Haiku Economics

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69633/haiku-economics

Quote:I was teaching economics at the Georgia Institute of Technology when I made the haiku-economics connection. I needed to connect with 225 economics, science, and engineering majors—college kids who were being trained to believe that poetry and feelings are not important to, say, the World Bank. At the same time I was reading The Essential Etheridge Knight and falling in love with haiku. I thought about the inability of standard economic models to explain bubbles, crashes, and global inequality—and how market fundamentalists refuse to discuss them. I saw the bridge I needed in this poem:

Invisible hand;
Mother of inflated hope,
Mistress of despair!

Adam Smith, indeed. Perhaps it’s the economists who can learn the most from poets about precision and efficiency, about objectivity and maximization—the virtues, in other words, of value-free science.

Ironically, the benefit of the addition is in the cost. The typical haiku budget constraint is limited by three lines of seventeen syllables. Basho himself understood well the joyful paradox of haiku economics: less is more, and more is better! Each poem is the length of about one human breath. This constraint, though severe, is more than offset by a boundless freedom to feel:

Window reflection—
The baby sparrow sitting,
Listening to glass.