I regret to inform you that we have only two episodes of Downton Abbey left this season: next Sunday’s, and the two-hour finale. I must say this season has been kind of a letdown, though that is a relative judgment; watching it weekly has been a great pleasure, if only because it’s so happy-making to spend time with those people, especially Maggie Smith (the Dowager Countess), Jim Carter (Mr. Carson), and Phyllis Logan (Mrs. Hughes).

Steven Mufson has a clever piece talking about the economic lessons taught by Downton Abbey. Excerpt:

2. Workers who don’t adapt slide down the economic ladder

Molesley was trained as a butler, and a butler was a skilled position in those days, requiring someone who knew how to manage the staff. When Matthew Crawley died, however, Molesley lost his position as a valet and couldn’t find another until the house’s senior butler, Mr. Carson, offered him a job as footman, a position demanding fewer skills and offering less money.

“I have come down in the world, Mr. Carson,” Molesley says. “I am a beggar and so, as the proverb tells us, I cannot be a chooser.”

“I see Molesley as the 1920s counterpart of the contemporary highly skilled worker in manufacturing — left behind by changed circumstances,” says Eric S. Maskin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who teaches at Harvard University. Today’s Molesley might be a former printing press machinist now restocking shelves at Wal-Mart.