for us after we’d choreographed our world-shattering modern-dance recital or mounted our famous empty-gallery show of preconceptual post-objectivist paintings or when our folk-rock group, Exiles of Dayton, learned to play “Kum Ba Ya.” And we weren’t going to “sell out” no matter how much money was lavished upon us. Business majors intended to (it was a loaded phrase in those days) “make money,” and they were going to do this even if it involved some activity that wasn’t a bit artistic, such as running IBM. We artsy types would have been shocked if anyone had told us (and no one had the nerve) that making money was creative. And we would have been truly shocked to learn that a fundamental principle of economics—“Wealth is created when assets are moved from lower- to higher-valued uses”—is the root of all creativity, be it artsy, IBMsy, or whatever. “Putting money first” was crass. It was as if you’d gone to a party with dozens of wild, swinging chicks and, instead of drinking Mateus and making small talk about Jean-Paul Sartre, you just whipped out your unit. Except we would have thought that was a blast. But go into business? Never. If you don’t count selling drugs. Which we were all doing. We knew everything about price elasticity when it came to pot, not to mention aggregate supply and demand. In point of fact, we hirsute weirdos probably had more real business experience than any business major on campus. And one more thing— we all fancied ourselves to be marxists. As a philosophic recipe, marxism is a cannelloni of the economical, stuffed with economics, and cooked in economic sauce. Still, we were not interested in economic ideas. And, to be fair, the business majors weren’t, either. Econ was not something they took because they were fascinated by the elegant complexities of economic relationships or because mankind cannot survive without economic activity. They took Econ and forgot everything in the text so they could get a job from somebody else who took Econ and forgot everything in the text. I turned into a square myself, of course, as everyone who lives long enough does. I got a job as a journalist—but without ever considering that journalism was a business. (Although I would have been unpleasantly surprised to get a hug instead of a paycheck at the end of the week.) And I continued to ignore
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