Quotes
Within the advanced countries, growth rates tend to be very stable over long periods of time, provided one averages over periods long enough to eliminate business-cycle effects (or corrects for short-term fluctuations in some other way). For poorer countries, however, there are many examples of sudden, large changes in growth rates, both up and down. Some of these changes are no doubt due to political or military disruption: Angola’s total GDP growth fell from 4.8 in the 60s to - 9.2 in the 70s; Iran’s fell from 11.3 to 2.5, comparing the same two periods. I do not think we need to look to economic theory for an account of either of these declines. There are also some striking examples of sharp increases in growth rates. The four East Asian ‘miracles’ of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are the most familiar: for the 1960-80 period, per capita income in these economies grew at rates of 7.0, 6.5, 6.8 and 7.5, respectively, compared to much lower rates in the 1950’s and earlier. Between the 60s and the 70s, Indonesia’s GDP growth increased from 3.9 to 7.5; Syria’s from 4.6 to 10.0.I do not see how one can look at figures like these without seeing them as representing possibilities. Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia’s or Egypt’s? If so, what, exactly? If not, what is it about the ’nature of India’ that makes it so? The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.
Robert E. Lucas, On the mechanics of economic development, Journal of Monetary Economics, vol. 22, no. 1, 1988, pp. 3–42, pp. 4-5
Cuando se incorpora la idea de que las economías crecen, y que lo hacen a tasas que pueden llegar a ser tan altas como para hacer rico a un país no muy rico en el curso de una generación, muchos de los dilemas que se presentan en las discusiones públicas sobre temas económicos desaparecen o quedan en un segundo plano. En particular, se resiente la idea de que la economía es un juego de suma cero, es decir, una situación en la que la ganancia de unos implica necesariamente pérdidas para otros (como sí ocurre, por ejemplo, entre equipos que participan de un campeonato de fútbol o entre la banca y el jugador en un casino). Por tomar un caso típico: la idea de que necesariamente hay un conflicto de clase entre empresarios y trabajadores queda relativizada cuando se comprueba que, si existe crecimiento económico, unos y otros pueden mejorar sus ingresos (lo cual no quita sentido a la pregunta sobre cuánto recibirá cada una de las partes del aumento en el ingreso total). De la misma manera, el crecimiento permite al gobierno obtener una mayor recaudación de impuestos sin necesidad de incrementar las tasas impositivas que cobra el sector privado de la economía. El crecimiento económico puede, también, hacer lugar para las distintas actividades productivas sin que sea necesario que pierdan unas para que ganen otras: con crecimiento, las grandes empresas pueden aumentar su facturación sin que ello disminuya el de las medianas y pequeñas; los supermercados pueden crecer sin perjudicar a los almacenes; las industrias manufactureras pueden prosperar en armonía con las rurales o las de servicios.
Lucas Llach, Macroeconomía argentina: Manual para (tratar de) comprender el país, Buenos Aires, 2018
Escribir un libro de texto es, posiblemente, la mejor manera de aprender sobre un tema cualquiera.
Lucas Llach, Macroeconomía argentina: Manual para (tratar de) comprender el país, Buenos Aires, 2018
The remedies for all our diseases will be discovered long after we are dead; and the world will be made a fit place to live in, after the death of most of those by whose exertions it will have been made so. It is to be hoped that those who live in those days will look back with sympathy to their known and unknown benefactors.
John Stuart Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, in Francis E. Mineka (ed.) Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1963, p. 668
Computers routinely do mathematics that no unaided human can manage, outperform world champions in checkers and grand masters in chess, speak and understand English and other languages, write presentable short stories and musical compositions, learn from their mistakes, and competently pilot ships, airplanes, and spacecraft. Their abilities steadily improve. They’re getting smaller, faster, and cheaper. Each year, the tide of scientific advance laps a little further ashore on the island of human intellectual uniqueness with its embattled castaways. If, at so early a stage in our technological evolution, we have been able to go so far in creating intelligence out of silicon and metal, what will be possible in the following decades and centuries? What happens when smart machines are able to manufacture smarter machines?
