Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, and feel they grow immortal as they quote.
—Edward Young (1683-1765).

Certainly the ideology launched by Francis Bacon in 1620 had a remarkably long shelf life, despite crushing evidence that it is a poor description of what scientists actually do and is exceptionally poor advice on how they should be organized.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 41.

The same is true of research science. It generates a continually expanding storehouse of knowledge, but only on the condition that the world be assumed to have no inherent meaning of its own.

—Kronman, Anthony. Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.

I would hazard a guess that 90% of great scientists start out as heretics. The problem is that 90% of scientific heretics are talking nonsense....I was asked how you can tell when a scientific heretic is right rather than mad. I confessed that, as I’ve grown older, I’m becoming more confused on this point. The problem is not just that vindicated heretics are rare, but also that the heretic who’s right will be just as partisan—avidly collecting evidence to confirm his idea—as the heretic who’s wrong.

—Matt Ridley writing in The Wall Street Journal. “Is That Scientific Heretic a Genius—or a Loon?” November 12-13, 2011. C4.

Every single time they've had a hypothesis of causation from their data that was tested in a clinical trial; without exception the trial failed to confirm the hypothesis. Doesn't mean the hypothesis wasn't true; but the trial found the opposite...So if you like the hypothesis, that one is not reliable; and if you don't like it, the other one is not reliable. Exactly. And literally the investigators who did that Minnesota study—it was finished by 1973 and it was published in 1988 or 1989, which was a year after the principal investigator retired. And I am a journalist and I tracked him down and I asked him: Why did you wait 16 years to publish? And he said: Because we didn't like the way it turned out. A moment of honesty. The assumption is if you don't get the answer you expect, you did the experiment wrong. And that is still the case today.

—Gary Taubes. November 21, 2011. Gary Taubes on Fat, Sugar, and Scientific Discovery. EconTalk.org.

...he had been on on virtually everything he had done. But he'd just about demonstrated how he could move up to the very top of his field by claiming a discovery and then kind of moving on to the next experiment and leaving better scientists to clean up the mess after him. And this has been a common theme in everything I've written about. In making declarative pronouncements based on preliminary data, and fighting viciously to get people to believe in you, you can do very well for yourself in these careers. Nobody moves forward by spending their career checking other people's work to see if it was right or not. And actually one of my favorite lines from physics was from this Nobel Prize winner Sam Ting at MIT, who said to me, if I can get this right: To be first and right is good; to be first and wrong is not so good; and to be second and right is meaningless.

—Gary Taubes. November 21, 2011. Gary Taubes on Fat, Sugar, and Scientific Discovery. EconTalk.org.

Old men have a weakness for generality and a desire to see structures whole. That is why old scientists so often become philosophers...
—Eugene Wilder

The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger at the time.
—John Stuart Mill, 1869

Experts are often considered tainted. It is an extremely frustrating fact of modern scientific life.
—Michael Specter quoting Anthony S. Fauci in Denialism

In my career in academia, however, I discovered to my dismay that many of my colleagues had little interest in the search for truth, however one might understand or pursue it. To them, their research and publication amounted to a game in which the winning players receive the greatest rewards in salary, research funding, and professional acclaim.

—Robert Higgs, “Truth and Freedom in Economic Analysis and Economic Policy Making.” The Independent Institute. April 19, 2011.

One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work. He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment.

—Jonah Lehrer from “The Truth Wears Off” in The New Yorker (12/13/10)

For Simmons, the steep rise and slow fall of fluctuating asymmetry is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research: after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer-review process is titled toward positive results. But then, after a few years, the academic incentives shift—the paradigm has become entrenched—so that most notable results are now those that disprove the theory...The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven percent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for.

—Jonah Lehrer from “The Truth Wears Off” in The New Yorker (12/13/10)

When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

—Jonah Lehrer from “The Truth Wears Off” in The New Yorker (12/13/10)

My work always tried to unite the truth with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
—Paul Dirac

Great thinkers are always posthumously productive.
—Graham Farmelo

On September 12, 1957, Vicary called a press conference to announce the results of an unusual experiment. Over the course of six weeks during the preceding summer, he had arranged to have slogans—specifically, “Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola”—flashed for three milliseconds, every five seconds, onto a movie screen…the messages had increased soda sales at the theater by 18 percent and popcorn sales by 58 percent.

The public reacted with fury…

There was a glitch, however. Researchers tried to replicate Vicary’s findings…but none succeeded. After five years Vicary confessed that his so-called experiment was “a gimmick.”

—Stroebe, Wolfgang. May/June, 2012. “The Subtle Power of Hidden Messages.” Scientific American Mind.

Scientists typically fail to craft simple, clear messages and repeat them often. They commonly overdo the level of detail, and people can have difficulty sorting out what is important. In short, the more you say, the less they hear. And scientists tend to speak in code. We encourage them to speak in plain language and choose their words with care. Many words that seem perfectly normal to scientists are incomprehensible jargon to the wider world. And there are usually simpler substitutes.

—Richard C. J. Somerville and Susan Joy Hassol. October, 2011. “Communicating the science of climate change.” Physics Today. 64(10):48-53.

If you get positive results, then I have one major talent, and that is getting published in mainstream journals.

—Yudhijit Bhattacharjee quoting psychologist Daryl Bem. March, 2012. “Paranormal Psychologist.” Discover magazine. Bem was talking to Charles Honorton, who sought to verify the existence of ESP’s like telepathy. Note: This illustrates why statistics reported in scientific journals are biased. If 100 studies are conducted on the ability of people to exhibit telepathy and only two suggest telepathy exists, those are the only two studies that will be published because they are the only ones (out of the 100 studies) that are interesting. In reality, the probability of telepathy existing is 2%, but according to the journals, it will be 100%.

If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia.
—Tyler Cowen

He referred to inclusive fitness as a cult, not a science.

—Jonah Lehrer. “Kin and Kind: A fight about the genetics of altruism.” The New Yorker. March 5, 2012. This is Martin Nowak describing how theoretical biologist Robert May described inclusive fitness theory.

First, the truth is ridiculed. Then it meets outrage. Then it is said to have been obvious all along. We’re currently in the outrage stage, but we’ll be obvious before long.

—E. O. Wilson remarking on the progress of science and the controversy over his theories of altruism. As quoted by Jonah Lehrer. “Kin and Kind: A fight about the genetics of altruism.” The New Yorker. March 5, 2012. This is Martin Nowak describing how theoretical biologist Robert May described inclusive fitness theory.

Our submission was rejected without being sent for peer review on the basis that the journal has a policy of not publishing replications.

—Chris French, on why his article showing ESP doesn’t exist, an article replicating a previous study showing ESP does exist, was not published in the same journal. An illustration of why this journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology should not consider itself scientific.

[Science is] the belief in the ignorance of experts.

—Reyman, Richard.

Within parapsychology, there is a tendency to accept any positive replications but to dismiss failures to replicate if the procedures followed have not been exactly duplicated.

—Chris French, on why his article showing ESP doesn’t exist, an article replicating a previous study showing ESP does exist, was not published in the same journal. An illustration of why many “scientific” journal should not consider itself scientific.

Scientists, it’s said, behave more like lawyers than philosophers. They do not so much test their theories as prosecute their cases, seeking supportive evidence and ignoring data that do not fit—a failing known as confirmation bias. They then accuse their opponents of doing the same thing. This is what makes debates over nature and nurture, dietary fat and climate change so polarized.

—Matt Ridley. March 17-18, 2012. “A Global-Cooling Theory Gets a Second Chance. The Wall Street Journal. C2.

A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer — a high proportion of them from university labs — are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications — papers in top journals, from reputable labs — for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.

Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

…

Other scientists worry that something less innocuous explains the lack of reproducibility.

Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies.

“We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,” said Begley. “I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very disillusioning.”

—Sharon Begley. March 28, 2012. “In cancer science, many ‘discoveries’ don’t hold up.” Reuters.

In 2010, two research teams separately analyzed data from the same U.K. patient database to see if widely prescribed osteoporosis drugs increased the risk of esophageal cancer. They came to surprisingly different conclusions.

One study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found no increase in patients' cancer risk. The second study, which ran three weeks later in the British Medical Journal, found the risk for developing cancer to be low, but doubled. Which conclusion was correct?

It is hard to tell, and the answer may be inconclusive. The main reason: Each analysis applied a different methodology and neither was based on original, proprietary data. Instead, both were so-called observational studies, in which scientists often use fast computers, statistical software and large medical data sets to analyze information collected previously by others. From there, they look for correlations, such as whether a drug may trigger a worrisome side effect.

…

But observational studies, researchers say, are especially prone to methodological and statistical biases that can render the results unreliable. Their findings are much less replicable than those drawn from controlled research. Worse, few of the flawed findings are spotted—or corrected—in the published literature.

"You can troll the data, slicing and dicing it any way you want," says S. Stanley Young of the U.S. National Institute of Statistical Sciences. Consequently, "a great deal of irresponsible reporting of results is going on."

Despite such concerns among researchers, observational studies have never been more popular.

Nearly 80,000 observational studies were published in the period 1990-2000 across all scientific fields, according to an analysis performed for The Wall Street Journal by Thomson Reuters. In the following period, 2001-2011, the number of studies more than tripled to 263,557, based on a search of Thomson Reuters Web of Science, an index of 11,600 peer-reviewed journals world-wide. The analysis likely doesn't capture every observational study in the literature, but it does indicate a pattern of growth over time.

—Gautam Naik. May 3, 2012. “Analytical Trend Troubles Scientists.” The Wall Street Journal. A1.

His conclusion is widely upheld by other scientists: Just because two events are statistically associated in a study, it doesn't mean that one necessarily sets off the other. What is merely suggestive can be mistaken as causal.

That partly explains why observational studies in general can be replicated only 20% of the time, versus 80% for large, well-designed randomly controlled trials, says Dr. Ioannidis. Dr. Young, meanwhile, pegs the replication rate for observational data at an even lower 5% to 10%.

—Gautam Naik. May 3, 2012. “Analytical Trend Troubles Scientists.” The Wall Street Journal. A1.

Dr. Young of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences takes a more skeptical view. He notes that because the Green study reports on three different variables at once, it introduces errors due to the classic problem of "multiple testing."

Dr. Green acknowledges that her team didn't adjust for multiple testing. She also notes that because information about the patients isn't consistent, "this database may not be the ideal place to look."

—Gautam Naik. May 3, 2012. “Analytical Trend Troubles Scientists.” The Wall Street Journal. A1.

I’ve been wrong so often, I don’t find it extraordinary at all.

—Roland Coase, at 101 years of age. Planet Money podcast. May 8, 2012. “Noble Laureate: ‘I’ve been…’”. National Public Radio.

20 Things You Didn’t Know About…Science Fraud: The geniuses who fudged data, the cheaters who did it in plain sight, and the frauds who got away with it.

1 What evil lurks in the hearts of scientists? Behavioral ecologist Daniele Fanelli knows. In a meta-analysis of 18 surveys of researchers, he found only 2 percent ’fessed up to falsifying or manipulating data...but 14 percent said they knew a colleague who had.

2 After studying retracted biology papers published between 2000 and 2010, neurobiologist R. Grant Steen claimed that Americans were significantly more prone to commit fraud than scientists from other nations.

3 But when two curious bloggers reanalyzed Steen’s data, they found that American’s aren’t so shifty after all.

4 Chinese scientists were actually three times as likely as Americans to commit fraud. (French researchers were least likely to misbehave.)

5 If caught stealing someone else’s ideas, scientists have a handy defense: cryptomnesia, the idea that a person can experience a memory as a new, original thought.

6 But there’s no shortage of excuses. In the 1970s the FDA investigated Francois Savery, a doctor who submitted identical data to two drug companies, claiming that they were from two different studies. When confronted, he explained that he was forced to re-create his data sets because he took the original research with him on a lake picnic and lost it when his rowboat capsized.

7 Government authorities later learned that Savery never conducted the studies in the first place—or received a medical degree.

8 Even geniuses succumb to temptation. Researchers have found that Isaac Newton fudged numbers in his Principia, generally considered the greatest physics text ever written.

9 Other legends who seem to have altered data: Freud, Darwin, and Pasteur.

10 And Austrian monk Gregor Mendel’s famous pea-breeding experiments—the foundation of modern ideas of heredity—are suspiciously good, matching his theory of genetic inheritance a little too well.

11 One of the most notorious scientific hoaxes remains unsolved. Someone mixed human and orangutan bones, treated them, and planted them to create Piltdown Man, a “missing link” between humans and apes found in 1912. But who?

12 Science historian Richard Milner accuses Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who also fabricated Sherlock Holmes. Doyle lived near the Piltdown site and resented the scientific community for mocking his belief in spiritualism. Opportunity and motive. Elementary!

13 In 1974 immunologist William Summerlin created a sensation when he claimed to have transplanted tissue from black to white mice. In reality, he used a black felt-tip pen to darken patches of fur on white mice.

14 Some researchers still use “painting the mice” to describe scientific fraud.

15 Painting the mice can have serious consequences. In the 1980s, psychologist Stephen Breuning published results from fictitious “trials” of tranquilizers; his findings informed the clinical practices for treating mentally retarded children.

