During the first year and a half of their graduate studies in economics at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, Rodney Smith and Roger Vaughan collaborated in the publication of the (Monty Phython inspired) satirical Journal of Progressive Hedonists Against Radical Thought (a.k.a., P.H.A.R.T.). Smith and Vaughan came to Chicago from UCLA and Oxford, respectively, and clearly shared a common sense of smell. Both later worked as economists at the RAND corporation. Roger Vaughan was responsible for pen-and-ink artwork which will be featured in a later post. He passed away in October 2021, but Rodney T. Smith is alive and well, President of the economics and strategic planning consulting firm Stratton Inc.
The second issue of the Journal of P.H.A.R.T. transcribed for this post was found in Milton Friedman’s papers at the Hoover Institution.
Request: if any visitors to Economics in the Rear-view Mirror have a surviving copy of other issues of the journal or of Roger Vaughan’s Chicago artwork, please let it be copied/transcribed and/or posted here for the benefit of future generations of economists yet untrained.
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Vol. 1, No. 2 May, 1971
P.H.A.R.T. EDITORIAL
Mother Apathy, blindfold across both breasts, was aroused, albeit temporarily, when it was announced recently that the dynamic new publication ‘P.H.A.R.T.’ (whose first edition is already a collectors’ item) had engulfed the revered, but aging, ‘P.E.C. Notes’. From the autumn of 1971, a spokesman said, both journals would be published jointly under the P.H.A.R.T. banner. The entire publishing world, normally oblivious to news worth printing, was thrown into confusion. Exclaimed a Time-Life editor, “I’m padlocking my staff to their desks by their private parts!”
Wall Street reacted with typical concern. Both P.H.A.R.T. shares changed hands many times, but speculation was terminated when the purpose of the flimsy pieces of paper was misunderstood and they were flushed into the Hudson.
Smiled a P.H.A.R.T. staffer from his tax-deductible air mattress in sun drenched Lake Michigan, “Anyone who can print the kind of *%¢#$* that we do, is bound to succeed in a place like the Economics Department.
Comparison with Hugh Hefner’s Empire is obvious, a comparison which seems even closer in light of P.H.A.R.T.’s intention of running a pull-out center-fold of economics books without covers.
Certainly the new combined journal should prove to be a bright super-nova in the Gutenberg Galaxy.
P.H.A.R.T. INTERVIEWS
Chicago Charlie: In this issue we are honored to have a pleasantly in depth interview with an obscure, but nevertheless vital, member of the economics community, an economics groupie. We all know that surfers are followed by beach bunnies, musicians are plastered by groupies, but few of us are aware that economists have their own followers who admire them for their abstractions. Enough of such preliminaries. Let’s get it on. How long have you been an economics groupie?
Economics Groupie: I was a know-nothing college dropout until I, sort of, wandered into this economics class and saw this guy draw this groovy diagram. Minutes later I was the virtuous path of abstraction wherein what I adored was emphasized, and what I abhorred was forgotten. Like, nobody else would have me.
C.C.: Very interesting. Which abstraction really turns you on. I mean, what do you really hold near?
E.G.: What to, duckie? I cherish the nominal versus the real distinction; compensated versus uncompensated elasticities, and market versus non-market activities.
C.C.: A strange collection. What exactly do you mean by the latter?
E.G.: Man, like sometimes it’s a drag to hurl my bod on the market just to get what the traffic will bare. Non-market activity can be really heavy, like just getting an economics biggy to fondle my copy of Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’, I mean….
C.C.: Thank you. Have you ever had any bad experiences… that is, as an economics groupie?
E.G.: Yes; whenever I attend conventions, like five people on the same abstraction…
C.C.: Who are your favorite personalities?
E.G.: Friedman’s money, Lewis’ labor, Becker’s fertility, Harberger’s compensated triangles, Chez’s jiggles, Nerlove’s heteroscedasticity, Johnson’s distribution, Zecher’s….
C.C.: Really! Familiarity breeds contempt!
E.G.: No, baby, just frustration.
C.C.: Well, I must draw this interview to a close.
E.G.: Regretfully, we never started.
P.H.A.R.T.’s NEWS IN BRIEF
Boston: Following on the immense commercial success of rock musicals ‘Hair’ and ‘Tommy’, the songwriting team of Samuelson and Solow is rumored to be working on a rock opera based on the formers’ best selling ‘Foundations of Economic Analysis’. The star part of ‘Negative Semi-Definite Matrix’ is rumored to be played by Samuelson himself, but speculation is rampant concerning the famous nude scene in which cross-elasticities emerge, bare to the world, from the matrix determinant.
