Ideas That Teach Economics: Who Should I Ask?

At least since I successfully used this blog to get a design for the cover of the third edition of my first book, I have been intrigued with the idea of using the internet as a way of collecting ideas and information. My current project, described in my previous post, is an obvious candidate. I have accordingly been using this blog, Facebook and G+ to ask for suggestions on what I ought to include in a book of short works of literature that contain economic ideas. I have also been emailing everyone I can think of who might contribute additional suggestions, ranging from my undergraduate debate partner, a fellow Kipling enthusiast and currently a federal judge, to two science fiction authors, also friends. Also lots of economists. It just occurred to me that I ought to try the second order approach--using the Internet to get suggestions about who I should use the Internet to get suggestions from. Hence this post.

Who should I contact by email who would be likely to know of short works of literature that included interesting economic ideas? What sites online might it be worth putting posts or comments on? 

So far the only one I have tried, aside from here, FB and G+, is Baen's Bar.

Ideas That Teach Economics: A Progress Report

In two previous posts I described my current project to put together a collection of works of literature that teach economics. Inspired in part by comments to those posts, I now have almost half a book's worth and am looking for more. Here is the current list, not necessarily in what will be the final order:

"Business as Usual DuringAlterations" by Ralph Williams

Horodotus on the marriage customs of the Babylonians

From Imitations of Horace by Alexander Pope

"Margin of Profit" by Poul Anderson

"The Peace of Dives" by Rudyard Kipling

"The Cambist and Lord Iron" by Daniel Abraham

"The Jigsaw Man" by Larry Niven

“The Verger” by Somerset Maugham

A Petition by Frédéric Bastiat

George Orwell, A Review of The Road to Serfdom and The Mirror of the Past

I am considering adding, at Peter Leeson's suggestion,  
"The Judgement of Solomon." 
It is a well known story but provides a simple illustration of a preference revealing mechanism, although arguably a flawed one.

With a little commentary by me, this would come to about 40,000 words. I am aiming at at least twice that, preferably a little more.

A few comments on what I want:

1. The idea is to teach economic ideas. Economics, to me, isn't the study of the economy, it is the approach to understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to take the actions that best achieve them. So the fact that a story describes events in the economy, such as inflation or unemployment, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition. 

2. I am looking for works that teach economics, not works that support my (libertarian, pro-free market) political views. 

3. I am looking for works that are good enough literature to be read as such. A story written by an economist to teach economics, such as Hazlitt's Time Will Run Backwards or Murder at the Margin by Marshall Jevons, does not qualify unless it is a good enough story to have survived on its literary merit alone. Ideally, this would be a collection that could be read for pleasure by someone uninterested in economics as well as being used as supplementary reading for discussion in an economics course.

4. I don't want excerpts that read as excerpts. The piece by Alexander Pope is part of a longer work but reads on its own as a complete poem.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is a somewhat similar project published in 2003, The Literary Book of Economics by Michael Watt. It is where I discovered the Pope poem, but so far that is the only thing I have found in it that I would want to use. It is not a book that I can easily imagine anyone reading all of for fun, although there are some interesting bits in it.

Suggestions can either be put as comments here or emailed to me.

Again Fictional Economics

A while back, I put up a post about an idea for a book, a collection of works of literature that taught economic ideas. Thanks to comments on that post, my list has expanded from two works to four, with a few other possibles. The purpose of this post is to make what I am looking for clearer and ask for more suggestions.

The plan is for a book consisting of works of literature, probably stories and poems, that are good enough to be worth reading for entertainment but that in addition embody interesting economic insights. Since it is to be a collection, the individual pieces have to be reasonably short—a novel would not fit. In my experience, good fiction writers usually write better fiction than even good economists, so I am not looking for something written by an economist to teach in fictional form, such as Looking Backwards by Hazlitt or Murder at the Margin and its sequels by Breit and Elzinga writing as Marshall Jevons–and in any case, all of those are too long for my purposes.

My present list:

"Margin of Profit" by Poul Anderson

A science fiction story whose point is that, in order to stop someone from doing something, you don't have to make it impossible, just unprofitable.

"The Peace of Dives" by Rudyard Kipling

An allegory in verse arguing that economic interdependence brings peace.

"So I make a jest of Wonder, and a mock of Time and Space,
"The roofless Seas an hostel, and the Earth a market-place,
  "Where the anxious traders know
  "Each is surety for his foe,
"And none may thrive without his fellows' grace."

--> "The Cambist and Lord Iron" by Daniel Abraham

A short story about prices--of an obscure currency, two men's lives, and a soul. 

--> "Business as Usual DuringAlterations" by Ralph Williams

A short story about why matter duplicators would not crash a market economy. 

Other suggestions? An excerpt from a longer work isn't impossible, but it has to stand on its own, be worth reading as a story. 

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P.S. I think I have one more. "The Jigsaw Man" by Larry Niven. The central point is the same that I later and independently published in the  JPE as "Why Not Hang Them All: The Virtues of Inefficient Punishment."

A commenter pointed me at The Literary Book of Economics by Michael W Watts, which seems to be a project along the same lines as mine; I've ordered a copy. From descriptions I could find, it's a lot of relatively short excerpts from works of literature, each  making some economic point. I'm thinking in terms of many fewer pieces, probably each complete.