16 Have you no subtlety, sir? In 1981 John Darsee, a rising-star cardiologist at Harvard, faked log entries in a canine heart study in full view of his colleagues.

17 Although many of his papers were later found to have false data, Darsee continued to be cited positively for years (pdf).

18 Write what you know: Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser resigned last year after he was found guilty of eight counts of scientific misconduct. Now he’s working on a book, reportedly titled Evilicious: Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.

19 The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity estimates there are 2,300 cases of misconduct among NIH-funded researchers each year.

20 A role-playing game on the office’s website, called “The Lab: Avoiding Research Misconduct,” has been downloaded 26,000 times since it launched last year. (Try testing your own moral compass here.)

—Eric A. Powell. “20 Things You Didn’t Know About…Science Fraud.” May 8, 2012. Discover Magazine. Health and Medicine.

Considerable hard data have emerged on the scale of misconduct. A metastudy (D. Fanelli PLoS ONE 4, e5738; 2009) and a detailed screening of all images in papers accepted by The Journal of Cell Biology (M. Rossner The Scientist 20 (3), 24; 2006) each suggest that roughly 1% of published papers are fraudulent. That would be about 20,000 papers worldwide each year.

—Macilwain, Colin. August 1, 2012. “The time is right to confront misconduct.” Nature. Column: World View.

Hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking', a technology that revolutionized the natural-gas industry, has been surrounded by controversy in recent years. So, when environmental experts at the University of Texas at Austin produced a report in February that gave the technique a fairly clean bill of health, they received widespread news coverage, including in the pages of Nature (see Nature 482,445; 2012). The study was billed as an independent analysis. Yet last week it emerged that its lead author is a well-paid board member of an energy company that is actively involved in fracking.

The failure to declare this involvement was an unfortunate mistake to make, not least because the man who made it is a respected senior scientist who headed the US Geological Survey under US presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — and is therefore experienced enough to understand the role that politics and perception have in sensitive issues such as energy development. Yet Charles 'Chip' Groat, associate director of the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute, failed to disclose that he holds a significant number of shares in the Houston-based Plains Exploration & Production Company, and that he earned more than US$400,000 from the company last year. In a 23 July statement to Bloomberg news, he said that disclosing his position on the board “would not have served any meaningful purpose relevant to this study”.

—August 2, 2012. “Unfortunate oversight.” Nature. Column: Editorial.

Positive results in psychology can behave like rumours: easy to release but hard to dispel. They dominate most journals, which strive to present new, exciting research. Meanwhile, attempts to replicate those studies, especially when the findings are negative, go unpublished, languishing in personal file drawers or circulating in conversations around the water cooler. “There are some experiments that everyone knows don't replicate, but this knowledge doesn't get into the literature,” says Wagenmakers. The publication barrier can be chilling, he adds. “I've seen students spending their entire PhD period trying to replicate a phenomenon, failing, and quitting academia because they had nothing to show for their time.”

—Yong, Ed. May 16, 2012. “Replication studies: Bad copy.” Nature. News Feature. 485(7398).

This study analyzes leading research in behavioral economics to see whether it contains advocacy of paternalism and whether it addresses the potential cognitive limitations and biases of the policymakers who are going to implement paternalist policies. The findings reveal that 20.7% of the studied articles in behavioral economics propose paternalist policy action and that 95.5% of these do not contain any analysis of the cognitive ability of policymakers. This suggests that behavioral political economy, in which the analytical tools of behavioral economics are applied to political decision-makers as well, would offer a useful extension of the research program. Such an extension could be related to the concept of robust political economy, according to which the case for paternalism should be subjected to “worst-case” assumptions, such as policymakers being less than fully rational.

—Berggren, Niclas. June 29, 2011. “Time for behavioral political economy? An analysis of articles in behavioral economics.” The Review of Austrian Economics. DOI: 10.1007/s11138-011-0159-z. Abstract.

Much published research on the impact of climate change consists of confirmation bias by if-then modeling, but critics also see an increasing confusion between model outputs and observations. For example, in estimating how much warming is expected, the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses three methods, two based entirely on model simulations.

The late novelist Michael Crichton, in his prescient 2003 lecture criticizing climate research, said: "To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global-warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models.... No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world—increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality."

—Ridley, Matt. August 4-5, 2012. “How Bias Heats Up the Warming Debate.” The Wall Street Journal. A15.

Journals favor rejections of the null hypothesis. This selection upon results may distort the behavior of researchers. Using 50,000 tests published between 2005 and 2011 in the AER, JPE and QJE, we identify a residual in the distribution of tests that cannot be explained by selection. The distribution of p-values exhibits a camel shape with abundant p-values above .25, a valley between .25 and .10 and a bump slightly under .05. Missing tests are those which would have been accepted but close to being rejected (p-values between .25 and .10). We show that this pattern corresponds to a shift in the distribution of p-values: between 10% and 20% of marginally rejected tests are misallocated. Our interpretation is that researchers might be tempted to inflate the value of their tests by choosing the specification that provides the highest statistics. Note that Inflation is larger in articles where stars are used in order to highlight statistical significance and lower in articles with theoretical models.

—Brodeur, Abel, Le Mathias, Marc Sangnier, and Yanos Zylbergerb. June 18, 2012. “Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back.” Paris School of Economics Working Paper No. 2012-29. Abstract.

In a recent paper, historians of economic thought David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart show that [Paul] Samuelson and other American economics textbook authors of the 1960s and 1970s kept forecasting rapid Soviet growth through their books’ successive editions, even while their own updated numbers clearly showed that the growth forecasts in previous editions had been too high. In the seven editions of his textbook published from 1961 to 1980, Samuelson kept including a chart indicating that Soviet output was growing faster that U.S. output, and predicting a catch-up in about twenty-five years. He repeatedly had to move the predicted catch-up date forward from the previous edition because the gap had never actually begun to close. In several editions he blamed low realized Soviet growth on bad weather. As late as the 1989 edition, he and coauthor William Nordhaus wrote: “The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.”

—White, Larry. 2012. The Clash of Economic Ideas.

In sharp contrast to previous studies suggesting that errors account for the majority of retracted scientific papers, a new analysis -- the most comprehensive of its kind -- has found that misconduct is responsible for two-thirds of all retractions. In the paper, misconduct included fraud or suspected fraud, duplicate publication and plagiarism. The paper's findings show as a percentage of all scientific articles published, retractions for fraud or suspected fraud have increased 10-fold since 1975.

—Albert Einstein College of Medicine (2012, October 1). Misconduct, not error, accounts for most scientific paper retractions: 10-fold increase in fraud-related retractions found.ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 5, 2012, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121001151949.htm

Science In Pursuit Of Truth

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

—Francis Bacon. Quoted in: Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page ???

Only describe, don’t explain.

—Wittgenstein

Learning religion is part of human nature. Learning science is a battle against human nature.

—Dominic Johnson, quoted in: The Economist. January 23, 2016. “Religion and psychology: In the hands of an angry God.” Review of book God is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human by Dominic Johnson.

The humanists incubated a philosophical revolution by discovering, and cautiously revealing, the world of Greek philosophy; but, for the most part, and excepting Valla, they were too clever to lay their beliefs on the table.

—Durant, Will. 1953. The Renaissance. The Story of Civilization. Page 537.

Wisdom seems always a reincarnation or echo, since it remains the same through a thousand varieties and generations of error.

—Durant, Will. 1953. The Renaissance. The Story of Civilization. Page 539.

We must speak as the many do, we must think as the few.

—Durant, Will. 1953. The Renaissance. The Story of Civilization. Page 539. Quote is by Nifo, describing how their philosophical beliefs could be stated in public in the religious realm.

We must clear our minds … from all causes that blind people to the truth—old custom, party spirit, personal rivalry or passion, the desire for influence.

—Muslim scholar Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (973 – 1048). Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 243.

He took it for granted that the earth is round, noted “the attraction of all things towards the center of the earth,” and remarked that astronomic data can be explained as well by supposing that the earth turns daily on its axis and annually around the sun, as by the reverse hypothesis. He speculated on the possibility that the Indus valley had been once the bottom of a sea.

—Will Durant about Muslim scholar Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (973 – 1048). Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 244.

I would rather discover a single demonstration [of geometry] than win the throne of Persia.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 16: The Conflict of Philosophy and Religion. Page 353.

Scientists don’t need to be consistent—only their theories do.

Lykken, Joseph and Marla Spiropulu. May 2014. “Supersymmetry and the Crisis in Physics.” Scientific American.

What are the fewest general propositions from which all the uniformities existing in nature could be deduced?
—Paul Dirac, from The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo

I heard [someone] say the other day … “The only indisputable truth is to be found in fiction.”

—Panelist on Intelligence Squared [podcast]. December 20, 2013. “An Anatomy of Truth: Conversations on Truth-telling.”

Physical laws should have mathematical beauty.
—Paul Dirac

…all of Epicureanism can be seen as the derivation of a way of life based only on the evidence that can clearly be established by our eyes and our other Natural faculties. This determination requires the firm rejection of knowledge through faith, divine revelation, universal forms, spirit worlds, or any other source of information which cannot be proved to be true before the tribunal of the faculties which Nature provides.

—Cassius Amicus, on Epicureanism.

Nature provides that we require only a very few things (food, water, air, shelter), and it is an illusion to believe that more is required for us to live a life of complete happiness.

—Cassius Amicus, on Epicureanism.

I have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.

—Two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling on how he came up with good ideas. Quoted in: Bryce, Nessa Victoria. July/August 2014. “The AHA! Moement.” Scientific American Mind. Page 41.

… it is easier for the ignorant than for the learned to be original.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 437.

Nature calls on us to measure our success in living not by length, but by happiness.

—Cassius Amicus, on Epicureanism.

Yet when the study of natural science was at last reborn, it was the once rejected atomic theory that furnished the starting point for modern chemistry, and when modern thinkers began to see the evolutionary processes in human institutions, it was observed that long ago Epicurus had blazed that path of enquiry. Erring with Plato had its pleasure and its profit but also its price, the postponement of scientific progress. Platonic thought had some close affinities with the Stone Age.

—Norman W. Dewitt, on Epicureanism (1947).

Since we’re getting attacked equally from both sides, we must be right.

—Scientist Michael Tomasello, on his hypothesis that the main difference between humans and primates is our ability to understand what other people are thinking, which helps makes us an ultrasocial animal. From: Stix, Gary. September 2014. “The ‘IT’ Factor.” Scientific American.

…the universe as a whole has always been such as it now is and always will be such. For there is nothing into which the universe can change, and there is nothing beyond the universal whole which can penetrate into the universe whole and produce any change in it.

—Epicurus. Letter to Herodotus.

Of all human pursuits the pursuit of wisdom is the most perfect, the most sublime, the most profitable, the most delightful.

—Thomas Aquinas. Quoted in: —Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 972.

If at this point one asks why a god who foresees all should have created a man and a woman destined to such curiosity, and a race destined to such heritable guilt, Thomas answers that it is metaphysically impossible for any creature to be perfect, and that man’s freedom to sin is the price he must pay for his freedom of choice. Without that freedom of will man would be an automaton not beyond but below good and evil, having no greater dignity than a machine.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 973.

I recommend that they make a concise statement or summary of their opinions, while still pursuing without intermission the study of Nature, which contributes more than anything else to the tranquility and happiness of life.

—Epicurus. Letter to Herodotus.

When our mental apprehension is confirmed by additional evidence, or when it is not contradicted by additional evidence, then it produces truth.

—Epicurus. Letter to Herodotus.

If you’re not prepared to be wrong you’ll never come up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened at being wrong…We stigmatize mistakes, and we’re not running educational systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

—Robinson, Ken. TED talk. November 3, 2009. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue9sAoFcyOU.

If one is a research worker, one mustn't believe in anything too strongly; one must always be prepared that various beliefs one has had for a long time may be overthrown.
—Paul Dirac

If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand. Again and again, when I have been at a loss how to proceed, I have just had to wait until [this happened]. It has led me along an unexpected path, a path where new vistas open up, a path leading to new territory, where one can set up a base of operations, from which one can survey the surroundings and plan future progress.
—Paul Dirac

…when we want to believe something...we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking...In contrast, when we don't want to believe something...we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.

—Louis Pasteur

The true conquests, the only ones that leave no regret, are those that have been wrested from ignorance.

—Napoleon Bonaparte wrote, after he conquered Egypt and set about studying it, including the discover of the famous Rosetta Stone.

There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are sciences and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.

—Louis Pasteur

Why do some people get caught by an idea that takes over your life? I don’t know, but I do know that as long as it doesn’t drive you crazy, it is a blessing.

—Julian Barbour, a physicist, remarking on his forty year quest to discover a universal model of the cosmos.

Such was the advice this extraordinary unemotional man offered to his colleagues: be guided, above all, by your emotions.
—Graham Farmelo, commenting on Paul Dirac

It has long been said that the hardest words to say in the English language are I love you. We heartily disagree! For most people, it is much harder to say I don’t know.

