everything I know about economics I learned in middle school

Amid all the schaudenfraude of AIG heads getting their multi-million dollar bonuses stripped and the defrocking of high priest Greenspan there have been a slew of pundits spewing all sorts of nonsense about how a recession will lead to people spend more time with family, value the important things in life, make a lot of us happier, yadda yadda yadda. That's not the first thing that springs to mind when you can't make house payments, and living on the street looms as a very real possibility. (I don't know about you, but New York is bloody cold right now.)

But sticking out from the cluster of financially comfortable pundits trying to console themselves with studies and figures was Margaret Atwood's eminently sensible Op-Ed piece in Tuesday's Times. This is the sort of thing that restores my faith in good writing, how two people can set out to make the same points, but only one packs any rhetorical punch. I am biased though, since I'm a huge fan of explaining political and economic behavior in analogies to middle school.