[oats]

An Open Letter to Economists

To Whom it May Confound,

I hear money makes the world go round -
but is that really true?
in southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea, too?
do market gimmicks move the civic broods to resourceful from resources lacked?
or are their fiscal grooves so minuscule that money made their world go flat?
sure - hold back emotion, tact, and ethical suffrage
mold the facts in open graphs then send it to publish
but when quotients crack to broken stats, don’t pretend it’s all true
veracity needs compassion - the whole world’s depending on you

To Whom it May Happen to Silence,

They say economics is an actual science
but what laws apply?
if you’re measuring wealth, what exactly is being quantified?
from cowrie shells to precious metals, now hours of work
but who decided the hierarchy of how much it’s worth?
if you think the difference between trash collectors and CEOs is reasonable, wait
remove all garbagemen and managers from society - that idea will change
the system’s flimsy and volatile, debasing the dollar’s power of purchasing
are your models predictive with any remote shadow of certainty?
worthless schemes developed to maximize short-term gains
market manipulation’s masturbation to turn profit from, your sperm stains
rudimentary metrics convinced us of this “capital” illusion
but if worth is a reflection of scarcity, what’s that say about the value of a human?
showers of confusion unearth truths that are hard to bury;
admitting currency is contrived makes your profession seem arbitrary

To Whom it May Ignore,

What makes a nation poor?
is this not the thought of Adam Smith?
wasn’t poverty the cause why he wrote his whole manuscript?
geographic advantages dictated conquest like the path of a pathogen
reinterpreted as proof of superior Euro-cultural acumen
when in fact Anglo-Saxons were just packed in small communities
and their proximity to animals gave them bacterial immunities
which were new diseases to native peoples: germ proselytization
and those bacteria did the dirty work of colonization
yet somehow the models in place have shifted to the upper niche
focusing solely on the moments that make a country rich
but the dumbest shit is how our impact is reprimanded so readily
when progress puts every social class on the planet in jeopardy
it doesn’t take much expertise to know our environment should be protected
but narrow thinking is expected…
when understanding the demographic that founded the field has been neglected


To Whom this May Convince

this sounds like a foolish way to think
but isn’t change the true purpose?
if stagnant wages devalue money, won’t stagnant thinking make YOU worthless?
your curse is you’re the experts with a rep to uphold
but we need you to steer us from the lie of perpetual growth
they say economics is DEscriptive while ethics is PREscriptive
but aren’t both of those components of the world that we live in?
economics paints a picture incomplete without a moral frame
so there’s no beauty in your rules when it ignores the poorest’s pain
there must be more to gain from an open-ended system;
right and wrong can’t be measured in gross domestic income
economies are inventions, not natural or organic
so whatever problems exist are there because we planned it
and with the planet being gambled with, there’s no denying
that our most valuable commodity is close to dying
the heat is slowly rising while we melt in the pot
if economists tell us how things really are…
…at what point will you guys start to tell us to stop?