—Steven D. Levitt and Stephan J. Dubner. 2014. Think Like a Freak. William Morrow: NY, NY. Page 20.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
—Rene Descartes

Just as science was at first a form of philosophy, struggling to free itself from the general, the speculative, the unverifiable, so philosophy was at first a form of poetry, striving to free itself from mythology, animism, and metaphor.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 3: The Heroic Age. Page 140.

To be genuinely empirical is to reflect reality as faithfully as possible; to be honorable implies not fearing the appearance and consequences of being outlandish.
—Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan

Truth cannot be something else or somewhere else. There cannot be models of it. It cannot be diagrammed or written out. It cannot be held as a possession of mind.
—Steve Hagen

As it happens, the word theory is not properly understood by the general public, which tends to think of a theory as a “guess.” Even dictionaries do not properly describe what the word means to scientists.

Properly speaking, a theory is a set of basic rules, supported by a great many confirmed observations by many scientists, that explains and makes sensible a large number of facts that, without the theory, would seem to be unconnected. It is as though the facts and observations are a number of dots representing cities, and lines representing country and state boundaries, distributed higgledy-piggledy on paper, making no sense. A theory is a map that puts each dot and line into the right place and makes a connected and sensible picture out of it all.

Theories are not necessarily correct in every detail, to begin with, and might never be entirely correct in every detail, but they are sufficiently correct (if they are good theories) to guide scientists in understanding the subject the theory deals with, in exploring further observations, and eventually, in improving the theory.

—Asimov, Isaac. 1992. Atom. Truman Talley Books: NY, NY.

They who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.

—Confucius

Great wits are sure to madness near allied

And thin partitions do their bounds divide

—John Dryden (1631-1700). Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official.

In established scientific fields of high autonomy, "revolutions" no longer are necessarily at the same time political ruptures but rather are generated within the field themselves: the field becomes the site of a permanent revolution.

—Pierre Bourdieu. 1991. “The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason.” Sociological Forum. 6(1).

Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything—though it might have been a good thing if he'd also taught her to question the act of questioning. Carried far enough, as far as Shelly's crowd carries it, that can dissolve the ground you stand on. I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept, and I suppose by that definition she's a long way from wise.
—Wallace Stegner, from The Angel of Repose.

I have often asked myself would it have been better if we had not succeeded. The war perhaps would have ended sooner with less misery and on better terms. Gentlemen, these questions are all useless. Progress and science and technology cannot be stopped.
—Carl Bosch, alchemist who helped created chemical warfare during World War I.

Is it not obvious that our contemporary concern with schools of existentialism, say, or with the distinctions among capitalism, communism and socialism, will seem a thousand years hence as incomprehensible to historians of his temper as the eight century’s concern with adoptianism, iconoclasm or the filioque controversy? The human mind has always worked with the materials it had at hand. It is risk to judge and condemn the intellectual achievements of one age by the standards of another. Aristotle was not a fool because he thought the universe consisted of fifty-five concentric hollow spheres—any more than Niels Bohr was a fool when he framed his “solar system” model of the atom…The slower pace of scientific development in the past does not mean that every thinker from Aristotle to Copernicus was an intellectual dwarf. The modern schoolboy is not greater than Euclid because he knows far more about mathematics.

—Richard Winston in Charlemagne (1960).

A married philosopher is a joke.

—Neitzsche

When someone holds up a common belief and says it is obvious, I say, well, let’s reverse the thinking on that and see where it gets you.

—Yudhijit Bhattacharjee quoting psychologist Daryl Bem. March, 2012. “Paranormal Psychologist.” Discover magazine.

I guess I could decide it was a fluke…Science is self-correcting. Reality always bites back.

—Yudhijit Bhattacharjee quoting psychologist Daryl Bem about what he would think if his studies supporting the existence of telepathy was not replicated in other studies. March, 2012. “Paranormal Psychologist.” Discover magazine.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of the bumps that the understanding has got by running its head against the limits of language.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it.

—Willard Van Orman Quine

Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.

—Willard Van Orman Quine

It makes no sense to say what the objects of a theory are, beyond saying how to interpret or reinterpret that theory in another

—Willard Van Orman Quine

…but now came the real shock. The biggest blow to earlier philosophy of science came, oddly enough, from the history of science, and in particular, from Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Now, Kuhn’s target in that book (it was a book about the history of science)…was typically called the “Whig Interpretation,” of the history of science…[which held that] science proceeds cumulatively and inevitably through the linear addition of discovery and argument, based on a background foundation of a set of concepts and assumptions. This is the kind of science which…you learned, and many people probably still learn, in their science classes. Namely, science proceeds by putting one brick on top of another brick. You get a foundation for your science, each experimentalist or theorist adds [another brick of] knowledge and you gradually build, build, build, build.

Kuhn argued that such is a plausible description only of a part—and in fact the least interesting part—of the development of science. For while what he will call “normal science” in most historical periods does proceed through the patient accumulation of fact. Over time, there gradually develops cracks and fissures: unsolvable problems begin to accumulate in this structure being built by normal science. When these cracks become grave enough, a scientific revolution takes place, nothing incremental but a sharp break, involving not the addition of one discovery or one little argument, but the wholesale replacement of what he called “the paradigm.” If you’ve heard the word “paradigm” in your life, it’s probably because it came from this book of Kuhn’s, which made it famous.

In a scientific revolution, the whole paradigm—meaning the fundamental concepts and practices of a science in a period of time—gets rejected. One paradigm is radically overthrown by another.

—Lawrence Cahoone describing Thomas Kuhn’s assertions in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida. 2010. “New Philosophies of Science.” Lecture 29. The Teaching Company.

If that were true, it would mean there would be no logical inference across paradigms. Well, this would mean, literally, that there could be no rational argument from the old paradigm to the new one. The decision to adopt the new one would have to be an irrational leap, or sociologically explained. And Kuhn is not afraid to say it. He says, “Most of the time the new paradigm is established when the holders of the old paradigm die off, and young people from graduate schools that have learned the new paradigm: they get jobs, they get tenure…the new paradigm takes hold.”

The child says something about what happened between Jane and Johnny. You saw the same thing. You explain it differently and in a more complicated way. The child cannot understand your explanation but you can understand the child’s explanation because yours includes…the child’s explanation as a possibility…. This is rational progress, and its why hopefully adults still get to teach their children.

Rational progress therefore remains conceivable wherever we can articulate within our new improved understanding of things…(an improved understanding of things), and still articulate the older way of understanding, and still explain its inadequacy along with the greater adequacy of the new view: that’s rational progress, and there’s nothing we’ve seen to say that can’t be done.

—Lawrence Cahoone. 2010. The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida. Lecture 36: Philosophy’s Death Greatly Exaggerated. The Teaching Company.

Moral philosophy, or the science of human nature, may be treated after two different manners; each of which has its peculiar merit, and may contribute to the entertainment, instruction, and reformation of mankind. The one considers man chiefly as born for action; and as influenced in his measures by taste and sentiment; pursuing one object, and avoiding another, according to the value which these objects seem to possess, and according to the light in which they present themselves…

…

…other species of philosophers consider man in the light of a reasonable rather than an active being, and endeavour to form his understanding more than cultivate his manners. They regard human nature as a subject of speculation; and with a narrow scrutiny examine it, in order to find those principles, which regulate our understanding, excite our sentiments, and make us approve or blame any particular object, action, or behaviour. They think it a reproach to all literature, that philosophy should not yet have fixed, beyond controversy, the foundation of morals, reasoning, and criticism; and should for ever talk of truth and falsehood, vice and virtue, beauty and deformity, without being able to determine the source of these distinctions. While they attempt this arduous task, they are deterred by no difficulties; but proceeding from particular instances to general principles, they still push on their enquiries to principles more general, and rest not satisfied till they arrive at those original principles, by which, in every science, all human curiosity must be bounded.

—David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

—David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy, fitted for all persons and all dispositions; and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon, which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom.

—David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Happy, if we can unite the boundaries of the different species of philosophy, by reconciling profound enquiry with clearness, and truth with novelty! And still more happy, if, reasoning in this easy manner, we can undermine the foundations of an abstruse philosophy, which seems to have hitherto served only as a shelter to superstition, and a cover to absurdity and error!

—David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Here therefore we may divide all the perceptions of the mind into two classes or species, which are distinguished by their different degrees of force and vivacity. The less forcible and lively are commonly denominated Thoughts or Ideas. The other species want a name in our language, and in most others; I suppose, because it was not requisite for any, but philosophical purposes, to rank them under a general term or appellation. Let us, therefore, use a little freedom, and call them Impressions; employing that word in a sense somewhat different from the usual. By the term impression, then, I mean all our more lively perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will. And impressions are distinguished from ideas,

—David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

This proposition, that causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason but by experience, will readily be admitted with regard to such

—David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher, who is rational and modest, has ever pretended to assign the ultimate cause of any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power, which produces any single effect in the universe.

—David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer…

—David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

All reasonings may be divided into two kinds, namely, demonstrative reasoning, or that concerning relations of ideas, and moral reasoning, or that concerning matter of tact and existence.

—David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

As an agent, I am quite satisfied in the point; but as a philosopher, who has some share of curiosity, I will not say scepticism, I want to learn the foundation of this inference. No reading, no enquiry has yet been able to remove my difficulty, or give me satisfaction in a matter of such importance. Can I do better than propose the difficulty to the public, even though, perhaps, I have small hopes of obtaining a solution? We shall at least, by this means, be sensible of our ignorance, if we do not augment our knowledge.

—David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

In reality, all arguments from experience are founded on the similarity which we discover among natural objects, and by which we are induced to expect effects similar to those which we have found to follow from such objects. And though none but a fool or madman will ever pretend to dispute the authority of experience, or to reject that great guide of human life, it may surely be allowed a philosopher to have so much curiosity at least as to examine the principle of human nature, which gives this mighty authority to experience, and makes us draw advantage from that similarity which nature has placed among different objects. From causes which appear similar we expect similar effects. This is the sum of all our experimental conclusions.

…

It is only after a long course of uniform experiments in any kind, that we attain a firm reliance and security with regard to a particular event.

…

For all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past, and that similar powers will be conjoined with similar sensible qualities.

—David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

—Bertrand Russell

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

—Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature.

Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature.

Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature.

…science often asks us to be really interested in inanimate things…some realms of science consider extremely inanimate issues—astrophysicists trying to discover planets in other solar systems, for instance. Science often requires our social, hominid brain to be passionate about some pretty unlikely subjects.

—Sapolsky, Robert M. September 2012. “Super Humanity.” Scientific American.

We are unmatched in the animal kingdom when it comes to remembering the distant past, when it comes to having a sense of the future. These skills have limits, however. Traditionally our hunter-gatherer forbearers may have remembered something their grandmother was told by her grandmother, or they may have imagined the course of a generation or two that would outlive them. But science sometimes asks us to ponder processes that emerge with time spans without precedent. When will the next ice age come? Will Gondwana ever reunite? Will cockroaches rule us in a million years?

—Sapolsky, Robert M. September 2012. “Super Humanity.” Scientific American.

…knowledge truth and reality are timeless, because deduction is timeless. What makes deduction work, so to speak, the reason why the conclusion of a deductive argument is a necessary consequence of the truth of its premise is because the conclusion is already implicit in the premises. It is merely an accident that we have to draw the conclusion—the conclusion was already in the premises.

—Goldman, Steven. 2007. “Lecture 17: Time, Change, and Novelty.” Great Scientific Ideas That Changed the World. The Teaching Company. Roughly fifteen minutes into the lecture.

That is a very interesting fact about science: sometimes theories are accepted on the basis of relatively modest empirical evidence…and others like the atomic theory of matter…can have a growing body of evidence and function within scientific explanation for decades and still be controversial.

—Goldman, Steven. 2007. “Lecture 19: The Cell Theory of Life.” Great Scientific Ideas That Changed the World. The Teaching Company. Roughly nineteen minutes into the lecture.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the “transcendent” and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself…. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

—Hitchens, Christopher. 2001. Letters to a Young Contrarian. Page 140.

Politics requires answers in Yes or No, and philosophy deals only in Yes-and-No.

—Durant, Will. 1917. Philosophy and the Social Problem. The Macmillan Company.

I would rather discover a single demonstration [ in geometry] than win the throne of Persia.

—Democritus (460-370 BC). Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Chapter 16: The Conflict of Philosophy and Religion. Page 354.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self; for what we wish, that we readily believe.

—Democritus (460-370 BC)

Metaphysics, Ontology, and the Like

Geshe Rabten told us to subject the texts we studied to rational scrutiny and critique, but he also insisted that the authors of those texts were fully enlightened beings. It dawned on me that we were not expected to use logic and debate to establish whether or not the doctrine of rebirth was true. We were only using them to prove, as best we could, what the founders of the tradition had already established to be true.

—Stephen Batchelor in Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist

“What,” I asked, “within the very depths of us, moves us to religion? It is because life presents itself as an unresolved question. Existence strikes us as a mystery, as a riddle. This experience reverberates through us, issuing in the sounds, 'Why?' and 'What?' The various religions of the world are systematic formulations of the answers to these questions.”

—Stephen Batchelor in Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.
—Emo Phillips

I TOO AM AN EPICUREAN.

—Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to William Short on October 31, 1819.

Recent research, however, supports the idea that consciousness is a conversation rather than a revelation, with no single brain structure leading the dialogue.