Chicago: The long held belief that all economists orbit around Chicago was cast into serious doubt, when, with the aid of powerful econometric telescopes, at least 200 economists were observed going ‘round in circles in the Boston area. “We are submitting the model builder to close questioning”, said a spokesman for the Chicago Inquisition. “I think we can show that these so-called observations were: (a) never made, and (b) not ‘proper’ economists anyway.”
New York: Although much doubt has been cast on the ‘as if’ approach to economic theology, Chicago feels it has, at last, come up with vindication for its views. After experimenting with several hundred dogs on the top of the brand new Trade Center, a Chicago scientist reported, “After we held each dog some five feet from the parapet, every single canine behaved as if they fully understood the Newtonian laws of gravity.” Surveying the pulp-covered street, he added, “That’s exactly the kind of empirical data we like to build on.”
Houston: Initial reports on analysis on moon rock samples brought back by Apollo 11, 12, and 14 confirm the fact that the moon is made of money, spokesman announced here today. “At first glance”, he read from a prepared statement, “they appear to be 19th century British gold sovereigns, with a picture of Milton Friedman and the inscription ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici.’”
London: The real purpose of the American policy of benign neglect towards international payments, masterminded by Harvard’s Gottfried Haberler became evident today when an English postman reported being molested by “A kind of satan-like figure, with an American accent, shouting something about my soul and throwing dollars everywhere”. Under separate questioning, the Federal Reserve admitted to attempting to buy the world and promised that next time, its agents would behave with more discretion and dignity.
Philadelphia: The following rumor, entirely unsubstantiated by P.H.A.R.T. foreign correspondent in Philadelphia, is circulating concerning famed British economist, Sir Roy Harrod. It appears that Sir Roy, unadjusted to the American matriarchal society was accustomed to addressing a sexually integrated class at the University of Pennsylvania, as “Gentlemen”. As attendance dwindled he was faced one day with an entirely female class. He gazed around for a few seconds, and then left muttering, “Since there is no one here, I shall not lecture”. Norman Mailer, eat your heart out.
P.H.A.R.T.’s LIVES OF THE GREAT ECONOMISTS
In a bold attempt to instill in economists a sense of pride in the historical development of their discipline, P.H.A.R.T, brings you, in each issue, a brief sketch of one of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand.
Crasso the Greek (? – 410 BC)
It is fitting that the first reference we have to this great economist occurs in the poetry of Obesia, the Fat-Woman of the caves, in those oft-quoted lines.
“The hills are alive with the sound of Crasso,
As he and his acolytes perform the dance of the drachma.”
Already the young Crasso, and his ‘Crassic’ followers were famous for running naked into holy shrines and leaving the walls covered in ‘graphiti’ (or graphs) illustrating some of the new concepts they had discovered. It is to this early period that the world owes the famous Crassic doctrines.
“When prices rise, things tend to become more expensive.”
“What lays ahead of us is in the future.”
Little else is heard of Crasso until he sprung to fame when called to the service of the King of Sicily to fight a serious outbreak of inflation. He successfully stemmed the fearsome tide of price rises by offering 21,000 warm chicken livers to the God, Hypa (a method, incidently, the Federal Reserve is currently considering). His triumph was short lived and as serious food poisoning decimated the population, popular feeling ran against him and he was forced to dust his naked body with flour and escape disguised as a statue.
He moved to Lydia where he perfected a technique of depicting, with amazing clarity, small cameo-like pictures of unequalled pornography on round pieces of metal. His art work became immensely popular, and although known deprecatingly by the Greeks as “Khoynos Pornos” (Foreign Filth) they circulated in Crasso’s native land and became popularly known as Khoyns.
Immensely wealthy, he returned to his native Corrinth idling his time gambling on the innumerable Greco-Persian wars, and was bankrupt when he offered 100 to 1 on Persia at Salamis.
He never again achieved his former glory, and in spite of nearly discovering the formula for the velocity of money, inventing, during hard winter, the concept of a wages freeze, and writing a prodigious number of strange tracts he moved slowly downhill. He gave one or two guest lectures, but was jeered from the podium when he spoke, with missionary zeal, of money floating down from the heavens. He is last recorded as the tragic model for Thucydides’ description of the effects of the plague during the Peloponnesian Wars.
P.H.A.R.T. MISCELLANY
As Others See Us
(From Berman’s ‘The Underground Guide to the College of Your Choice’.)
