An Economic Haiku Contest

I was reading a bedtime story to my daughter Sophie when I stumbled upon the following haiku by Jack Prelutsky, told from the perspective of a mouse:

If not for the cat,
And the scarcity of cheese,
I could be content.

Perhaps I am just a sucker for the word scarcity, but there was something in this haiku that really moved me — which is an accomplishment since I have virtually no ability to appreciate art of any kind. (That particular haiku must have moved other people too; in a book of haiku, it was the very first one and gave the book its name.)

Although it was probably not meant to be a haiku about economics, I would classify it as one. So I went in search of other economics haikus. Marginal Revolution blogged last fall about economist Keisuke Hirano‘s econometrics haiku.

The rest I saw were not so good, except for one Dubner wrote back in the early days of our blog.

I was happy to see a haiku book review of Freakonomics.

Overall, though, I was left wanting something more.

Here’s the deal: you have 24 hours to create your own economics haiku and post it in the comments. Then we will select our five favorites and let readers vote on their favorite original haiku (no plagiarism, please). The winner takes home a piece of Freakonomics schwag.