“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Not Albert Einstein. As he is a quotation magnet it has stuck to him quite often, but apparently it was actually sociology professor William Bruce Cameron in 1963 (see https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/26/everything-counts-einstein/). Would it be any more clever if it had been Einstein?
In my latest National Post column I lament Forbes’ characteristic attempt to stuff Michael Shellenberger’s brave apology for excessive climate alarmism down the memory hole
“We think of economics as strangled in math because of the formulas and graphs filling most economics textbooks. But you can (and I did) search the entire founding volume of economics, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, without encountering a mathematical formula. In New Ideas, Buchholz quotes Alfred Marshall, the preeminent economist of the late nineteenth century (and a mathematician): ‘(1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them until you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics.’”
P.J. O’Rourke Eat the Rich
"A recession is very possible. We have been having them for two hundred years. The world hasn’t changed. But nobody has a good record of predicting a recession in advance. There’s an enormous amount of noise in an economic system. You have daily, monthly, weekly ups and downs.”
Milton Friedman in an interview in National Review September 28, 1998
In my latest Loonie Politics column I lament the hypnotic post-modern incoherence of Trudeau’s simultaneous insistence that he knows borrowing is harmless and can’t do a fiscal update because the future is uncertain.
“Austrians [the “Austrian school” of economists], I believe, have remained realistic because they have never suffered from what has been called ‘physics envy.’”
Michael Prowse in National Review February 24, 1997
In my latest Epoch Times column I say there’s a lot more sense in certain calls to “Defund the police” than you might think or than some advocates exhibit.