“The key to any good policy, Prescott summarized, was to make a commitment and stick to it. ‘What I am going to describe for you is a revolution in macroeconomics,’ Prescott wrote in the American Economist in 2006. The essay further distilled theories from a seminal 1977 paper by Prescott and Kydland, titled ‘Rules Rather Than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans’... ‘You should not think in terms of controlling the economy,’ Prescott said in 2004. ‘That leads to bad outcomes. You should think in terms of committing to good policy rules.’… ‘Economists like simplicity. It’s one of our most endearing traits,’ he wrote in a 2006 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. ‘As soon as you complicate things by getting between a man and his intentions you create all sorts of distortions that are often suboptimal (and are the devil to model). Taxes excel at these shenanigans. And those distortions don’t end when the grim reaper comes calling. Ashes to ashes, dust to trust.’”

The obituary of Edward Prescott, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics, in the National Post November 14, 2022

“Life resembles a game in which you are continually dealt ‘cards’ of enormously varied sorts, from very specific events or objects to rules large and small for playing the game. But some people are dealt things so horrifying that they never dare tell anyone they have them, and sit staring at them all through the game, not knowing how to play them or get rid of them, and hating them and the game.”

An insight that came to me in December 1987. [If you have such cards, trust the compassion of a fellow player and talk to them.]

“Working hard at something that doesn’t work doesn’t make it work.”

John Alston on PBS June 21, 1992

“There’s just gotta be a place up ahead where men ain’t low-down and poker’s played fair. If there weren’t, what are all the songs about? I’ll see y’all there and we can sing together, and shake our heads over all the meanness in the Used-To-Be.”

The last words of Buster Scruggs as he approaches heaven with his harp and the duet fades out, in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

“the decade that taste forgot”

Regarding the 1970s, and attributed to “one journalist” by David P. Deavel in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22) (in a piece saying the late Fr. James V. Schall “never succumbed to the 1970s habit too many of his Jesuit confreres had of wearing the intellectual and spiritual (not to mention sartorial) clothing of that decade”.

“The next revolution is always perfect.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Vol. 8 (September, 1928 – March, 1929) quoted in “Chesterton University An Introduction to the Writings of G.K. Chesterton by Dale Ahlquist” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22)

“The best prophet of the future is the past.”

Lord Byron (whose advice I only take cautiously and in small amounts, to be sure), apparently in a letter written January 28, 1828 though my efforts to track it down did not lead to a confirmed specific attribution.

Claiming a special French “right to idleness”, radical eco-feminist Green MP Sandrine Rousseau said hard work was “essentially a Right-wing value”.

The Telegraph November 14, 2022 [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/14/french-have-got-even-lazier-study-shows-vast-majority-happy/]; I trust she did not overstrain herself writing that admission disguised as a boast.