—Melinda Wenner Moyer. November/December 2011. “Something’s Wrong With This Picture.” Scientific American Mind. Page 12.

To be is to be the value of a variable.

—Willard Van Orman Quine

Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics

—Willard Van Orman Quine

...humans, perhaps uniquely, can generate mental models of our circumstances that enable us to anticipate future changes and concoct coping strategies. We use our working memory to hold mental representations of situations. We can envision a fantasized scenario and compare this image with a model of our current state. By doing so, we can simulate strategies to reduce the difference between where we are and where we want to wind up in the future, giving us a key evolutionary advantage. We might mentally rehearse ways to out-compete others, for instance, for a mate or a job promotion. The combination of consciousness, self-awareness, and explicit problem solving is what enables us to learn things not relevant to our evolutionary past.

—David C. Geary in Scientific American Mind. "Primal Brain in the Modern Classroom." September/October, 2011. Pages 45-49.

Brain-imaging studies and other experiments indicate that giving up our intuitions and grasping Newton’s insights does not come easily, even for college students.

—David C. Geary in Scientific American Mind. "Primal Brain in the Modern Classroom." September/October, 2011. Pages 45-49.

I do not define time, space, place, and motion as being well-known to all. Only I must observe, that the vulgar conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects.

—Isaac Newton in Principia

In fact, one has to think that the philosopher’s job is more central than ever. While it is true that over the centuries philosophy has been diminished as more and more fields…have gradually split off from philosophy…the problem of integrating the knowledge of those fields and of the other fields of everyday life…the job of integrating this and seeing them in a common context, is greater than ever. The attempt to know the world in ourselves, to know what is true, good, and beautiful, remains a philosophical job. Nobody else is taking it up.

So, the alternative to philosophy would be essentially to stop wondering. To stop asking questions that go beyond the methods and intellectual boundaries of the many contexts of our lives: family life, the sciences, our business, entertainment, our local civic obligations, technology. Each of these spheres and in each of these spheres human beings interact and ask questions. But it’s only when they step outside that, they ask questions about, “Is this sphere good, is it what it should be, is it what it ought to be, how may I to understand the relationship between these different parts of my life and our lives?”

So the choice is either, as Aristotle knew long ago, to accept our unreflective, uncoordinated—often contrary—beliefs, or to ask ourselves if they are true and how they hang together. If you ask those questions and try to answer them, you’re doing philosophy.

It may be that we are just not built for cognitive rest. Perhaps we never have been since we ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Human beings are condemned to ask questions beyond and about what they do and what they experience. When we do that, again, we’re doing philosophy.

So the journey of modern thought is not over. Perhaps it’s just beginning.

—Lawrence Cahoone. 2010. The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida. Lecture 36: Philosophy’s Death Greatly Exaggerated. The Teaching Company.

Even the boldest of us have but seldom the courage for what we really know.

—Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Maxims and Arrows: p1 s2.

Although the Matrix if fictional, our mind runs on its own type of virtual reality. The brain creates a model of the world that we assume is accurate most of the time. Yet in numerous instances, it is not. Visual illusions vividly illustrate the brain’s mistaken interpretations. In some cases, it makes false assumptions about the world, distorting our perception.

Recent work has revealed neural activity in the brain underlying—or corresponding to—several types of illusory perceptions. Instead of siply seeing what is there, therese findings suggest we are perpetually re-creating the world around us using the Matrix inside our head.

…

…The world does not passively impose itself on our mind; rather it has to be actively interpreted.

…

…we have no direct contact with reality. Our brain is always abstracting and interpreting the world around us. Even when we know the true nature of an illusion, this insight often does not change our experience. As far as the brain is concerned, if an event is an illusion, it might as well be real.

—Hood, Bruce. September/October 2012. “Re-creating the Real World.” Scientific American Mind.

History of Science

The term statistics entered the English language I think around 1780…

—Weinberger. February 17, 2012. “Weinberger on Too Big To Know.” EconTalk.

Around the third century B.C. Aristotle and other ancient Greek philosophers put us on the right track, employing measurement to help learn about the world. Muslim scholars later pioneered the basics of testing and observation, the foundations of the scientific method, perhaps more than 1,000 years ago. Among the others who helped to refine the process were Roger Bacon, who fostered the use of inductive reasoning in the 1200s; Galileo, who put Bacon’s ideas into practice in the late 1500s and early 1600s; and René Descartes, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, who built on the method shortly before and during the Enlightenment of the 1700s—to name a mere handful.

—DiChristina, Mariette. September 2012. “Out of Bounds.” Scientific American.

Art, literature, and philosophy first strengthened [the influence of religion], and then weakened it…Protagoras doubted, Socrates ignored, Democritus denied, Euripides ridiculed the gods; and in the end Greek philosophy, hardly willing it, destroyed the religion that had molded the moral life of Greece.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 8: The Gods of Greece. Page 201.

Social Sciences

If you do not contradict yourself frequently you are nothing more than a cliché.

—F. Bailey Norwood

One social scientists contends the only injustice is a violation of property rights while another contents property itself is injustice.

—F. Bailey Norwood

Religion

Human life is subject to constant disruption that cannot be acommodated in purely contractual terms.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 178.

The acts that stir our wonder and admiration, and the great tragic gestures put before us by art and literature, remind us that there is another world behind our daily negotiations. It is a world of absolutes, in which the ruling principles are creation and destruction, rather than agreemnt, obligation, and law.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 178.

The covenant demands that each person honor his obligations and receive his rights. But no one has a right to forgiveness, and no one, in the scheme of the covenant, is obligated to offer itg. Forgiveness comes, when it comes, as a gift. True, it is a gift that must be earned. But it is earned by penitence, contrition, and atonement—acts that cannot be terms of a contract ...

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 182.

... faith is not the same thing as religion. It is an attitude to the world, one that refuses to rest content with the contingency of nature.

——Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 192.

Many people who might call themselves agnostics or even atheists live the life of faith, or something like it—in an attitude of openness toward meanings, recognizing the sacramental moments, and giving thanks, after their fashion, for the gift of the world. Yet they adhere to no religion. so what different does religion make? The heart of religion is ritual, and it is a mark of religion that its reituals are meticulous.

——Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 192.

All deities reside in the human breast.

—Blake, William. Proverbs from Hell

The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another.

—James, Williams. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience

I believe that the practice of compassion and loveâ€”a genuine sense of brotherhood and sisterhoodâ€”is the universal religion. It does not matter whether you are a Buddhist or Christian, Moslem or Hindu, or whether you practice religion at all. What matters is your feelings of oneness with humankind.

—Fourteenth Dalai Lama. 2002. How to Practice The Way to a Meaningful Life. Page 12.

All religions are born in the mind of a crazy person. It is the job of reasonable people to take those nuggets of lunacy and transform them into something useful for society.

—Me

Man is quite insane. He wouldnâ€™t know how to create a maggot, and he creates gods by the dozen.

—Michel de Montaigne 1533-1592.

Religion, as I have been considering it, does not describe the natural world but the Lebenswelt, the world of subjects, using allegories and myths in order to remind us at the deepest level of who and what we are. And God is the all-knowing subject who welcomes us as we pass into that other domain, beyond the veil of nature. ... The life of prayer rescues us from the Fall, and prepares us for a death that we can meaningfully see as a redemption, since it unites us with the soul of the world.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 198.

“How happy are the astrologers!” exclaimed Guicciardini, “who are believed if they tell one truth to a hundred lies, while other people lose all credit if they tell one lie to a hundred truths.”

—Durant, Will. 1953. The Renaissance. The Story of Civilization. Page 528.

Averring his inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism, [William] James, toward the close of his book, writes: â€œDoes God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? Are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.

—Epstein, Joseph. September 27-28, 2014. â€œHuman Nature and the Fruits of Faith.â€ Review of William James 1902 book, Varieties of Religious Experience. The Wall Street Journal. C13

There are no living Christians today. I know this because Jesus said, â€œFor the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and will then repay every man according to his deeds. Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom,â€ (Matthew 16:27, 28) so if you believe in the Bible, then you believe the world has already ended. It is not only impossible that you are a living Christian today, but it is impossible that you exist.

—Anonymous

What is the difference between Noahâ€™s flood and a school shooter?

—Anonymous

Gods were assimilated with humans, humans with animals and plants, the transcendent with the immanent, and the visible with the invisible. This was not simply self-indulgent make-believe, but part of the endless human endeavor to endow the smallest details of life with meaning. Ritual, it has been said, creates a controlled environment in which, for a while, we lay aside the inescapable flaws of our mundane existence. Yet by so doing we paradoxically become acutely aware of them. After the ceremony, when we return to daily life, we can recall our experience of the way things ought to be. Ritual is therefore the creation of fallible human beings who can never fully realize their ideals.

—Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood.

Question from audience:... why do we need a god?

Answer from Armstrong: We probably donâ€™t. Buddhists do fine without one. A god, again, is an example of how inept our theological thinking is. I donâ€™t think we do need a god, but some people find it helpful. God is only a symbol of transcendence. Thatâ€™s where our theology is weak. â€¦ We hear about god for the first time, very often, when we first learn about Santa Claus, and over the years our idea of Santa Claus develops â€¦ our religion gets stuck at this rather infantile level. â€¦ I think that transcendence is a fact of life, but transcendence â€¦ means something we can never describe or know.

—Armstrong, Karen. October 12, 2014. â€œKaren Armstrong on Religion and the History of Violence.â€ Intelligence Squared.

Jesus copied Pythagorus. Pythagorus was said to have

been the son of the god Apollo

his mother was called "virgin"

said to have returned from the dead, 3 days after his death

said to have appeared two places at once

the ability to control waters and the wind

preached that you should love your enemies

believed that possessions got in the way of truths

gathered disciples and lived in a communal lifestyle

—...Mlodinow, Leonard. 2002. Euclidâ€™s Window. Free Press.

It was not merely that the average Greek accepted miracle storiesâ€”of Theseus rising from the dead to fight at Marathon, or of Dionysus changing water into wine: such stories appear among every people, and are part of the forgivable poetry with which imagination brightens the common life.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 195.

Learning religion is part of human nature. Learning science is a battle against human nature.

—Dominic Johnson, quoted in: The Economist. January 23, 2016. â€œReligion and psychology: In the hands of an angry God.â€ Review of book God is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human by Dominic Johnson.

The findings at Gobekli Tepe suggest that we have the story backwardâ€”that it was actually the need to build a sacred site that first obliged hunter-gatherers to organize themselves as a workforce, to spend long periods of time in one place, to secure a stable food supply, and eventually to invent agriculture.

—Elif Batuman. December 19 & 26, 2011. â€œThe Sanctuary.â€ The New Yorker magazine.

If I could lay hold on that god who, out of a thousand men whom he has made, saves one and damns all the rest, I would tear and rend him tooth and nail as a traitor, and would spit in his face.

—A 1247 weaver of Toulouse. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 735.

The power of Christianity lay in its offering to the people faith rather than knowledge, art rather than science, beauty rather than truth. Men preferred it so.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 737.

I place my conscience above any scripture. You may argue: there are evil people in the world, and perhaps even they follow their own conscience. If that is the case then scripture may be needed to prevent the evil from following their evil conscience. I donâ€™t know. What I do know is that the only way I could become evil is if I betrayed my conscience and followed the words of apocalyptic prophets who spoke millennia ago.

—Me

If I governed a nation of Jews, I should restore the Temple of Solomon. Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

—Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, after he signed an agreement making Catholicism the major, but not the only, religion of France.

Some people today argue that religion is primarily a source of violence, conflict, and social discord. Historically, however, religion has played the opposite role: it is a source of social cohesion that permits human beings to cooperate far more widely and securely than they would if they were the simple rational and self-interested agents posited by the economists.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY. Page 38.

Actually, to become a professor or a clergy member in Europe even a hundred years following Spinozaâ€™s death, you had to have your denunciation of him ready. That was part of the oral exam, knowing where heâ€™d made his mistakes. And this meant that everyone was reading Spinoza; they had to read him in order to denounce him, so he was radicalizing Europe, and in about a hundred years they were ready for the Enlightenment.

—Rebecca Goldsteinâ€™s acceptance speech for the 2011 Humanist of the Year award. Published in The Humanist. November-December, 2011. Pages 12-16.

Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 3.

People say, â€œWhatâ€™s wrong with moderate religion?â€ And there are those nice folks who go to church on Sunday simply to take part in their neighborhoods. And hereâ€™s the problem with that. Moderate religion is religion where people do a little bit of cherry-picking. They take the best bits of religion and some of the more embarrassing or difficult or barbaric bits they leave to one side. Unkind people would call that hypocrisy. On the other end of the scale, however, are those who take their religion very seriouslyâ€”extremists we call them. The point about the extremists is that theyâ€™re the most honest of the people who have religious views, because they commit themselves to what their tradition tells them. They stay closest to the texts. Now if thatâ€™s real religion, if thatâ€™s honest religion, the world is better off without it. And if the world is better off without the true or honest form of religion, why not put the hypocrites in with them too.

—A. C. Grayling. November 15, 2011. Intelligence Squared Debates. Motion: The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion.

