Today I'll talk to my regulation students about the importance of having the attitude that you can improve the situation around you. I thought of that because I was reassigned to Harvard Hall 102, which is a nice room, without the construction noise of Littauer, the lack of blackboard, or then noisy air conditioner, but which is a lecture room with the old-fashioned forward facing rigid chairs with fold-up writing boards. I use lots of discussion. The seating situation is crucial for discussion. There were, however, a number of loose chairs in the room, and, if truth be told, in the classroom next door (which used to have a nice little table too). So I had the students rearrange those to make a semicircle. It was not ideal, but it worked OK, and I even had the pleasure of a self-moving discussion igniting about Uber and a new service, just banned in Boston, for people to sell information about empty parking spots, which coujld keep going while I fixed a comptuer problem.

So I will make the point to them that there are two kinds of people: those who take their situation as given, and those who look for improvements they can make. Actually, there is a third kind, I guess: those who look for improvements and complain that nobody is making them. I have some recollection that psychologists can test for this personality attribute and it's correlated with success even conditioning on IQ and such things. I think there might be a good aphorism on that, but I can't remember it, so I'll make some up:

"You'll succeed if you don't about what is, but what might be because you're there."

"Don't think about what is, but what might be."

"Don't think about what's wrong, but about how you can fix it."

Where's the economics in this? Well, it pertains to any activity, so it pertains to economics research too. To do good research, you need to (1) See what's wrong, and (2) Try to fix it, and (3) Stop and write it up. (Just as the good is the enemy of the perfect, so the perfect is the enemy of the good.) Thus we get to the Verlaine quote that is the title of this blog post, a quote which can be loosely translated as:

"An economics paper is never finished, only published."

P.S. I thought of a couple of variants on the Verlaine quote, nicely pointed because of how he treated his wife and how he doesn't seem (from Wikipedia) to have written much in the last decade of his short life:

"Un poèt n'est jamais fini, seulement abandonné."

"La femme d'un poèt n'est jamais la finalée, seulement abandonnée."