Carl Sagan, Pale blue dot: A vision of the human future in space, New York, 1994, pp. 29-30
One promising approach to institutional reform is to try to acknowledge people’s need to show off, but to divert their efforts away from wasteful activities and toward those with bigger benefits and positive externalities. For example, as long as students must show off by learning something at school, we’d rather they learned something useful (like how to handle personal finances) instead of something less useful (like Latin). As long as scholars have a need to impress people with their expertise on some topic, engineering is a more practical domain than the history of poetry. And scholars who show off via intellectual innovation seem more useful than scholars who show off via their command of some static intellectual tradition.
Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, Oxford, 2017, p. 312
Philosophy is essentially a middle-aged man’s game, though certain philosophers (notably Plato and Kant) have put up their best performances when they were well past middle life. Those of us who are not Platos or Kants are well advised to retire gracefully before they have too obviously lost their grip. Medical science would almost have made the world safe for senility, if physics had not made it unsafe for everybody; and there are far too many old clowns arthritically going through their hoops, to the embarrassment of the spectators: From X’s eyes the streams of dotage flow,And Y expires a driveller and a show.
C. D. Broad, A reply to my critics, in Paul A. Schilpp (ed.) The philosophy of C.D. Broad, New York, 1959, pp. 711–830, pp. 711-830
When I arrived in the fall of 1969, there was a philosophy course listed in the catalog entitled “Capitalism.” And the course description was “a moral examination of capitalism.” Of course, for most students, then, it would be taken for granted that a moral examination would be a moral condemnation of capitalism. But that’s not what I intended. We were going to read critics of capitalism. But we were also planning to read defenses of capitalism, and I was going to construct some of my own in the lectures. Some of the graduate students in the philosophy department knew what ideas I held, and they weren’t very happy about a course being taught in the department defending those ideas. Now it was true that there was another course in the department on Marxism by someone who was then a member of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party and students did not object to that. But still some students objected to my giving a lecture course on capitalism. I remember early in the fall (I guess I was scheduled to give the course in the spring term), a graduate student came to me at a departmental reception we had, and said, “We don’t know if you’re going to be allowed to give this course.” I said “What do you mean, not allowed to give this course?” He said, “Well, we know what ideas you hold. We just don’t know whether you will be allowed to give the course.” And I said, “If you come and disrupt my course, I’m going to beat the shit out of you!”
Robert Nozick, An Interview with Robert Nozick, Libertarian Review, 1977, pp. 15, p. 15
Hans von Bülow once arrived in a small German town to give a piano recital. He was informed by the somewhat nervous organizers that the local music critic could usually be counted on to give a good review, pro- vided that the artist first agreed to take a modestly priced lesson from him. Bülow pondered this unusual situation for a moment, and then replied, ‘He charges such low fees he could almost be described as incor- ruptible’. On another occasion Bülow got back to his London hotel after dark. As he was climbing the dimly lit staircase, he collided with a stranger hurrying in the opposite direction. ‘Donkey!’ exclaimed the man angrily. Bülow raised his hat politely, and replied, ‘Hans von Bülow’!Volumes could be filled with the wit and wisdom of Hans von Bülow, and the biography that follows teems with examples. His banter was woven into the very weft and weave of his complex personality. He had, moreover, the enviable gift of instant retort. A gentleman eager to be seen in his company once observed Bülow taking a morning stroll. He overtook the great musician, but was unsure of how to introduce himself. Finally he thought of something to say. ‘I’ll bet you don’t remember who I am.’ ‘You just won your bet’, replied Bülow, and walked on. Equally withering were Bülow’s observations on the follies of everyday life. Having heard that an eligible young bachelor wanted to improve his social station through marriage, he observed, ‘It will never work. The young lady wants to do the same thing’.On orchestral players Bülow could be particularly hard, especially if he felt that they were incompetent. He once berated a trombone player who was failing to deliver the right kind of sound, and told him that his tone resembled roast beef gravy running through a sewer. In Italy, during a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Bülow found himself confronted by a timpanist who simply could not master the intricate rhythms of the Scherzo. There comes a moment in this dynamic movement when the timpanist must break through with force, hammering out the basic rhythm of the main theme. Bülow strove with might and main to pound the pattern into the poor man’s head, but to no avail. Suddenly the solution occurred to him. Timp-a-ni! Timp-a-ni! Timp-a-ni! he kept yelling. A smile of comprehension slowly dawned on the player’s face, as he caught the rhythm of the one word with which he was familiar, and in no time at all he was playing the passage in the correct manner.Bülow could also be severe on fledgling composers, particularly if he suspected that they wanted him to endorse their music. During a visit to Boston, in the spring of 1889, a local composer of modest talent sent Bülow one of his compositions and was bold enough to request an opinion. The piece was titled ‘O Lord, hear my prayer!’ Bülow glanced briefly at the manuscript and wrote beneath the title, ‘He may, if you stop sinning like this!’A more famous case was that of Friedrich Nietzsche who, in the summer of 1872, was indiscreet enough to send Bülow an ambitious orchestral composition of his own—a ‘Manfred Meditation’—for the conductor’s critical appraisal. It was one of the philosopher’s major blunders. He had witnessed Bülow conduct /Tristan /at the Munich Royal Opera House a few weeks earlier, and by way of thanking him for ‘the loftiest artistic experience of my life’ he had sent Bülow a copy of his newly published ‘The Birth of Tragedy’. When he heard that Bülow was sufficiently impressed with the book to carry it with him everywhere, he was emboldened to send him his ‘Manfred Meditation’, doubtless hoping that the famous conductor would favour him with the usual assortment of platitudes that professionals are sometimes apt to offer distinguished amateurs. If Nietzsche thought to secure some fine phrases from Bülow, proffered by virtue of who he was, rather than by virtue of what the music itself was worth, he was sadly mistaken. Bülow looked at the ‘Manfred Meditation’ and knew that he must do his duty. He told Nietzsche that his score was ‘the most unedifying, the most anti-musical thing that I have come across for a long time in the way of notes put on paper.’ Several times, Bülow went on, he had to ask himself if it were not some awful joke. Having inserted the blade, Bülow now twisted the hilt and used Nietzsche’s own philosophical precepts against him. ‘Of the Apollonian element I have not been able to discover the smallest trace; and as for the Dionysian, I must say frankly that I have been reminded less of this than of the “day after” a bacchanal.’ In brief, Nietzsche’s score had produced in Bülow a hangover./Schadenfreude, /too, was never far from the surface, for like most of us Bülow found occasional joy in the misfortune of others. Two of his orchestral players, named Schulz and Schmidt, were slowly driving him to distraction because of their evident inability to understand what he required of them. One morning he got to the rehearsal only to be met with the sad news that Schmidt had died during the night. ‘And Schulz?’ he inquired.
Alan Walker, Hans von Bülow: A life and times, Oxford, 2010, pp. 3-5
Utilitarianism is a great idea with an awful name. It is, in my opinion, the most underrated and misunderstood idea in all of moral and political philosophy.
Joshua Greene, Moral tribes: emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them, London, 2013, pp. 106-107
The book has had a good reception, and many have cheered me by telling me they liked it or learned from it. But the response that warms me most after twenty years is the late John Strachey’s. John Strachey, whose books I had read in college, had been an outstanding Marxist economist in the 1930s. After the war he had been defense minister in Britain’s Labor Government. Some of us at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs invited him to visit because he was writing a book on disarmament and arms control. When he called on me he exclaimed how much this book had done for his thinking, and as he talked with enthusiasm I tried to guess which of my sophisticated ideas in which chapters had made so much difference to him. It turned out it wasn’t any particular idea in any particular chapter. Until he read this book, he had simply not comprehended that an inherently non-zero-sum conflict could exist. He had known that conflict could coexist with common interest but had thought, or taken for granted, that they were essentially separable, not aspects of an integral structure. A scholar concerned with monopoly capitalism and class struggle, nuclear strategy and alliance politics, working late in his career on arms control and peacemaking, had tumbled, in reading my book, to an idea so rudimentary that I hadn’t even known it wasn’t obvious.
