In my latest Loonie Politics column I explain how our finance minister can look so happy over his appalling fiscal “snapshot”.
“The measurement of outcomes in higher education is still in the dark ages. There’s still a very strong sense that universities are ultimately measured by the quality of their professoriate and their scholarly output, with relatively less attention paid to the quality of the student experience and the calibre of the learning that goes on. We profile creative and illustrious alumni, and we rub the latest prestigious report or ranking in our hair, but I worry that the actual serious measure of what we’re about is still in its early stages.”
University of Toronto president David Nayor in a Q&A with Kate Fillion in Maclean’s November 13, 2006
“All in all, I cannot say enough good things about this candidate or recommend him too highly.”
Another in the “He's an extraordinary man” series of double-edged letter of recommendation phrases that is found in multiple places on the Internet; I do not know the origin.
“The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and, instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”
Samuel Johnson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail Nov. 5 1999
“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