“The graduate school here (Chicago) is the old apprenticeship type of learning. The difference between the University of Chicago and other universities is like the difference between English Justice and French Justice — at other universities the professors consider you innocent of stupidity until you prove otherwise while here you are presumed guilty of stupidity until you prove yourself innocent.”
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We hope, in each issue, to bring you some of the ‘bon mots’ that are the obvious concomitant of a concentration of high powered minds.
Stigler: “The government take-over of the railways is a vain and abortive attempt to make the post office look efficient.”
Johnson (H.G.): “When a professor leaves M.I.T. for Harvard, the average intelligence in both places rises.”
Samuelson: “If you take a 15 trillion year plan, then the theorem is correct.”
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P.H.A.R.T. would take great privilege in awarding its most treasured prize, a corroded plastic waterbed, to all those sophisticated individuals who manage to reduce student-faculty visits to informal economics seminars. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, P.H.A.R.T, would like to announce, that:
(a) the esoteric economic pun is the lowest form of humor;
(b) there just may be someone in the room who is less than enthralled by the ability to play ‘Obscure-Journal-Article-Snap’ with all comers:
(c) the breath-taking account of how to take-apart a speaker, complete with a 20 minute digression of ‘statistical- discrepancies-I-have-seen-through’, should be saved for the autobiography.
It takes considerable ignorance to assume that everyone present is fascinated by economics 24 hours a day. Those who do have nothing else to talk about should try not to see it as a virtue. A more comprehensive ‘weltanschauung’ would make brighter living.
It was not clear, when the fire and smoke-laden Delphic rumblings had passed, whether or not the Nobel Laureate had actually said anything. After following the pillar of fire around the campus like the children of Israel, the Economics Department received a ‘lecture’, an experience not unlike speed reading a Dictionary of Quotations while being assaulted by a poorly-programmed 360. The quality of evening speakers this year has rarely risen above the esoteric. To quote Leijonhuvfud: “If this is how economics develops — where will it end?”
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P.H.A.R.T. REVIEW OF BOOKS
In response to our previous reviews, readers submitted the following:
The Sensuous Criminal, by G.G. (Alcatraz, 1971) . Discusses in frank, no-nonsense language, the implications of over fifty Neuman-Morgenstern utility functions for criminal behavior. Explains why criminals with Moebius-strip utility functions usually get caught; why most extortionists have homogeneous-of-degree-less-than-one time preference functions; and many, many more. J. Edgar Hoover loved it — you will too. yours for only U= a + bI dollars!
The Godfather (A Story of Money, Interest, and Prices), by Donaldo Patinkini (Extortion Press, 1971). An inside man reveals the true interworkings of a powerful group of variables. Gives a detailed but chilling analysis of how inept government has allowed the Ma Fed to extract millions from society through monetary control.
The Holy Bible (The King Milton Version) Heavenly Press, 1971. In the beginning God created money. That took 6 days, on the 7th day he rested, and so nothing else matters.
P.H.A.R.T. CONTRIBUTIONS TO ECONOMIC THOUGHT
A Scatological Theory of Nominal Income*
Few things stand the economics profession in such shame than the narrowness of the treatment accorded to the determination of nominal income. The intensity of the Keynesian/Monetarist debate has obscured the more fundamental limitations of the logical possibilities examined.
It is the contention of this paper that this entire debate is hollow, and it is to the agricultural sector and the determinants of the demand for guano1 that we must look for any truly logical transmission mechanism. In Section 1 of this paper, below, the basic model for the determination of income is outlined, while Section 2 examines some of the implications for the American economy today.
Section 1: The Model
The rapid pace of industrialization in England has long proved a fertile hunting ground for the economist anxious to achieve tenure. Weber blamed it on the Church, Marx on the greedy bourgeois, McLuhan on the printing press, and Rostow argued that take-off was a result of take-off. Few have linked the unbinding of the industrial Prometheus to the discovery of guano deposits in Peru by strong-stomached British sailors in the first half of the 19th century.
Consider the fundamental identity,
Q= k Sh. Y
where Q is the quantity of agricultural output, Sh. is the quantity of soil nutrients, and Y is the quantity of land. It should be obvious that an increase in Sh., holding Y and k constant, will increase Q.2 It is not for nothing that the favorite Anglo-Saxon toast has come to be: “May the Bird of Paradise add nutrients to your soil.”
Neither is it a coincidence that British development should slow adown disastrously in the later 19thcentury when this supply dried up, and the wily Peruvians, under a seagull dictator, clamped a high tariff on this most valuable of bowel-movements.
Section 2: Post Guano Ergo Propter Guano?