Thomas C. Schelling, The strategy of conflict, Cambridge, MA, 1980, pp. vi-vii
When Auguste Rodin visited Vienna in june 1902, Berta Zuckerkandl invited the great French sculptor, together with Gustav Klimt, Austria’s most accomplished painter, for a Jause, a typical Viennese afternoon of coffee and cakes. Berta, herself a leading art critic and the guiding intelligence of one of Vienna’s most distinguished salons, recalled this memorable afternoon in her autobiography: Klimt and Rodin had seated themselves beside two remarkably beautiful young women—Rodin gazing enchantedly at them.… Alfred Grünfeld [the former court pianist to Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany, now living in Vienna] sat down at the piano in the big drawing room, whose double doors were opened wide. Klimt went up to him and asked: “Please play us some Schubert.” And Grünfeld, his cigar in his mouth, played dreamy tunes that floated and hung in the air with the smoke of his cigar. Rodin leaned over to Klimt and said: “I have never before experienced such an atmosphere—your tragic and magnificent Beethoven fresco; your unforgettable, temple-like exhibition; and now this garden, these women, this music … and round it all this gay, childlike happiness.… What is the reason for it all?” And Klimt slowly nodded his beautiful head and answered only one word: “Austria.”
Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, New York, 2012, p. xiii
How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence.
Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, vol. 16, no. 4, 1959, pp. 5–30, p. 22
The Russians ran the eastern parts of Germany directly until the German Democratic Republic was established as a satellite state of the USSR in 1949. Production was nationalised, factories and property turned over to the state, health care, rent and food were subsidised. One-party rule was established with an all-powerful secret service to back it up. And the Russians, having refused the offer of American capital, plundered East German production for themselves.They stripped factories of plant and equipment which they sent back to the USSR. At the same time, they required a rhetoric of ‘Communist brotherhood’ from the East Germans whom they had ‘liberated’ from fascism. Whatever their personal histories and private allegiances, the people living in this zone had to switch from being (rhetorically, at the very least) Nazis one day to being Communists and brothers with their former enemies the next.And almost overnight the Germans in the eastern states were made, or made themselves, innocent of Nazism. It seemed as if they actually believed that Nazis had come from and returned to the western parts of Germany, and were somehow separate from them—which was in no way true. History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler’s regime. This sleight-of-history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century.
Anna Funder, Stasiland: stories from behind the Berlin Wall, London, 2003, p. 161
There was hunger in the cities but not in the food-producing villages, and the peasants hoarded and hid food. One way to get some bread and butter, or maybe a chicken, was to walk to a village not too far from [Odessa], carrying along some silk handkerchiefs, a few pieces of family silver, or even a golden watch, and to exchange these for food. Many enterprising city inhabitants did this, even though it was a dangerous undertaking.Here is a story told to me by one of my friends who was at that time a young professor of physics in Odessa. His name was Igor Tamm (Nobel Prize laureate in Physics, 1958). Once when he arrived in a neighboring village, at the period when Odessa was occupied by the Reds, and was negotiating with a villager as to how many chickens he could get for half a dozen silver spoons, the village was captured by one of the Makhno bands, who were roaming the country, harassing the Reds. Seeing his city clothes (or what was left of them), the capturers brought him to the Ataman, a bearded fellow in a tall black fur hat with machine-gun cartridge ribbons crossed on his broad chest and a couple of hand grenades hanging on the belt.“You son-of-a-bitch, you Communistic agitator, undermining our Mother Ukraine! The punishment is death.““But no,” answered Tamm, “I am a professor at the University of Odessa and have come here only to get some food.““Rubbish!” retorted the leader. “What kind of professor are you?““I teach mathematics.““Mathematics?” said the Ataman. “All right! Then give me an estimate of the error one makes by cutting off Maclaurin’s series at the nth term. Do this, and you will go free. Fail, and you will be shot!“Tamm could not believe his ears, since this problem belongs to a rather special branch of higher mathematics. With a shaking hand, and under the muzzle of the gun, he managed to work out the solution and handed it to the Ataman.“Correct!” said the Ataman. “Now I see that you really are a professor. Go home!”
George Gamow, My world line: an informal autobiography, New York, 1970, pp. 19-20
If taxes are to be levied, or income imputed, on the basis of the value of agricultural and/or residential properties, it is important that assessment procedures be adopted which estimate the true economic value of property with reasonable accuracy. […] The economist’s answer to the assessment problem is simple and essentially foolproof: allow each property owner to declare the value of his own property, make these declared values a matter of public record, and require that an owner sell his property to any bidder who is willing to pay, say, 20 percent more than the declared value. This simple scheme is self-enforcing, allows no scope for corruption, has negligible costs of administration, and creates incentives, in addition to those already present in the market, for each property to be put to that use in which it has the highest economic productivity. The beauty of this scheme, so evident to economists, is not, however, appreciated by lawyers, who object strongly to the idea of requiring the sale of properties, possibly against the will of their owners. The economist can retort here that if owners value their property at the price at which they would be willing to sell, they should not be unwilling to sell at a price 20 percent higher.
