{"id":5174,"date":"2010-11-07T15:16:22","date_gmt":"2010-11-07T15:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/11\/07\/the-bob-dylan-plan-for-economi\/"},"modified":"2010-11-07T15:16:22","modified_gmt":"2010-11-07T15:16:22","slug":"the-bob-dylan-plan-for-economi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/11\/07\/the-bob-dylan-plan-for-economi\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bob Dylan Plan for Economic Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"

I bought the Witmark Demos<\/a> a week or so ago, because I could always use another 50 Bob Dylan songs, and listening to them on shuffle play has managed to earworm me with one song in particular, “I Shall Be Free”<\/a>, which it occurs to me has great current relevance:<\/p>\n

\n

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop
\nIt’s President Kennedy callin’ me up
\nHe said, “My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?”
\nI said, “My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot
\nAnita Ekberg
\nSophia Loren”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You might think Dylan’s plan for prosperity through importing attractive foreign women is a little fanciful, but it’s at least as plausible as the “more tax cuts” “plan” of the Tea Party crowd, and a good deal more fun. We had more entertaining radicals back in the 1960’s.<\/p>\n

Even better, the last forty-odd years of economic research have shown that it’s possible to double the growth rate of the Kennedy years, by importing good-looking foreign men as well as women. Why, with this plan, we could put a man on the Moon in five<\/em> years, or one man and one woman on two different moons inside of a decade.<\/p>\n

Of course, the song does need to be updated with some celebrities who are more, shall we say, au courant. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(I had vague thoughts of posting something more serious this morning, but the ScienceBlogs server meltdown derailed that, and now I just have time for a shower between leaf-raking and the Giants game. So you get frivolous political pop culture.)<\/p>\n

(On a marginally more serious note, it’s really interesting how the official lyrics provided by Dylan’s publishers are not at all what he sings on the actual record (either the Witmark Demo version or the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan<\/cite> album version). This is a recurring problem with his lyrics, made worse by the fact that his voice is sufficiently bad that you often can’t quite tell what he really said, only that it’s not what’s on the lyrics sheet.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I bought the Witmark Demos a week or so ago, because I could always use another 50 Bob Dylan songs, and listening to them on shuffle play has managed to earworm me with one song in particular, “I Shall Be Free”, which it occurs to me has great current relevance: Well, my telephone rang it… Continue reading The Bob Dylan Plan for Economic Growth<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,28,81,37,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-politics","category-economics_1","category-pop_culture","category-silliness","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}