“Economists’ work is often criticized as being ‘useful as a chocolate teapot,’ The Economist magazine wrote.”

Ottawa Citizen October 25, 1997 (though it has occurred to me since that (a) you could eat a chocolate teapot and (b) what’s really wrong with economists’ work isn’t that it’s not useful, it’s that people don’t want to hear about it... but it’s still a lovely metaphor).

In my latest Epoch Times column I say Ontario’s supposed plan to save our “crumbling” health care system is a bunch of vague arm-waving wishes that the world worked differently than it does that couldn’t be less creative, bold or useful if the people in authority were being dull, timid and pointless on purpose.

“I do not object to people looking at their watches when I am speaking. But I strongly object when they start shaking them to make sure they are still going.”

“William Norman Birkett (1883-1962), British lawyer” quoted in Cy Charney The Salesperson’s Handbook

In my latest Loonie Politics column I welcome the youth of tomorrow’s future back to the dismal reality of today’s schooling with an assignment to write an essay on what they’d really do if they were in charge, and why it would be so different from what they promised and expected to do.

In my latest National Post column I say we can’t rationally decide whether we want “strong” mayors for our cities until we decide what mayors are for, and what they are.

“Few are presumptuous enough to dispute with a chemist or mathematician upon points connected with the studies of labour of his life. But almost any man who can read and write feels at liberty to form and maintain opinions of his own upon trade and money …. The economic literature of every succeeding year embraces works conceived in the true scientific spirit, and works exhibiting the most vulgar ignorance of economic history and the most flagrant contempt for the conditions of economic investigation. It is much as if astrology were being pursued side by side with astronomy or alchemy with chemistry.”

Gen. Francis A. Walker, a professor at Yale and later president of M.I.T., quoted by Milton Friedman in CATO Policy Report Vol. XXI No. 2; another source on which my notes are culpably incomplete calls him “probably the most famous American economist of the nineteenth century” and director of two national censuses, which latter claim Wikipedia confirms, adding that he was wounded at Chancellorsville, fought in other battles, became a POW, was made a brevet brigadier general at age 24, and went on to a series of other achievements that make one wonder what one has done with one’s own life.

“What next? Economists divided on the future”

Subject line of an MSNBC teaser email whose body said “If you're confused about the outlook for the economy and stocks one year after the market hit bottom, then you've got good company — the Wall Street economists and strategists who are supposed to have this all figured out.” (The actual date, if you care, was March 7, 2010 but just as some words of wisdom are eternal, so are some fatuities.)

In my latest Epoch Times column I say it’s predictable that the latest expensive troubles for Ottawa’s megaproject O-Train weren’t predicted.