ABSTRACT
‘Toothcomber’ is intellectually descended from ‘Beachcomber,’ which was the pen-name of the English columnist J. B. Morton, who wrote the The Daily Express’s ‘By the Way Column’ from 1924 to 1975. The present vignettes have been stimulated partly by the kindly thought that proper economics writing deserves a regular dose of solid economics in it and partly by the realisation that even if one were to deliberately set about doing a J. B. Morton on economics, it might prove hard to come up with anything that could quite parallel some of the stuff that professionals in the field have been systematically dishing out—as mimicked in various minuscule pieces which Morton wrote on the subject. The presiding spirit of the pieces in this chapter is the philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit.
