BOOKS OF MY YOUTH: LUCKY JIM.

BOOKS OF MY YOUTH: LUCKY JIM. Studying economics changes you. (For example, children can be viewed as human capital.) I loved LUCKY JIM by Kingsley Amis when I was about twenty. It is still funny and liberating, but I have changed. Jim is a struggling young academic whose career may turn on the success of an article he has written. He shrinks from even repeating the title of the article: “It was a perfect title, in that it crystallised the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.” And the title? The title is: “The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485.” I still find the passage very funny, but I am rueful that today I would think that awful subject was very important (those shipbuilders changed the course of history). Worse, I would read that awful article if I had the chance.