An opinion poll conducted in 2005 showed that three out of four Americans believe in the existence of paranormal phenomena. Other work has revealed that about one in three of us claim to have experienced the supernatural.

—Richard Wiseman. January/February, 2012. â€œWired for Weird.â€ Scientific American Mind.

EPICURUS's old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

—Hume, David. 1776. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

Knowledge

I would rather find a single explanation than become the King of Persia.

—Democritus

Question with boldness the existence of a God; Because, if there is one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

—Thomas Jefferson

And harassed by the body“s overwhelming weight, the soul is in captivity unless philosophy comes to its rescue, bidding it breathe more freely in the contemplation of nature, releasing it from earthly into heavenly surroundings.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC â€“65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LVI. Penguin Classics. Page 12

Mind

The man who insists on seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides.

—Henri-Frederic Amiel

To understand the most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called “confabulation.” Confabulation is so frequent in work with split-brain patients and other people suffering brain damage that Gazzaniga refers to the language centers on the left side of the brain as the interpreter module, whose job is to give a running commentary on whatever the self is doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of the self“s behavior.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

Art

Our musical culture, I suggested, requires us to respond to a subjectivity that lies beyond the world of objects, in a speace of its own. Music addresses us as others address us ... music addresses us from beyond the borders of the natural world.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 175.

The life of prayer rescues us from the Fall, and prepares us for a death that we can meaningfully see as a redemption, since it unites us with the soul of the world.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 198.

The Norwoods

Norwood’s don’t cry, they hate Karate, and they don’t do permits!

Corbett Norwood 2014.

Quotes for AGEC 4213

This is not a number game, it’s a quantity game.

—Ryan Daddy from TV show Party Down South (2014).

Life

Meaning in Life, Spirituality & Transcendence

He who knows only one religion knows none.

—(Friedrich) Max Muller (1823-1900), an English philologist and philosopher.

And remember, that truth which once was spoken: to love another person is to see the face of God.

—Les Miserables, the musical (2012).

God, is one mortal helping another. We make our own divinity through our behavior toward others.

—Pliny the Younger. Quoted in: Whitmarsh, Tim. Battling the Gods.

She fell upon her knees, with her head on her bed, her hands clasped over her head, full of anxiety and tremors, and, although a gypsy, an idolater, and a pagan, she began to entreat with sobs, mercy from the good Christian God, and to pray to our Lady, her hostess. For even if one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one is always of the religion of the temple which is nearest at hand.

—Hugo, Victor (2012-12-31). The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hapgood Translation, Unabridged) (Kindle Locations 7848-7849). e-artnow. Kindle Edition.

—My facebook on 12/2/13

I did not want to continue living like this…searching for my external sources of gratification to very temporarily boost my self-esteem.

—Cassassuce, Florence, who accomplished extraordinary things but still suffered from depression. Source: Crocker, Jennifer and Jessica J. Carnevale. September/October 2013. “Letting Go of Self-Esteem.” Scientific American Mind. Page 27.

If you are wondering, “Do I have worth?” “Do I have value?” the answer is not yes, no or maybe. The answer is simpler: change the subject.

—Crocker, Jennifer and Jessica J. Carnevale. September/October 2013. “Letting Go of Self-Esteem.” Scientific American Mind. Page 33.

I have no kind of faith, because I believe no one—no one but myself … It’s just because men believe others, and do not believe themselves, that there are different faiths. I also believed others, and lost myself as in a swamp—lost myself so that I had no hope of finding my way out. Old Believers and New Believers, and Judaisers and Hlysty, and Popovtsy and Bezpopovsty and Avstriaks and Molokans and Skoptsy—every faith praises itself only and so they all creep about like blind puppies. There are many faiths, but the spirit is one—in me, and in you, and in him. So that if everyone believes himself, all will be united; everyone be himself and all will be as one.”

—An old man who refused to pray and cross himself like the others, in: Tolstoy, Leo. 1899. Resurrection. Oxford World’s Classics. Page 456.

If you don’t behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.

—Fulton Sheen.

The more original a human being is, the deeper is his anxiety.

—Kierkegaard.

Revere the gods; watch over human beings. Our lives are short. The only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts.

—Marcus Aurelius in Meditations. Book Six. 30.

So don't waste your mind on nursery rhymes

Or fairy tales of blood and wine

It's turtles all the way down the line

So to each their own til' we go home

To other realms our souls must roam

To and through the myth that we all call space and time

—Sturgill Simpson in Turtles All the Way Down

Happily for Jean Valjean that he had been able to weep. That relieved him, possibly. But the beginning was savage. A tempest, more furious than the one which had formerly driven him to Arras, broke loose within him. The past surged up before him facing the present; he compared them and sobbed. The silence of tears once opened, the despairing man writhed.

He felt that he had been stopped short.

Alas! in this fight to the death between our egotism and our duty, when we thus retreat step by step before our immutable ideal, bewildered, furious, exasperated at having to yield, disputing the ground, hoping for a possible flight, seeking an escape, what an abrupt and sinister resistance does the foot of the wall offer in our rear!

To feel the sacred shadow which forms an obstacle! The invisible inexorable, what an obsession!

Then, one is never done with conscience. Make your choice, Brutus; make your choice, Cato. It is fathomless, since it is God. One flings into that well the labor of one's whole life, one flings in one's fortune, one flings in one's riches, one flings in one's success, one flings in one's liberty or fatherland, one flings in one's well-being, one flings in one's repose, one flings in one's joy! More! more! more! Empty the vase! tip the urn! One must finish by flinging in one's heart.

—Hugo, Victor (2010-12-16). Les Misérables (English language) (p. 907). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

If we may believe the traditions, Mohammed, unlike most religious reformers, admired and urged the pursuit of knowledge. “He who leaves his home in search of knowledge walks in the path of God … and the ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 235.

I wanted the whole world or nothing.

—Charles Bukanski

Love says 'I am everything'. Wisdom says "I am nothing'. Between the two, my life flows.

—Maharaj, Nisargadatta. 1973. I Am That.

If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidias, or an Egyptian by worshiping animals, or another man by a river or a fire, I have no anger for their divergences, only let them note, let them remember let them love.

—Durant, Will, quoting Maximum as he defended pagans' use of idols against Christian scolding.. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 10.

I don’t know how to describe the exact feeling but it was close as I’ve ever known to peace.

—Levi King, describing his feelings moments after murder of two strangers for no apparent reason than the psychological need to kill. Quoted from: The Killer Speaks. Season 1. Episode 1. 15:45.

There is no conclusion. What has concluded that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told and no advice to be given. Farewell.
—William James, on his deathbed

Whether it is called nobility, virtue, or divinity, and whether or not God exists, people simply do perceive sacredness, holiness, or some ineffable goodness in others, and in nature.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

The object of this belief is to cheer one up and give one courage to face the future after a misfortune or catastrophe. It does this by leading one to think that the catastrophe is necessary for the ultimate good of the people.

—Paul Dirac, on religion, from The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo

"I didn't understand what the meaning of life was," he said. "I still don't, but I thought that everyone else did, that there was this big secret that everyone was in on that I wasn't. I thought everyone understood why we were here, and that they were all secretly happy somewhere without me."

—Kulze, Liz. March 8, 2013. “The Existential Pain of Being Young, White, and Affluent.” The Atlantic. Accessed March 8, 2013 at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/03/the-existential-pain-of-being-young-white-and-affluent/273471/.

...if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.
—Dalai Lama, from The Universe in a Single Atom.

They protested their respect for Islam’s holy books, but they argued that where it or the Hadith contradicted reason, the Koran or the traditions must be interpreted allegorically; and they gave the name kalam or logic to this effort to reconcile reason and faith. It seemed to them absurd to take literally those Koranic passages that ascribed hands and feet, anger and hatred, to Allah; such poetic anthropomorphism, however adapted to the moral and political ends of Mohammed at the time, could hardly be accepted by the educated intellect.

—Will Durant on the Mutazilites or the Seceders, participants of religious debates that began the Moslem Enlightenment in 757. Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 244.

Of this one thing make sure against your dying day—that your faults die before you do.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter XXVII. Penguin Classics. Page 73.

Posterity is for the philosopher what the ‘other world’ is for the man of religion.

—Diderot. Source: Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part IX. The Age of Voltaire. Page 641.

Life is a succession of tasks rather than a cascade of inspiration, an experience that is more repetitive than revelatory, at least on a day-to-day basis. The thing is to perform the task well and find reward even in the mundane … I’ve grown suspicious of the inspirational. It’s overrated. I suspect duty — that half-forgotten word — may be more related to happiness than we think. Want to be happy? Mow the lawn. Collect the dead leaves. Paint the room. Do the dishes. Get a job. Labor until fatigue is in your very bones. Persist day after day. Be stoical. Never whine. Think less about the why of what you do than getting it done. Get the column written. Start pondering the next.
—Cohen, Roger. June 12, 2015. “Mow the lawn.” New York Times. Opinion.

“What is death, after all?” pursued Gringoire with exaltation. “A disagreeable moment, a tollgate, the passage of little to nothingness. Some one having asked Cercidas, the Megalopolitan, if he were willing to die: ‘Why not?’ he replied; ‘for after my death I shall see those great men, Pythagoras among the philosophers, Hecataeus among historians, Homer among poets, Olympus among musicians.’”

—Hugo, Victor (2012-12-31). The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hapgood Translation, Unabridged) (Kindle Locations 7659-7662). e-artnow. Kindle Edition.

‘Tis a philosopher’s death, and I was destined thereto, perchance. It is magnificent to die as one has lived.”

—Hugo, Victor (2012-12-31). The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hapgood Translation, Unabridged) (Kindle Locations 7659-7662). e-artnow. Kindle Edition.

To see the eclipses of the Sun and Moon; to see the capture of wild elephants and snakes; and to see the poverty of the wise, is to see that the power of fate is always supreme.
—Hindu proverb

We're only human when we grieve.

—unknown

I know the world's a broken bone,
but melt your headaches, call it home.
—Panic! At The Disco, from Northern Downpour on the Pretty.Odd. album.

Our hearts have room for all sorts of contradictions.

—Theodor Fontane

Disciples and devotees…what are most of them doing? Worshipping the teapot instead of drinking the tea!

—Wei Wu Wei

Why are you unhappy?

Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one.

—Wei Wu Wei

Play your part in the comedy, but don't identify yourself with your role.

—Wei Wu Wei

A Christian might have argued that this was because the voice of the internal spectator was that of conscience or the diety, but Smith had made it perfectly clear that it was the voice of an entirely fictitious being, an imaginary person who we invoke in difficult ethical situations to help us clarify our sense of ethical propriety and allow us to act in a way we ourselves could approve of.

—Nicholas Phillipson in Adam Smith speaking of Adam Smith and his concept of the impartial spectator (page 270).

One often hears that we need God in order to be good, in order to ground morality or in any case in order to enforce morality. What reason could one have for being good, the thinking goes, if there isn’t the great police officer upstairs ready to give you a summons? Spinoze demonstrates a grand and high-minded, noble, and transcendent view of how we can live our lives on purely secular grounds. And that’s why he was so despised, why he was so feared, why he had to be condemned, why he was called Satan’s emissary on earth, why his Theological-Political Treatise was describe over and over again as a book forged in hell. Other great philosophers said things just as radical...But what Spinoza does is not just argue against the rationality of beliefs that anchor a religious point of view. He also inspires us with a secular point of view. He inspires us with secular visions.

—Rebecca Goldstein’s acceptance speech for the 2011 Humanist of the Year award. Published in The Humanist. November-December, 2011. Pages 12-16.

...there is a kind of ethics in hardcore rational epistemology, in demanding good grounds for one’s beliefs, and holding one’s beliefs to high standards. There’s also an ethical vision that comes out of the recognition that we are fatherless, and in accepting responsibility for the world’s ills. There is no ultimate, supernatural force that’s going to right the wrongs. We have to do it for one another. We’re all in this Confraternity of the fatherless together, which places tremendous responsibilities on us. It demands that we be grown-ups.

—Rebecca Goldstein’s acceptance speech for the 2011 Humanist of the Year award. Published in The Humanist. November-December, 2011. Pages 12-16.

Oh Lord, how heavy thine honor is to bear.

—Thomas Becket, before being killed by Henry II’s Normal nobles in the movie Beckett.

Their joy was to be in solitude, and they assured me that they never had enough of being alone; and so they disliked visits, even from their relations.

—Saint Theresa of Avila (1515-1582) in Saint Theresa: The History of Her Foundations.

Nemoto believes in confronting death; he believes in cultivating a concentrated awareness of the functioning and fragility of the body; and he believes in suffering, because it shows you who you really are. When asked whether he believes that happy people are shallower than those who suffer, first he says that there are no such people, and then he things for a moment and says that his wife is one. Is she less profound as a consequence of her serenity? Yes, he says, perhaps she is.

—MacFarquhar, Larissa. June 24, 2013. “Last Call: A Buddhist monk confronts Japan’s suicide culture.” The New Yorker.

