“Economics is really about understanding the world – and changing it – and not in a messianic fashion, but in an honest fashion.”
James J. Heckman, co-winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economics, quoted in Ottawa Citizen Oct. 12, 2000
“It ain’t what a man don’t know as makes him a fool, but what he does know that ain’t so.”
The “homely wisdom of Josh Billings (1818-1885)” quoted in Daniel Boorstin Cleopatra’s Nose
“The Roman republic did not fall before external foes. It had not been permanently crippled or weakened by long wars against powerful neighbours. What, then, were the faults and weaknesses that brought it to disaster? Were they due to defects in Roman political life or to a faulty machinery of government? Where they the result of an unsound economic system which discouraged the production and upset the distribution among all the people of the good things of this world? Was Roman law unjust, producing social discontent and resentment? Or did the trouble spring from some deeper cause, traceable perhaps to some fundamental change in men’s attitude towards life? If so, was it a matter of altered social relationships between one class and another, between rich and poor, between the old families and fashionable society on the one hand and the unknown ‘common man’ on the other, between the free and the slaves or between the Romans and the Italians or the Romans and foreigners? Beyond all these possible sources of weakness was there a failure of old religious and moral beliefs and a decay of old habits that had in the last resort been the true source of the vitality of the State? Such seem to be the main questions that arise as we read about Cicero…”
Introduction in F.R. Cowell Cicero and the Roman Republic
“Social questions are the vital questions of today; they take the place of religion.”
Beatrice Webb in her diary in 1884, quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society
“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
Archilochus, a 7th century BC Greek poet, quoted by Paul P. Streeton in Gerald M. Meier and Dudley Seers Pioneers in Development
“We are now getting to the point at which different beliefs about the universe lead to different behaviour. And it would seem, at first sight, very sensible to stop before we got there, and just carry on with those parts of morality that all sensible people agree about. But can we?”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
In my latest National Post column I say the “Gilets jaunes” in France have legitimate grievances. But unfortunately not legitimate solutions.