It is only recently that the amazing correlation between the depth of guano deposits and the rate of growth of real output has received the attention it richly deserves. Since it avoids the quagmire of nominal and real debates, so long the bane of monetarism, the Federal Reserve has recently taken to publishing guano depth-counts taken at strategic points along the New England coast, and is currently contemplating setting up manure counting stations (M1 and M2) in. Nebraska and New Jersey. However, much pseudo-scientific pressure is levelled against this approach by economists who should know better, and there has been not a little reluctance to admit to using it. Few people, in fact, realize that the oft-repeated ‘1065’ figure was, in fact, the depth to which a now-famous aide to the budget supervisor sunk (in millimeters)3 when supervising one the first ‘counts’.
The theory leads to some important policy regulations:
(1) The removal of the welfare distorting Regulation P, by which a 10¢ surcharge is levelled on guano booths throughout the country.
(2) The conversion of banks into mere guano warehouses, to act as receptacles for such deposits and withdrawals, with a 100% reserve requirement.
(3) The automatic issuing of Feen-A-Mints with food stamps.
(4) The regulation of the guano growth rate to a fixed 5% per annum by an intensive, federally sponsored, seagull training program.
(5) The appointment of seagulls to replace Connally, Schultze, and Nixon to engender a harmonious, non-political environment in which to stabilize the economy.
It is hoped that this analysis proves a fertile hunting ground for the development of economic theory.
*The original idea was suggested by John Graffiti, although the author accepts all credit for the penetrating analysis. The future of 5 assistants is inextricably entwined with any potential faults.
1 Guano (Spanish). Literally, “the food from the heavens” or, more colloquially, “birdshit”, (Ed.).
2 For this proof, the author is indebted to a small, but persistent, Lake Michigan seagull.
3 Believed to proximate the distance from his feet to his neck, (Ed.).
P.H.A.R.T. PUZZLE CORNER
Answers to last issue’s questions:
- (a) False
(b) Uncertain. Such activity would involve income redistribution from bakers to hens.
(c) False. 1.5976 is, of course, the nominal number of students, which would be about 0.002 in real terms.
(d) True.
- (a) What do you receive when purchasing a buffalo?
(b) Which of the following can be categorized as an inferior good: sex or drink?
(c) What is the equilibrium weekly wage of an M.B.A.?
(d) Which?
- The quote, of course, was Keynes, page 40, and he was illustrating the importance of choosing units.
- H.A.R.T. FORKED TONGUE AWARD remains unawarded.
- H.A.R.T. MOST PERFECT COMPETITOR TROPHY is awarded to that perceptive reader who pointed out that the market for splinters from the cross of Christ would seem to fulfill Smith’s conditions an infinite number of buyers, a large number of suppliers, and an amazing invisible hand. More copies of this beautiful sculpture remain to be won for more insights into ‘Our Competitive Environment’.
This issue’s questions:
- Quote of the month. What amazing economist wrote the following and where?
“latex$ \left( X^{\prime }_{\ast }X_{\ast }\right)^{-1} X_{\ast }\bar{y}&s=2$”
(This is to test that you are doing your reading.)
- TRUE, FALSE, IGNORANT.
Your grade will be largely independent of anything you write.
(a) Since when care packages were dropped into prisoner of war camps it was cigarettes and not prunes that were adopted as currency: prisoners were not acting rationally.
(b) Three helicopters in formation at sunset is an omen of inflation.
(c) Racehorses sometimes earn tens of thousands of dollars in stud services. Since economists are rarely paid as much for similar services, they are either being exploited, or earn non-pecuniary benefits.
- An economist of repute defined homotheticity in the following way: “You stand at the origin and jiggle your head this way and that way and nothing changes.” Utilizing this definition, determine whether the following is true. A compensated jiggle of the head will cause a non-homothetic function to appear homothetic.
- If Irving Fisher had defined the money stock as M7, then the business cycle would be the dance of the 7 veils?
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SHELDON DE F’ART SAYS : “PER ARDUA AD INSOMNIA”
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P.H.A.R.T, is an underground journal of negligible literary merit dedicated to the proposition that some followers of economics may possess a sense of humor. It is hoped to stimulate everyone into some form of response. For those who are leaving and wish to subscribe, the cost is $1.00 per annum, plus postage, for 8 copies (or more)
Most of the blame, any personal inquiries, submissions, letters, or donations should be directed to Rodney Smith or Roger Vaughan.
P.H.A.R.T.
Box P
Department of Economics
Social Science Building
West 59th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60637
U.S.A.
Source: Hoover Institution Archives. Papers of Milton Friedman, Box 79, Folder “79.6 University of Chicago Miscellaneous”.