Gerald P. O'Driscoll et al., TAX REFORM, Contemporary Economic Policy, vol. 15, no. 1, 1965, pp. 1–20, p. 290
Classical scholars have, I believe, a general principle, /difficilior lectio potior/—the more difficult reading is to be preferred—in textual criticism. If the Archbishop of Canterbury tells one man that he believes in God, and another that he does not, then it is probably the second assertion which is true, since otherwise it is very difficult to understand why he should have made it, while there are many excellent reasons for his making the first whether it be true or false.
G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work, Cambridge, 1940, p. 4
“How are you treated today, as a former Stasi man?’ I ask. I would like to find out why he is disguised as a westerner.‘The foe has made a propaganda war against us, a slander and smear campaign. And therefore I don’t often reveal myself to people. But in Potsdam people come up and say’—he puts on a small sorry voice—‘“You were right. Capitalism is even worse than you told us it would be. In the GDR you could go out alone at night as a woman! You could leave your apartment door open!”’You didn’t need to, I think, they could see inside anyway.‘This capitalism is, above all, exploitation! It is unfair. It’s brutal. The rich get richer and the masses get steadily poorer. And capitalism makes war! German imperialism in particular! Each industrialist is a criminal at war with the other, each business at war with the next!’ He takes a sip of coffee and holds his hand up to stop me asking any more questions.‘Capitalism plunders the planet too—this hole in the ozone layer, the exploitation of the forests, pollution—we must get rid of this social system! Otherwise the human race will not last the next fifty years!’There is an art, a deeply political art, of taking circumstances as they arise and attributing them to your side or the opposition, in a constant tallying of reality towards ends of which it is innocent. And it becomes clear as he speaks that socialism, as an article of faith, can continue to exist in minds and hearts regardless of the miseries of history. This man is disguised as a westerner, the better to fit unnoticed into the world he finds himself in, but the more he talks the clearer it becomes that he is undercover, waiting for the Second Coming of socialism.
Anna Funder, Stasiland: stories from behind the Berlin Wall, London, 2003, p. 86
In 1905. Governor Samuel W. Pennypacker rejected the sterilization act of the Pennsylvania legislature with the ringing broadside: “It is plain that the safest and most effective method of preventing procreation would be to cut the heads off of the inmates.” (Not long afterward, Pennypacker wise cracked down a raucous political audience: “Gentlemen, gentlemen! You forget you owe me a vote of thanks. Didn’t I veto the bill for the castration of idiots?”)
Daniel J. Kevles, In the name of eugenics: genetics and the uses of human heredity, Cambridge, MA, 1995, p. 109
To Engels’s mind, there was nothing in math that was not already in nature; mathematics was simply a reflection and an explanation of the physical world. As a result, he attempted to crowbar all sorts of mathematical models into his system of dialectics. “Let us take an arbitrary algebraic magnitude, namely /a,” /begins one passage in /Dialectics of Nature. /“Let us negate it, then we have /-a /(minus /a). /Let us negate this negation by multiplying /-a /by /-a, /then we have /+a, /that is the original positive magnitude, but to a higher degree, namely to the second power.” As the Trotskyist scholar Jean van Heijenoort points out, this is all horribly confused: to take just one example, ‘’negation" in Engels’s usage can refer to any number of differing mathematical operations. Worse was to come as Engels, playing the reductive philistine, dismissed complex numbers and theoretical mathematics—those parts of theoretical science that went beyond a reflection of natural phenomena—as akin to quackery: “When one has once become accustomed to ascribe to the [square root of] -1 or to the fourth dimension some kind of reality outside of our own heads, it is not a matter of much importance if one goes a step further and also accepts the spirit world of the mediums.”
Tristan Hunt, Marx's general: The revolutionary life of friedrich engels, New York, 2010, pp. 286-287