Academic Research on Realtors Confirmed by 1983 Novel

A reader named Gerard Mulligan was good enough to let us know that a 1983 novel he was reading, Scenes From Later Life by William Cooper, contains a passage that, if the section from Freakonomics about real-estate agents were ever made into a film, could practically serve as the script. (If the film were British, that is.) Check out the passage on the upper left-hand page:

In his note, Mr. Mulligan added this: “What did Shelley say about poets being the unacknowledged economists of the world? Or something like that.” According to my copy of the wonderful new Yale Book of Quotations, Shelley actually said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

But I quite prefer Mr. Mulligan’s version.