THE MEETING POINT OF ECONOMICS AND POETRY

By Ilija Šaula

At first glance, it seems that economics and poetry stand on opposite shores of the same human experience, like two languages that share neither vocabulary nor intention: one speaks in numbers, the other in the silences between words; one measures, the other feels; one distributes scarcity, the other creates the illusion of infinity out of abundance. And yet, when the gaze lingers a little longer and abandons the quick separations with which reason often defends itself from complexity, their hidden closeness begins to emerge. Both grow out of the same need to bring the chaos of the inner world into some form of order, however temporary and fragile.

For both economics and poetry, each in its own way and with its own available means, attempt to answer the same question: what truly has value. Economics does this through the allocation of resources, through calculation, through the balance between desires and possibilities; poetry does it through the choice of words, through the absence of the superfluous, through the effort to compress the unsayable into a few lines that withstand time. In that effort, their shared discipline is revealed, a kind of inner frugality, almost ascetic, in which excess is discarded so that essence may shine. Just as money loses its value when there is too much of it, so does a word lose its weight when it is scattered without need. In that sense, the poet truly becomes an economist of language, a guardian of a delicate balance between what is spoken and what is left unsaid, where every word must justify its existence not by function, but by depth.

But this similarity does not end with the principle of economy; it reaches deeper, into the very nature of trust without which neither can survive. Money, in its essence, is an agreement — a fragile consensus that something without intrinsic value nonetheless holds worth. Its strength does not lie in the material, but in the belief that surrounds it. By analogy, a poem is merely a sequence of signs until the reader grants it trust and agrees to enter its world, accepting that a metaphor can be truer than a fact. In that encounter between the one who writes and the one who reads, a quiet exchange takes place, akin to trade, but freed from the harshness of commercial character. It is an exchange of meanings, emotions, inner images. If trust disappears, everything collapses, and both the exchange and the poem become empty forms, stripped of their power.

In the modern world, where the boundaries between disciplines are increasingly blurred, this connection becomes even more evident. Economics is no longer merely the domain of numbers; it increasingly depends on the stories people tell one another, on collective feelings that cannot be reduced to formulas. Fear can bring markets down, hope can lift them; vision can create value where none existed before. In this sense, capital no longer circulates only through banks and institutions, but through narratives and images of the future that we share or reject. And here poetry, almost imperceptibly, returns as a hidden driving force — not as ornament, but as a fundamental form of thinking that shapes the way we imagine the world.

Even where pure rationality seems to reign, some form of poetic intuition is present. What we call the market is not merely a mechanism, but a living organism that reacts to moods, contemplations, collective dreams and fears. In that organism, every innovation carries within itself a trace of destruction, for the new can arise only if the old breaks apart and yields its place. This dynamic, which economics recognizes as the necessity of progress, has its echo in art, where each new generation must break with previous forms in order to find its own voice. As if both the market and the poem breathe with the same rhythm: an inhale of creation, an exhale of destruction, and between them a continuous movement that does not allow stagnation.

And so, slowly, the boundary that at first seemed insurmountable begins to fade. Economics is no longer only the science of survival, nor is poetry merely the luxury of the spirit. They meet at the point where a person begins to understand that bread is not enough without meaning, but that meaning cannot endure without bread. One gives structure; the other, purpose; one sets limits; the other transcends them. In their meeting, there is no conflict, but completion — as if each finds in the other what it lacks.

Perhaps the answer to the question that drives them both is hidden precisely here: value lies neither in the thing nor in the word, but in the relationship we build toward them. It arises in the space between need and meaning, between what we must and what we desire in, that space, where economics and poetry touch, a person ceases to be merely a consumer or merely an artist. He becomes something third — a being that understands that the greatest wealth is that which cannot be measured, yet without which no measure makes sense.