When Heracleitus applies to ethics these four basic concepts of his thought—energy, change, the unit of opposites, and the reason of the whole, he illuminates all life and conduct. Energy harnessed to reason, wedded to order, is the greatest good. Change is not an evil but a boon; “in change one finds rest; it is weariness to be always toiling at the same things and always beginning afresh…The mutual necessity of contraries makes intelligible and therefore forgivable the strife and suffering of life. “For men to get all they wish is not the better thing; it is disease that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; toil, rest.” He rebukes those who desire an end of strife in the world; without this tension of opposites there would be no “attunement,” no weaving of the living web, no development. Harmony is not an ending of conflict, it is a tension in which neither element definitely wins, but both function indispensably (like the radicalism of youth and the conservatism of old age)…“Strife is the father of all and the king of all; some he has marked out to be gods, and some to be men; some he has made slaves, and some free.” In the end, “strife is justice.”; the competition of individuals, groups, species, institutions, and empires constitutes nature’s supreme court, from whose verdict there is no appeal.

—Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part II. The Life of Greece. The Heroic Age. On Heracleitus of Ephesus. Page 147.

…there is nothing in the world which can bring a prince renown and honor like the sword, so he would be a despised creature before all men if he did not love it and seek his sole glory therein.

—Kaiser Frederick William I’s instructions to the instructors of his son, who would later be known as Frederick the Great. Source: Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part IX. The Age of Voltaire. Chapter XIII: Frederick and Maria Theresa. Page 439.

Besides what I have read in many places, I have seen by experience the great blessing which it is for a soul to continue making progress in the practice of obedience. In this, I believe, lies the secret of continually making progress in virtue and covering the progress with humility: in this lies our security from the doubt, which it is well for us mortals to be exposed to during this life, whether we are wandering from the path of heaven...Because if they had really given themselves up to this holy obedience, and yielded their judgement to it, seeking to have no other opinion than that of their confessor, or, if they are in Community, that of their Superior, the devil ceases to assail them with his incessant disquietudes, because he finds that he comes off loser rather than the gainer thereby.

—Saint Theresa of Avila (1515-1582) in Saint Theresa: The History of Her Foundations. (I do not identify with this statement, but I think it reflect the religious zeitgeist of the Medieval age.

Oh greatness of God! And how Thou shewest Thy power in giving boldness to an ant! And how, O my Lord, it is not Thy fault, but the fault of our cowardice and pusillanimity that those who love Thee do not carry out great works! Because we never make revolutions without being full of a thousand fears and cautiousness, therefore, Thou, O my God, dost not work Thy wonders and great deeds.

—Saint Theresa of Avila (1515-1582) in Saint Theresa: The History of Her Foundations.

Well, then, why doesn’t nature equally invite all of us to do the same thing for ourselves? Either a joyful life (that is, one of pleasure) is a good thing or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then you should not help anyone to it—indeed, you ought to take it away from everyone you can, as being harmful and deadly to them. But if you are allowed indeed obliged, to help others to such a life, why not first of all yourself, to whom you owe no less favour than to anyone else? For when nature prompts you to be kind to your neighbours, she does not mean that you should be cruel and merciless to yourself.

—Thomas More in Utopia, 1516.

...to decrease your own pleasure in order to augment that of others is a work of humanity and benevolence, which never fails to reward the doer over and above his sacrifice. You may be repaid for your kindness, and in any case your consciousness of having done a good deed, and recalling the affection and good will of those whom you have benefited, gives your mind more pleasure than your body would have drawn from the things you forfeited.

—Thomas More in Utopia, 1516.

My mother thinks that we are all spirits, and that we’ve all lived before, that it’s a dance, without end. How terrible that would be! To never have any rest, any peace—for it all to go on forever, and ever, and ever and ever and ever and ever. That would be hell, Mary. Wouldn’t that truly be hell?

—line by Archduke Rudolph (1858-1889), the crown prince of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia in the movie The Crown Prince. Spoken shortly before his suicide pact with his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera.

I believe that in a free marketplace of ideas the voice of humanism will prevail, because it makes more sense than other transreligious perspectives. To do so, we must learn the same tools of influence as our detractors. The present popularity of ideology over individual compassion, of the claims of superiority by one religion or denomination over others, of the compartmentalization of the saved and the unsaved, and of the efforts to coerce public prayer in schools do not serve the self-interest of anyone — humanist or other. Most of the matters on the conservative agenda do not, in my opinion, serve the best interests of society. The failure of humanists is not in substance but in failing to believe with conviction. As we fail to care enough about the value of what we believe to share it forcefully and effectively with others, we contribute by our inaction to sleeping parochialism.
—Gordan Gamm, in What I Believe.

Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred...Neither can we be satisfied with being merely admired for what other people are admired. We must at least believe ourselves to be admirable for what they are admirable. But, in order to attain this satisfaction, we must become the impartial spectators of our own character and conduct.

—Adam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Part III. Chapter II.

The universe allows us to experience both misery and merriment, as the latter cannot exist without the former, and for this the universe is benevolent. Because we eventually become desensitized to merriment but not misery, the universe must slay us even as we beg to live. For this, the universe is merciful.

—F. Bailey Norwood

I’m not seeking to be understood anymore: I want to understand. I’m not asking to be loved: I want to love.

—Saint Claire of Assisi speaking to Saint Francis of Assisi in the movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon.

Nature's engineering feat that exceeds all else,

is the ability of man to deceive himself.

—F. Bailey Norwood in Matrona's Four Children

As the vigneron takes grapes to make it wine,

a thought can turn earth absurd to earth sublime.

—F. Bailey Norwood in Matrona's Four Children

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.
—Andre Malraux

In 21^st-century America, there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, or apparently well-adjusted people who believe not just that they can speak to God but that he hears and answers them…Some of her subjects admit to asking God where to get a good haircut and pouring him his own cup of coffee at the breakfast table. Others speak of intense spiritual experiences in ways that are difficult to explain as self-delusion.

—Barton Swaim discussing the book When God Talks Back (by T. M. Luhrmann) in The Wall Street Journal. “That Voice Sounds Familiar.” April 3, 2-12. Bookshelf. A13.

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
—Steven Weinberg

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the not-worth-knowing.
—H. L. Mencken

Nevertheless it is possible that some such story was used to make the adventure digestible for the common Greek; men must have phrases if they are to give their lives.

—Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part II. The Life of Greece. The Heroic Age.

Guyuk asked [Pope] Innocent IV the obvious questions: How do you know whom God absolves and to whom He shows mercy? How do you know that God sanctions the words you speak? Guyuk pointed out that God had given the Mongols, not the pope, control of the world from the rising sun to the setting sun. God intended for the Mongols to spread his commandments and his laws through Genghis Kahn’s Great Law. He then advised the pope to come to Karakorum with all of his princes in order to pay homage to the Mongol Kahn.

—Jack Weatherford in Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World. 2004. Page 263. Three Rivers Press: NY, NY.

In its true sense Religion is the most fundamental of the soul's impulses, the impassioned love of life, the feeling of its preciousness, the desire to foster and further it. In that sense every thinking man must be religious; in that sense Religion is a perpetually self-renewing force, the very nature of our being. In that sense I have no thought of assailing it, I would make clear that I hold it beyond assailment.

—Upton Sinclair in The Profits of Religion.

To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price on conjectures.
—Anatole France

Reasoning rarely engenders moral judgment; rather it searches to explain or justify an intuition after the fact.
—Gerd Gigerenzer in Gut Feelings

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.
—Frank Zappa

The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.
—Anatole France

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
—Eric Hoffer

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.
—Jules Renard

In some ways his immersion in a sacred book has sustained him through life. “You were taught very early on that there was someone there looking after you, someone you could rely on, someone you could talk to. You knew his words. They were in your mind.” But there was another side to it. The authority of the church with this book in its hand also became a source of fear. “It is not just awe and reverence; it is fear. People are fearful of being seen to be doing something wrong. There are lots of people that go through life without ever expressing themselves or their feelings, and it is sad to see that.”

The reverence for the minister, the man in the pulpit explicating the supremacy of the Bible, remains potent. “The church is a refuge from the realities of life,” Macaulay says, “but there is also something else, which is a wee bit more sinister. Domination is a factor. The power of some of these preachers to really control their congregation. That has always been there.”

—Adam Nicolson. “The Bible of King James.” National Geographic. December, 2011.

I had great respect for shamans—and I still do. I have always believed there is an important component of medicine that involves suggestion, ritual, and belief—all ideas that make scientists scream.

—Ted Kaptchuk, an acupuncturist interviewed by Michael Specter. “The Power of Nothing.” The New Yorker. December 12, 2011.

Kaptchuk practiced acupuncture for half his adult life. But he stopped twenty years ago. Despite the popularity of acupuncture, clinical studies continually fail to demonstrate its effectiveness—a fact that Kaptchuk doesn’t dispute. I asked him how a person who talks about the primacy of data and disdains what he calls the “squishiness” of alternative medicine could rely so heavily on a therapy with no proven value.

Kaptchuk smiled broadly. “Because I am a damn good healer,” he said. “That is the difficult truth. If you needed help and you came to me, you would get better. Thousands of people have. Because, in the end, it isn’t really about the needles. It’s about the man.”

—Ted Kaptchuk, an acupuncturist interviewed by Michael Specter. “The Power of Nothing.” The New Yorker. December 12, 2011.

The Hitchens he knew, Goldberg says, loved wine and friendship and debating the existential questions. As to his early death, Hitchens told NPR he had been “dealt a pretty good hand by the cosmos, which doesn’t know I’m here and won’t know when I’m gone.

—from a piece about Christopher Hitchens, quoting Mr. Hitchens.

The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it.

—Marcus Aurelius

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.

—Buddha.

But [Thomas] Jefferson’s approach to redacting the Bible involved something more radical than translation. He literally snipped out everything supernatural: miracles, the Virgin birth, the resurrection. The result was his own, non-mystical account of the life of Jesus.

—The Economist magazine. December 17, 2011. “The faith (and doubts) of our fathers.”

We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment. The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible existence that is known as the lot of man. Exile, captivity, and especially death (which we usually shrink from facing at all in happier times) became for us the habitual objects of our concern. We learned that they were neither inevitable accidents, nor even constant and exterior dangers, but that they must be considered as our lot itself, our destiny, the profound source of our reality as men. At every instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase: “man is mortal!” And the choice that each of us made of his life and of his being was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death, because it could always have been expressed in these terms: “rather death than…

—Jean-Paul Sartre in La Republique Du Silence (1944)

To live a happy, meaningful life, you must at some point decide whether you are going to be a participant in life or an observer of human life.

The essence of participating human is to create conflict where none exists. Peaceful college campuses contrive football games where men armor themselves and collide at full speed for no logical reason. Hannibal created and spread myths about his divinity both to intimidate the Romans and—in case he emerged victorious—to become a demigod. Bastiat became the founder of modern economics because knowledge was lacking and its provider would be crowned. Saint Francis loved unconditionally because so much love was conditional. The key is that all fight largely for the fight; there is no other reward. For life to have meaning it must accomplish something. To accomplish, there must be something inferior that is made superior due to human effort. Perfection, satisfaction: these only stand in the way of a virtuous life. Eve did not bite the apple because she was tricked by a snake. She ate because she was bored. Yet, participating human cannot admit his cause is ultimately pointless, and so affiliation and myth emanate. Every Alabama student and alumni were victorious when "their" team won the national championship. Roman citizens considered Augustus to be their father, almost literally. Saint Francis performed miracles, because there is nothing spectacular about a stinky, barefooted man simply wandering around, begging for food.

The observer, on the other hand, cannot participate in the fight because in his perennial reading, listening, and watching, he sees that humans create conflict solely for the purpose of conflict. He sees this over and over, in different places, times, and forms—but it is all the same. He records the creation of affiliation and myth out of nothing, because nothing is empty and human lives cannot remain empty. One becomes a visitor to another team's football game, a chronicler of an ancient history that can never be altered, and so he never feels the urgency in which participating human is called to fight. The observer's happiness in life comes from the observation. If history, sport, politics, war, literature, and science of every kind are not interesting to the observer, then he is left with nothing, and his life empty.

Both can be happy, and one is no more virtuous than the other. There is on peculiarity readers must beware, though. One can transform from a participating human to an observer. Indeed, many do in the latter stage of their life. The observer cannot become a participant though. His foot-tracks are covered. Unless the story of mankind is his pleasant companion, the observer is cursed with perennial loneliness.

The participant can always find a new cause. The observer is stuck with the universe he is given. I am one of these observers, and though I grow fonder of the human story the more I learn, I do know that if it forsakes, all is forsaken.

—F. Bailey Norwood

The Hindus were among the first to conceive of life as a journey—a grand journey—…The individual in life ideally moves through various stages of development, and those stages of development begin with Brahmacharya…the student stage. The first 25 years of a students’s life, ideally devoted to studying all knowledge and understanding the sacred texts of Hinduism. After that, Grihastha, that is, the householder stage. Notice that’s age 25 to about 55, in which the individual establishes a family and becomes devoted to providing for others, for raising children, and so that key portion of one’s life is dedicated to society and fulfilling one’s social responsibility. But then there’s the prospect of liberation here, and in the third of the stages, Vanaprastha, the individual is encouraged to sever his or her ties with society and to move off into a realm of solitude, in which one searches in the most serious manner possible one’s connection with truth, with the divine, and so the term literally means “forest hermit”…This solitary seeker of truth…must begin with leaving all family and responsibilities behind in a quest for self-knowledge…in this journey…the third stage is necessary. Necessary for what? For attaining the fourth stage…: Sannyasa…the meaning of Sannyasa, it means saintliness, and it depends on the result of Vanaprastha…because one could wander about in the forest for a very long time and not attain this kind of self-realization or self-knowledge of what is true, good, noble, right, just…One has to attain a certain wisdom…

—Dennis Dalton. Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory. Lecture One: The Hindu Vision of Life. The Teaching Company. 1998.

