Bastiat's Window: Origin Story
The seen and the unseen in economics, ethics, health, technology, & culture.
I’m Robert Graboyes. By trade, I’ve been an economist, journalist, and musician. In those fields and in other endeavors, I’ve strived to look beyond the rippling surface and plumb the hidden depths beneath. Frédéric Bastiat, history’s wittiest economist, focused on “the seen and the unseen” («Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas») and used the metaphor of a broken window to represent this bifurcation. The title of this blog, Bastiat’s Window, is an homage to his insights and his humor.
Paraphrasing poet John Gillespie Magee, Jr., sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things my parents never dreamed of. This kaleidoscope of memories will form the basis of this blog.
I passed my childhood in Petersburg, Virginia; in this small Southern town, I was surrounded by talented amateur artists, musicians, and thespians—but also by the vile depravities of Jim Crow, which hung across the town like a sulfurous smog. I began playing piano at age 5 and first composed music at age 8. In college, I aspired to a literary life, imagining myself as a novelist and immersing my thoughts in the likes of William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; on the most most memorable morning of those years, I sat alone in a room, leafing ever-so-carefully through the hand-written manuscript of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. As a small-town newspaper reporter on the edge of Appalachia, I wrote on politics, business, and moonshine; one stunning week, I interviewed a rising political star and, a few days later, covered his funeral after a tragic airplane crash.
In 1984, on a dark, remote road in Liberia, frantic soldiers waved machine guns at my driver and me; they were, it turned out, simply pleading with us to transport a woman in labor to the nearest hospital, 30 miles away. In New York City, I played in an orchestra that accompanied a Sesame Street star’s narration of Peter and the Wolf. The two most remarkable sights of my life were a total eclipse of the sun in 1970 and the birth of my son 16 years later. I worked for a bank whose actions were pivotal in ending apartheid in South Africa, and I may have played some tiny role in pushing the bank to take said action. I’ve eaten snail in France, frog in Côte d'Ivoire, horse in Kazakhstan, and mountain oysters in Colorado. I’ve helicoptered about Denali, looked southward from the Cape of Good Hope, stood amid throngs of animals on the plains of Kenya, and walked the ancient paving stones of Jerusalem.
My work as an economist has allowed me to write on Africa, monetary policy, healthcare, eugenics, technology, aviation, politics, deafness, history, film, and much more. I’ve taught at five universities and won a string of professor-of-the-year awards. In perhaps the single most outstanding moment of my career, I was awarded the Reason Foundation’s 2014 Bastiat Prize for Journalism. When that was announced, the founder of the prize described me as “modern day Bastiat.” While I view that as a lovely bit of hyperbole, I’ll take it as license to borrow Monsieur Bastiat’s good name for this blog.
In this blog—Bastiat’s Window—I’ll elaborate on all of these things and on much more. I look forward to the conversations that lie ahead.