Downfall of the Business Cycle

Felix Kaufmann’s satirical song, presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation, gives disputes over scientific abstraction, value neutrality, and economic research a theatrical voice. With music by Johann Sioly and text after Wilhelm Wiesberg, it moves from the limits of natural science to state policy and finally to the work of a Business Cycle Institute. Its governing joke is that research might extinguish the economic fluctuations it seeks to explain.

The opening sets scientific models against the variety of lived experience:

Now, natural science tries to give us clues, Abstractions meant to shape our worldly views; But we know life presents a broad tableau, And choices made reflect the daily flow.

This contrast establishes the speaker’s suspicion of abstraction. Yet the complaint is double-edged: resistance to methods that constrain reality accompanies bewilderment at ordinary technological success. The practical demand that science sustain a nation turns a question about the limits of knowledge into an exaggerated test of its usefulness.

The attack becomes explicitly political when the speaker condemns Wertfreiheit, or value neutrality:

Oh take not value from our repertoire, Heavens, without it man has no North Star.

Values appear here as indispensable guides to action. In context, however, the appeal to the state’s defender to halt the offending method makes this defense sound coercive as well as anxious. The lyric stages opposition to disinterested inquiry rather than straightforwardly endorsing the speaker’s methodological claims.

The closing institutional satire concentrates these tensions in the Business Cycle Institute, juxtaposing its distinguished board with the suggestion that one man performs all the work. Research then acquires an absurd causal power: the business cycle itself becomes endangered by investigation and equilibrium. The joke collapses the distinction between explaining economic processes and making them disappear. Through this escalation, Kaufmann transforms methodological disagreement into comic performance, exposing the extravagance of demands placed on science and of fears aroused by its practice.