In an essay currently online over at The New York Times (but which won’t appear on dead trees until this Sunday’s issue of NYT Book Review), Paul Greenberg has a suggestion for turning around the economy.

His thesis is in his title—”Bail Out the Writers!”

The piece begins:

A little while back my daughter told me the following depressing joke:

Woman: What do you do?

Man: Me? Oh, I write books.

Woman: How interesting! Have you sold anything recently?

Man: Why, yes. My couch, my car and my flat-screen television.

Greenberg apparently knows the world of the writer far too well.