When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

—Ann Druyan, wife of Carl Sagan. Piece in the Skeptical Inquirer. November / December, 2003.

I think we’re just machines. I think we’re just made of matter…but for me, that doesn’t make me feel that we’re any less special. It makes me think, what a wonderful thing, that a collection of matter created by a process of evolution lasting billions of years: how wonderful that this process and that these little collections of matter are able to produce [an artists’] water colors and Bach’s preludes. I can live with that.

—From Radiolab podcast. “Talking to Machines.” Season 10. Episode 1.

While death-priming made religious participants more certain about the reality of religious entities, non-religious participants showed less confidence in their disbelief.

—Science Daily. “Death Anxiety Increases Atheists’ Unconscious Belief in God.” April 2, 2012.

People will be thankful if I compress into four theses such an essential and such a new insight. I thereby make it more easily understood; I I hereby challenge contradiction.

First Proposition. The grounds upon which "this" world has been designated as seeming, rather establish its reality,—another kind of reality cannot possibly be established.

Second Proposition. The characteristics which have been assigned to the "true being" of things are the characteristics of non-being, of nothingness;— the "true world" has been built up out of the contradiction to the actual world: a seeming world in fact, in as far as it is merely an illusion of moral optics.

Third Proposition. To fable about "another" world than this has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of calumniation, disparagement, and aspersion of life is powerful in us: if that be the case we take revenge on life, with the phantasmagoria of "another," a "better" life.

Fourth Proposition. To separate existence into a "true" and a "seeming" world, either in the manner of Christianity, or in the manner of Kant (who was a wily Christian at last), is only a suggestion of decadence,—a symptom of deteriorating life . . . That the artist values appearance more than reality is no objection against this proposition. For here "appearance" means reality once more, only select, strengthened, and corrected reality . . . The tragic artist is no pessimist,—he rather toys yea, even to all that is questionable and formidable; he is Dionysian . .

—Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Maxims and Arrows: p2 s2.

…If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be that of the best thing in us.

…

…the activity of philosophic wisdom is admittedly the pleasantest of virtuous activities; at all events the pursuit of it is thought to offer pleasures marvellous for their purity and their enduringness, and it is to be expected that those who know will pass their time more pleasantly than those who inquire. And the self-sufficiency that is spoken of must belong most to the contemplative activity. For while a philosopher, as well as a just man or one possessing any other virtue, needs the necessaries of life, when they are sufficiently equipped with things of that sort the just man needs people towards whom and with whom he shall act justly, and the temperate man, the brave man, and each of the others is in the same case, but the philosopher, even when by himself, can contemplate truth, and the better the wiser he is; he can perhaps do so better if he has fellow-workers, but still he is the most self-sufficient…

…

If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life.

…

the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest.

—Aristotle (2009-06-27). Nicomachean Ethics (Kindle Locations 2978-2984). Cybraria LLC. Kindle Edition.

Psychologists often approach personality by measuring basic traits such as the “big five”: neuroticism, extroversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness (warmth/niceness), and conscientiousness…But psychologist Dan McAdams has suggested that personality really has three levels, and too much attention has been paid to the lowest level, the basic traits. A second level of personality, “characteristic adaptations,” includes personal goals, defense and coping mechanisms, values, beliefs, and life-stage concerns (such as those of parenthood or retirement) that people develop to succeed in their particular roles and niches…

The third level of personality is that of the “life story.” Human beings in every culture are fascinated by stories: we create them wherever we can…It’s no different with our own lives. We can’t stop ourselves from creating what McAdams describes as an “evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future into a coherent and visualizing life myth. Although the lowest level of personality is mostly about the elephant, the life story is written primarily by the rider. You create your story in consciousness as you interpret your own behavior, and as you listen to other people’s thoughts about you. The life story is not the work of a historian—remember that the rider has no access to the real causes of your behavior; it is more like a work of historical fiction that makes plenty of references to real events and connects them by dramatizations and interpretations that might or might not be true to the spirit of what happened.

From this three-level perspective, it becomes clear why adversity might be necessary for optimal human development. Most of the life goals that people pursue at the level of “characteristic adaptations” can be sorted…into four categories: work and achievements, relationships and intimacy, religion and spirituality, and generativity (leaving a legacy and contributing something to society)…Because human beings were shaped by evolutionary processes to pursue success, not happiness, people enthusiastically pursue goals that will help them win prestige in zero-sum competitions.

…

At the third level of personality, the need for adversity is even more obvious: You need interesting material to write a good story. McAdams says stories are “fundamentally about the vicissitudes of human intention organized in time.” You can’t have a good story without vicissitudes, and if the best you can come up with is that your parents refused to buy you a sports car for your sixteenth birthday, nobody will want to read your memoirs. In the thousands of life stories McAdams has gathered, several genres are associated with well-being. For example, in the “commitment story,” the protagonist has a supportive family background, is sensitized early in life to the sufferings of others, is guided by a clear and compelling personal ideology, and, at some point, transforms or redeems failures, mistakes, or crises into a positive outcome, a process that often involves setting new goals that commit the self to helping others.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

Klavdia Vavilova: Where did you get it from, Yefim, those fairy tales…about the International of Kindness? The International is founded on the blood of workers and peasants. People swallow gunpowder for it, and become very spiteful. Fighting, marching, lice! Lice, fighting, and marching. It sends your head spinning.

Yefim: If you take fairy tales away from people, how would you explain to them for what they should live for?

Klavdia Vavilova: People don’t need fairy tales. What they need is the truth, for which one wouldn’t hesitate to die.

Yefim: To die? And what about living?

—From movie Commissar (1967), a Russian film banned by the Soviet government for more than 20 years.

As it is with a play, so it is with life—what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will—only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LXXVII. Penguin Classics. Page 130.

It is in no man’s power to have whatever he wants; but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn’t got, and cheerfully make the most of the things that do come his way … Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them. Look at the number of things we buy because others have bought them or because they’re in most people’s houses. One of the causes of the troubles that beset us is the way our lives are guided by the example of others; instead of beig set to rights by reason we’re seduced by convention. There are things that we shouldn’t wish to imitate if they were done by only a few, but when a lot of people have started doing them we follow along, as though a practice became more respectable by becoming more common.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter CXXIII. Penguin Classics. Page 227.

You know the difference, Lucillus, between the postures people adopt in climbing up and descending a mountain; those coming down a slope lean back, those moving steeply upwards lean forward, for to tilt one’s weight ahead of one when descending, and backwards when ascending, is to be in league with what one has to contend with. The path that leads to pleasures is the downward one: the upward climb is the one that takes us to rugged and difficult ground. Here let us throw our bodies forward, in the other direction rein them back.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter CXXIII. Penguin Classics. Page 230.

Glory’s an empty, changeable thing, as fickle as the weather. Poverty’s no evil to anyone unless he kicks against it. Death is not an evil. What is it then? The one law mankind has that is free of all discrimination. Superstition is an idiotic heresy: it fears those it should love: it dishonours those it worships. For what difference does it make whether you deny the gods or bring them into disrepute? These are the things which should be learnt and jut just learnt by heart.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter CXXIII. Penguin Classics. Page 231.

Sacrifice

Exploring this distinction at the heart of “sacrificing to” will reveal two features that are essential to sacrifice: ritual and violence. Ritual and violence are opposing responses to the same anxiety of rejection … Self-sacrifice for another individual, value, or collective seems key to much of ethical life and political organization … moral drama resides in the conflict between self-transcendence and self-love.

—Halbertal, Moshe. 2012. On Sacrifice. Princeton University Press.

Paris is well worth a mass.

—Henry of Navarre, after he converted from being a Huguenot to a Catholic, so that he might be accepted by Paris and thus become the new French king. Sometime between 1590 and 1593. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1961. The Age of Reason Begins. The Story of Civilization series. Page 363.

Suffering

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,—

They kill us for their sport.

—Shakespeare in King Lear

...one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de misÃ¨res. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.

—Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms (Classics)

Terrible things happen in this world. And the only comfort we get is that we didnâ€™t cause them.

—The Leftovers [HBO series]. Season 2. Episode 6. 53:40.

IF the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most illadapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full, and which arises out of the need and distress pertaining essentially to life, should be purposeless and purely accidental. Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence; but misfortune in general is the rule.

—Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms (Classics) (Kindle Locations 623-626). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him; a vapor, a drop of water, suffice to kill him. But when the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.

—Pascal. Quoted in: Will and Ariel Durant. The Age of Louis XIV. The Story of Civilization. Page 64

... the god“s gifts and griefs we humans by necessity must endure, for the yoke like on our neck.

—Matanaira in Hymn to Demeter in Homeric Hymns.

If you imagine, in so far as it is approximately possible, the sum total of distress, pain and suffering of every kind which the sun shines upon in its course, you will have to admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little on the earth as on the moon; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline condition.

—Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms (Classics) (Kindle Locations 724-725). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition

Jon: What kind of god would do that?

Melisandre: The one weâ€™ve got.

—Game of Thrones. Season 6. Episode 9

The universe is designed to make us suffer, but that doesn“t mean we have to make each other suffer.

—Me

Do you not see what sort of life nature promised us, when it decided that the first thing human beings do at their birth should be to cry?

—Seneca in Consolation to Polybius in Hardship and Happiness. Page 84.

I“d gone crazy, couldnâ€™t you tell? / Threw stones at the stars but the whole sky fell.

—Isakov, Gregory Alan. The Stable Song. That Sea, The Gambler [album].

Slave 1: Do you really believe in gods?

Slave 2: Of course.

Slave 1: Whatâ€™s your proof?

Slave 2: The fact that Iâ€™m cursed by them. Wonâ€™t that do?

Slave 1: Well, itâ€™s good enough for me

—Aristophanes. The Knights. 424 BC

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

—â€”Horace Walpole

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

—Soren Kierkegaard

Alas, that I was not born one of these!

—Pharoah Ptolemy II, whose gout and excessive wealth and power made him miserable, made this remark while looking out the window and seeing a beggar lying lazily in the sun. Source: â€”Durant, Will. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Page 586.

The happiness of those who want to be popular depends on others; the happiness of those who seek pleasure fluctuates with moods outside their control; but the happiness of the wise grows out of their own free acts.

—Aurelius, Marcus (121 AD â€“ 180 AD). The Emperorâ€™s Handbook. A new translation of Meditations. Book 6. 52.

But damn your happiness! So long as life's full, it doesn't matter whether it's happy or not. I'm afraid your happiness would bore me.

—Jane Smily in A Thousand Acres

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be.

—John Stuart Mill

Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.

—G.K. Chesteron

Happiness is like Coke - something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.

—Aldous Huxley

It“s because I take God so seriously that I can“t bring myself to believe in him. In that way, itâ€™s really a sign of respect.

—Julia Sweeny. Quoted in Scientific American. January 2017. Page 19.

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvationâ€¦and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.

—HERMAN HESSE, Wer lieben kann ist glÃ¼cklich.

From Alexander Pope

Force first made conquest, and that conquest, law;

Till Superstition taught the tyrant awe,

Then shared the tyranny, then lent it aid,

And gods of conquerors, slaves of subjects made;

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle III.

So drives self-love through just and through unjust,

To one man’s power, ambition, lucre, lust:

The same self-love, in all, becomes the cause

Of what restrains him, government and laws.

For, what one likes if others like as well,

What serves one will, when many wills rebel?

How shall he keep, what sleeping or awake,

A weaker may surprise, a stronger take?

His safety must his liberty restrain:

All join to guard what each desires to gain.

Forced into virtue thus, by self-defence,

Even kings learn’d justice and benevolence:

Self-love forsook the path it first pursued,

And found the private in the public good.

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle III.

For forms of government let fools contest:

Whate’er is best administer’d is best:

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle III.

Thus God and Nature link’d the general frame,

And bade self-love and social be the same.

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle III.

Who thus define it, say they more or less

Than this, happiness is happiness?

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle IV.

Condition, circumstance, is not the thing;

Bliss is the same in subject or king.

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle IV.

Say first, of God above, or man below

What can we reason, but from what we know?

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle I.

Modes of self-love the passions we may call:

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle 2.

On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail,

Reason the card, but passion is the gale;

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle 2.

The monk’s humility, the hero’s pride,

All, all alike find reason on their side;

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle 2.

Lust, through some certain strainers well refined,

Is gentle love, and charms all womankind

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle 2.

Envy, to which the ignoble mind’s a slave

Is emulation in the learn’d or brave;

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle 2.

The same ambition can destroy or save,

And makes a patriot as it makes a knave.

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle 2.

