Greg Mankiw's blog

Freshwater or Saltwater? Sept 3rd, 2009, by Paul Krugman

Economics is in Crisis: It is Time for a Profound Revamp July 21st, 2009, by Paul deGrauwe, Financial Times

OLD KEYNES

"The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion."

"The world is not so governed from above that private and social interests always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the Principles of Economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these."

"The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past, the ocean will be flat again."

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."

"The beauty and the simplicity of such a theory are so great that it is easy to forget that it follows not from the actual facts, but from an incomplete hypothesis introduced for the sake of simplicity."

"But the principles of laissez-faire have had other allies besides economics text-books. It must be admitted that they have been confirmed in the minds of sound thinkers and the reasonable public by the poor quality of the opponent proposals - protectionism on one hand, and Marxian Socialism on the other."

"There is no harm in being sometimes wrong- especially if one is promptly found out."

"Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent."                          

  John Maynard KEYNES (1883-1946)

on Homo Oeconomicus, predictability, etc

"There is a skeptic far more terrible than he who believes that everything began in matter. It is possible to meet the skeptic who believes that everything began in himself."

"The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait."

   G.K. CHESTERTON

more on wildness, now ending in chaos

The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas TALEB.     Publisher: Random House.

"Where is the railway station?" he asks me. "There," I say, pointing at the post office, "and would you post this letter for me on the way?""Yes," he says, determined to open the envelope to check whether it contains something valuable.

   Amartya SEN, in Rational Fools

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A PEACEFUL SWISS TRIO: The 3 Alberts

Albert ANKER (19th century national painter)

gallery

Albert EINSTEIN (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1921)

"I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive."

"Nothing that I can do will change the structure of the universe.
But maybe, by raising my voice, I can help in the greatest of all causes
-- goodwill among men and peace on earth."

"I often think in music.
I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. ... I get most joy in life out of music."

"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...
the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.
If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

"I want to know God's thoughts,..... the rest are details.."

"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."

"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater."

"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within."

"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self."

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

"I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe."

Albert SCHWEITZER  (Nobel Peace Prize, 1952)

"Our culture divides people into two classes: civilized men, a title bestowed on the persons who do the classifying; and others, who have only the human form, who may perish or go to the dogs for all the "civilized men" care." 

"I will not enumerate all the crimes that have been committed under the pretext of justice. People robbed native inhabitants of their land, made slaves of them, let loose the scum of mankind upon them. Think of the atrocities that were perpetrated upon people made subservient to us, how systematically we have ruined them with our alcoholic "gifts", and everything else we have done…We decimate them, and then, by the stroke of a pen, we take their land so they have nothing left at all…"

"And now, when you speak about missions, let this be your message: We must make atonement for all the ter­rible crimes we read of in the newspapers. We must make atonement for the still worse ones, which we do not read about in the papers, crimes that are shrouded in the silence of the jungle night…"