What would Shaw have made of it fall?
Published 11/04/2013 | 05:00
• As the economy continues to struggle, one wonders what the founder of the London School of Economics would have made of it all? And before you shout 'Oh no, not another economist with his pet theory', the man who set up this seat of economic learning was none other than . . . George Bernard Shaw.
Being a founder did not curb Shaw's cutting edge – although a friend and patron of John Maynard Keynes, the father of modern macro-economics, he once wrote: "If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."
Recent events would have left GBS spoiled for choice and he would have brandished his sabre wit with free abandon. "Oh, the tiger will love you; there is no sincerer love than the love of food" perfectly encapsulates how we were swallowed up by the greed of builders and speculators in those Celtic Cheet(ah/us) years, where "a government that robs Peter to pay Paul could always rely on the support of Paul".
