manner of Voltaire or Swift. Like the best satirists, Keynes could be genuinely outraged in the name of our common humanity, while retaining a robust contempt for most of the actual human specimens who passed his way.

Ah yes, Voltaire and Swift, as fine a pair of minds as you might care to recommend to budding economists.

5. But when someone tries to pass himself off as a wit and a satirist, remember then it's time to excoriate him for his feeble satirical wit. What fun to laugh at Keynes' foolishness, especially as he liked to send up "classical economists" and tell stories about burying money in jars so that people might perform honest labor digging the loot up:

...Keynes the Shakespearian imp suggests that the Treasury might want to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them underground, "and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig them up again". It would be more sensible, no doubt, "to build houses and the like", but hole-digging would be better than the nothing the economists otherwise recommended.

In practice, a good deal of the fiscal stimulus doled out across the Western world over the past 12 months has followed Keynes's light-hearted spirit. Just as for Keynes the pharaohs' pyramids made better public works projects than did railroads, so for us the best form of stimulus is that which gets money into people's pockets the fastest, regardless of its economic or social efficacy.

Under no account should you actually quote Keynes:

Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely pyramid building as well as the search for precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York. Thus we are so sensible, have schooled ourselves to so close a semblance of prudent financiers, taking careful thought before we add to the "financial" burdens of posterity by building them houses to live in, that we have no such easy escape from the sufferings of unemployment. We have to accept them as an inevitable result of applying to the conduct of the State the maxims which are best calculated to "enrich" an individual by enabling him to pile up claims to enjoyment which he does not intend to exercise at any definite time.

Pyramids better than two railways going to the same destination? Well perhaps the meaning is there, along with the celebration of the virtues of having two sets of fibre cables hanging from telephone poles around major cities, or perhaps the pyramids win when we remember what a fine harvester of tourist dollars they've been ever since tourism as an industry was born. Just as war can be a robust activity. But suddenly the satire is clouded, the truth a little harder to see.

No matter. Make light of anything current by thinking of it as pyramid building or digging for bottles:

But then - since electorates are rarely so light-hearted with their money as Keynes was with his - the really important thing is to pretend that these expenditures, devised on the run for the purpose of being spent on the run, should be presented in the loftiest possible terms, as nation-building exercises and education revolutions and the like.

Further, pretty much everybody will be in on the joke, since the most irresponsible and over-geared business person can be bailed out, in the name of public virtue. What could be droller than that?

Well perhaps not so droll as everybody unemployed and out of work and getting droller by the moment as governments stand to one side and do nothing, saying that the irresponsible must be made to go down the gurgler, and take everyone else along with them, as a lesson to us all for allowing the foolish to be foolish (but wait, let's not talk of regulation of the foolish, because that would be oppressive). I guess the lemming theory of economics, that we should all go over the cliff together, shouting at each other that it's all the other's fault, would be a grand literary metaphor. And truly droller than that.

6. Introduce a world weary despairing cynicism as a tonal feature, still replete with laborious breath-taking, nay vertiginous, words:

Like all good jokes, Keynes's satirical sallies on the economics profession were made out of the demands of the moment, in order to justify levels of public expenditure that citizens then found breath-taking and vertiginous, though they may seem like political small beer today. The problem with jokes in this style, though, is that, though hilarious when delivered at speed, they can pall when consumed at leisure.

7. Contemplate doom:

While the federal government is presently enjoying that delicious serendipity which results from doing half-useful things that are also enjoyable to execute, they may find that the Keynesian laugh-line expires sooner than expected. After all, most of the fiscal stimulus has been spent out of money squirreled away over the felicitous years of the past decade. Yet once the money has run out, and the economic world-turned-upside-down has righted itself again, we may have a decade or more of fiscal austerity in which to ponder whether that money spent in bottle-burying haste was indeed spent well.

8. Confirm doom, perhaps by offering up a socialistic vision of community coherence as an alternative, even though some might think co-operative endeavour is little better than organizing society to build pyramids:

Take for instance the acknowledged plight of our school sector, just now the most expensive means of publicly subsidising social inequity known to humankind. Today every school across the nation, rich and poor, functional and dysfunctional alike, has a few freshly mortared brick walls, and a bundle of styrofoam-clad netbooks, with which to console themselves in their isolation. But the pressing need of the school sector, surely, is to harness that enormous public expenditure into some kind of co-operative endeavour, across the borders of the putative sectors, and across the divide that separates the selective student from the comprehensive. Yet, rather than tearing down those Berlin Walls, we're giving them a paint job.

9. Offer up a fading hero, who in his final Wagnerian moments comes to understand that all is bitter in the mouth, an echo of the realization that Keynes had corrupted public economic debate and come to understand his failings, and must shoulder the burden of all that's recently been done in his name, albeit long after his death in 1946:

In his fading years, Keynes increasingly regretted the witticisms of his prime, not least because his satirical spirit had been imitated, ad nauseam, by less gifted wits. In his final published article he acknowledged that classical economics, for all its limits, served a valuable purpose, and that "much modernist stuff, gone wrong and turned sour and silly", had corrupted public economic debate.

10. End with a Shakespearian twist so convoluted and opaque that none will understand and none will disagree, with a double twist pike that both foretells doom and revisits doom:

I doubt he would have recognised 2009 as 1932 revisited. But then, Harlequin wears a dunce's cap, and history plays us all for fools in the end.

And there you have it, the perfect column, which makes no actual reference to the banal, dull, mystifying conceits of current economics, but instead romps through a legion of names, and the literary treasures of John Maynard Keynes, and comes up with a single thought: government expenditure as a rescue package for what currently ails us? I'm agin it.

And remember, plain speaking is the enemy of rotund thinking, just as full-toned sonorous lulling sentences are the way towards a rotund column redolent with yearning for the past and a doom laden fear of the future.

So here's a final thought, no Harlequin, but Macbeth will do just as nicely:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Oh dear.