Presidential Politics in the Year of the Toad Editor's Note

by Boozer Allan Hamilton Ph.D.

Note: Dr. Hamilton is this year's recipient of the Howard Littlefield prize for putting the con in economics, but with a twist. Hamilton's methods actually work and so, unlike the great bulk of economic methods, cannot be called, strictly speaking, a con. He is slated to write a series of papers presenting his theory, but in this first essay has decided to discuss the upcoming election season in the US from an outsider's perspective. Note that Dr. Hamilton holds dual Brazilian and Haitian citizenship.

One reason his work is not better known is his eccentric, often cryptic style of writing, not unlike another forgotten genius of economics, perhaps the greatest economist of all time according to Hamilton, Thorstein Veblen, whose style convinced readers that he wrote satirically. That he did is true, but nonetheless his ideas form a cogent whole and inspired in some part Boozer's own mathematical formalization that has led to amazingly precise predictions. We can only assume that Boozer already knows who will win this election but is keeping the prediction in escrow until after the election. For more on his achievements and his biography, please see the award.Littlefield Award

Note that Hamilton refers to himself as BAH, and his model as BAHM. We apologize for his grammar, but he refuses to allow editing for grammar, calling it a ceremonial crock of creme de merda or merde, (we cannot always decide as he speaks a ragout of French, Portuguese, and English, among other languages). We insist he write in English, or at least a facsimile of English. It is little known that in fact he commands perfectly English, Portuguese and French, among a large cluster of languages, but now refuses to write within their accepted bounds. His earliest papers, however, are models of grammar, unlike most economic literature which can best be described with the term made famous in certain circles by Maurice Stoker, namely impacted prose. In the medical sense, as in fecal impaction, with the hideous word impact losing any meaning and replacing the more nebulous (rightly so) noun effect and verb affect, which economists affected to make it seem as if their policies had impact, not effect, when it is closer to the latter but in reality not either. Another affectation of economics in its hankering after the substance of physics or chemistry or now biology, a long tradition going back at least to the overrated Adam Smith in his jealousy of Newton's success with gravity.

The Editors

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