If white and black blend, and unite

A thousand ways, is there no black or white?

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle 2.

Forgiveness and Clemency

Repentance for wrongdoing is the saving grace of life.

—Democritus

To keep from becoming angry with individuals you must forgive all at once: the human race should be granted a pardon.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC â€“ 65 AD). On Anger. From Anger, Mercy, Revenge. 2010. The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Robert A. Kaster.

Life becomes easier when you learn to accept the apology you never got.

—R. Brault (it is said)

Gandhi saw his theory through to its ultimate conclusion. Nonviolence meant not only loving your enemies, he maintained, but realizing that they were not your enemies at all. He might hate the systemic and military violence of colonial rule, but he could not allow himself to hate the people who implemented it. “Mine is not an exclusive love. I cannot but love Muslims or Hindus and hate Englishmen, for if I loved merely Hindus and Muslims because their ways are on the whole pleasing to me, I shall soon begin to hate them when their ways displease me, which they may well do any moment. A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.”

—Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own.

—Marcus Aurelius in Meditations. 2:1.

It became clear to him that all the dreadful evil he had been witnessing in prisons and jails, and the quiet self-assurance of the perpetrators of the this evil, resulted from men attempting what was impossible: to correct the evil while themselves evil. Vicious men were trying to reform other vicious men, and thought they could do it by using mechanical means. And the result of all of this was that needy and covetous men, having made a profession of this pretended punishment and reformation of others, themselves became utterly corrupt, and unceasingly corrupt also those whom they torment. Now he saw clearly whence came all the horrors he had seen, and what ought to be done to put an end to them. The answer he had been unable to find was the same that Christ gave to Peter. It was to forgive always, everyone, to forgive an infinite number of times, because there are none who are not themselves guilty, and therefore none who can punish or reform.

—Tolstoy, Leo. 1899. Resurrection. Oxford University Press: NY, NY. Pages 480-481.

When one forgives, two souls are set free.

—Unknown

I apply not my sword, where my lash suffices, nor my lash where my tongue is enough. And even if there be one hair binding me to my fellow men I do not let it break; when they pull I loosen, and if they loosen I pull.

—Will Durant quoting Muawiya, the Umayyad caliphate, which lasted from from 661 to 750. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 193.

If a man foolishly does me wrong, I will return to him the protection of my ungrudging love; the more evil comes from him, the more good shall come from me.

—The Buddha. Quoted in: Will Durant. The Story of Civilization. Our Oriental Heritage. Page 429.

I think there is nothing more glorious than when those who are at the pinnacle of society grant pardon for many actions, but seek pardon for none.

—Seneca in Consolation to Marcia

Anyone who recalls how often heâ€™s been falsely suspected, how many of his own appropriate actions bad luck has made look like wrongs, how many people he came to like after hating them, will be able to avoid becoming angry instantly, at least if he says to himself, each time heâ€™s offended, â€œI myself have made this mistake also.â€

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC â€“65 AD). On Anger. From Anger, Mercy, Revenge. 2010. The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Robert A. Kaster.

To keep from becoming angry with individuals you must forgive all at once: the human race should be granted a pardon.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC – 65 AD). On Anger. From Anger, Mercy, Revenge. 2010. The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Robert A. Kaster.

Life becomes easier when you learn to accept the apology you never got.

—R. Brault (it is said)

Only by cultivating the virtue of wholeness

And by returning injury with kindness

can there be true harmony.

Therefore, one of deep virtue always gives

Without expecting gratitude.

…

Although the subtle Way of the universe

Holds no favoritism or partiality,

It always supports those who are naturally virtuous.

—Lao Tzu. Tao Teh Ching. 59. Translated by Hua-Ching Ni. Seven Star Communications: Los Angeles, California. 1979.

One of the most robust and consistent findings in the research literature is that people who are more self-compassionate tend be less anxious and depressed. The relationship is a strong one, with self-compassion explaining one-third to one-half of the variation found in how anxious or depressed people are.

—Neff, Kristin (2011-04-19). Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind (p. 110). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

… Gandhi saw his theory through to its ultimate conclusion. Nonviolence meant not only loving your enemies, he maintained, but realizing that they were not your enemies at all. He might hate the systemic and military violence of colonial rule, but he could not allow himself to hate the people who implemented it. “Mine is not an exclusive love. I cannot but love Muslims or Hindus and hate Englishmen, for if I loved merely Hindus and Muslims because their ways are on the whole pleasing to me, I shall soon begin to hate them when their ways displease me, which they may well do any moment. A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.”

—Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood.

—Marcus Aurelius in Meditations. 2:1.

—Tolstoy, Leo. 1899. Resurrection. Oxford University Press: NY, NY. Pages 480-481.

When one forgives, two souls are set free.

—Unknown.

One of the things that makes the Jesus of the New Testament such a tantalizing character is that it’s never clear what he’s telling us. Everything can be read two ways. When he calls on his followers to forgive all debts, refuse to cast the first stone, turn the other cheek, love their enemies, to hand over their possessions to the poor—is he really expecting them to do this? Or are such demands just a way of throwing in their faces that, since we are clearly not prepared to act in this way, we are all sinners whose salvation can only come in another world—a position that can be (and has been) used to justify almost anything.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

... the greatest generals--Alexander, Caesar, Belisarius, Saladin, Napolean--found clemency a mighty engine of war.

--Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 108.

However many people you slaughter you cannot kill your successor.

--Seneca to Nero. Quoted in Campbell, Robin. 2004. Seneca: Letters from a Stoic. Introduction. Penguin Books: NY, NY. Page 12.

The most beautiful of people are imprisoned within the ugliest of bodies; their potential for truth is hidden by their spontaneous lies; and their true greatness is subdued by ugly deeds. Look into their beauty and you can only forgive their sins.

—F. Bailey Norwood.

Hurt people hurt people. That’s how pain patterns get passed on, generation after generation. Bread the chain today. Meet anger with sympathy, contempt with compassion, cruelty with kindness. Greet grimaces with smiles. Forgive and forget about finding fault. Love is the weapon of the future.

—Yehuda Berg.

For each person perceives all other goods in proportion to their own good fortune, expecting them to be greater or less accordingly, but all expect to derive the same benefit from clemency.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). On Clemency. From Anger, Mercy, Revenge. 2010. The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Robert A. Kaster.

—Will Durant quoting Muawiya, the Umayyad caliphate, which lasted from from 661 to 750. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 193.

If a man foolishly does me wrong, I will return to him the protection of my ungrudging love; the more evil comes from him, the more good shall come from me.

—The Buddha. Quoted in: Will Durant. The Story of Civilization. Our Oriental Heritage. Page 429.

Love and kindness

One with wholeness of virtue

has an unconditioned mind.

He regards the mind of all being

As his own mind.

He is kind to the kind.

He is also kind to the unkind,

For the subtle nature of the universe is kind.

—Lao Tzu. Tao Teh Ching. 49. Translated by Hua-Ching Ni. Seven Star Communications: Los Angeles, California. 1979.

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.

—George Washington Carver

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson

about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said, "My son, the battle is between

two "wolves" inside us all.

One is Evil.

It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed,

arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies,

false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good.

It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."

The grandson thought about it for a minute

and then asked his grandfather:

"Which wolf wins?"

The old Cherokee simply replied,

"The one you feed."

—A Native American Metaphor

I think there is nothing more glorious than when those who are at the pinnacle of society grant pardon for many actions, but seek pardon for none.

—Seneca in Consolation to Marcia

one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de misères. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms (Classics) (Kindle Locations 771-774). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

In an interview with Bill Maher last month, Senator Cory Booker nicely defined patriotism by contrasting it with mere tolerance. Tolerance, he said, means, “I’m going to stomach your right to be different, but if you disappear off the face of the earth I’m no worse off.” Patriotism, on the other hand, means “love of country, which necessitates love of each other, that we have to be a nation that aspires for love, which recognizes that you have worth and dignity and I need you. You are part of my whole, part of the promise of this country.”

—David Brooks. April 5, 2016. “How Covenants Make Us.” The New York Times.

Wash yourself clean. With simplicity, with humility, with indifference to everything but right and wrong.

—Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. 7:31.

You must respect the body you are trying to heal.

—Malcolm Gladwell. August 10, 2016. Revisionist History [podcast].

The most sublime act is to set another before you.

—Blake, William. Proverbs From Hell.

The feeling is mutual.

—Answer given by Cesar Chavez to a reporter’s question, “What accounts for all the affection that farm workers show you in public?”

The Golden Rule

I might best set down this model for a prince to imitate: let him wish to treat his fellow-citizens as he wishes the gods to treat him.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). On Clemency. From Anger, Mercy, Revenge. 2010. The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Robert A. Kaster.

Zigong: “Is there any single word that could guide one’s entire life?”
Master: “Should it not be reciprocity? What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.”
—Analects of Confucius

A person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 49.

"Teach me the Torah while I stand on one foot."

Of course Hillel, too, saw that the heathen was scoffing, but calmly and patiently he said:

"You want to learn a great deal quickly, don't you? Very well, I shall teach you the Torah while you stand on one foot. This is our Holy Torah: 'What is hateful to you, do not do unto others.'"

The heathen forgot that he had come only to jeer.

"Does it mean that the heathens and the Jews and all of us are brothers? Does it mean that we must be kind to one another like brothers?" asked the heathen, wonderingly.

"That's it, my son. That's the meaning of the whole Torah. All the rest is only an explanation of that. Go, go, my son. Go and study it," said Hillel kindly.

"When may I come for another lesson?" asked the heathen humbly.

—Hillel the Elder (110 BCE – 10 CE), who was a famous Jewish sage who helped begin and develop the Talmud.

I have often thought of them since my return to my own people, and am happy to think that they prefer living in their own country to coming out to ours and driving us from it, as many of the whites have already done. I think with them, that wherever the Great Spirit places his people they ought to be satisfied to remain, and be thankful for what He has given them, and not drive others from the country He has given them because it happens to be better than theirs. This is contrary to our way of thinking, and from my intercourse with the whites, I have learned that one great principle of their religion is to do unto others as you wish them to do unto you. Those people in the mountains seem to act upon this principle, but the settlers on our frontiers and on our lands seem never to think of it, if we are to judge by their actions.

—Blackhawk. 1955. The Autobiography of Black Hawk.

“…One theory before this had been that big brains make language possible, but I believe it was the opposite—that the need for language created big brains.”

…he counted five crucial mechanisms that drove cooperation in highly social species like ours. The first mechanism is Tit for Tat, or direct reciprocity…Next comes the much more advanced mechanism of indirect reciprocity or reputation…the third mechanism as “spatial selection”—interaction born of living in proximity…The fourth is multilevel selection, involving larger groups like towns, bribes, or companies…The fifth mechanism is a version of the familiar kin selection, the tendency to cooperate with blood relations.

—Ohlson, Kristin. December, 2012. “Cooperative Instinct.” Discover Magazine.

So what is really built into the person is a strategy: Play tit for tat. Do to others what they do unto you. Specifically, the tit-for-tat strategy is to be nice on the first round of interaction; but after that, do to your partner whatever your partner did to you on the previous round.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

Vengeance and gratitude are moral sentiments that amplify and enforce tit for tat. Vengeful and grateful feelings appear to have evolved precisely because they are such useful tools for helping individuals create cooperative relationships, thereby reaping the gains from non-zero-sum games.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

An individual who had gratitude without vengefulness would be an easy mark for exploitation, and a vengeful and ungrateful individual would quickly alienate all potential cooperative partners.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

In theory, feudalism was a magnificent system of moral reciprocity, binding the men of an endangered society to one another in a complex we of mutual obligation, protection, and fidelity.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 564. Refers to feudalism in the High Middle Ages.

… judging by what we know of the original conditions of Christianity from the teachings expressed in the Gospels, it would appear that the chief methods of distortion used by other religions had been foreseen and that warnings against them had been clearly stated. It was straightforwardly said against the priestly caste that none could be the teacher of another (‘Do not call yourselves fathers and teachers’). Against the attribution of sacred knowledge to books it was said that what is important is the spirit and not the letter, that man ought not to believe in human traditions, and that all the laws and the Prophets, that is all those books in which the writing is considered sacred, lead only to the fact that we should do to others as we would wish them to do to us.

—Tolstoy, Leo (1828-1910). What Is Religion, Of What Does Its Essence Consist?

We want to play tit for tat, which means starting out nice and being a pushover, and we want to cultivate a reputation for being a good player. Gossip and reputation make sure what goes around comes around—a person who is cruel will find that others are cruel back to him, and a person who is kind will find that other others are kind in return. Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life. As long as everyone plays tit-for-tat augmented by gratitude, vengeance, and gossip, the whole system should work beautifully.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

…oxytocin orchestrates the kind of generous and caring behavior that every culture endorses as the right way to live—the cooperative, benign, pro-social way of living that every culture on the planet describes as "moral." The Golden Rule is a lesson that the body already knows, and when we get it right, we feel the rewards immediately.

This isn't to say that oxytocin always makes us good or generous or trusting. In our rough-and-tumble world, an unwavering response of openness and loving kindness would be like going around with a "kick me" sign on your back. Instead, the moral molecule works like a gyroscope, helping us to maintain our balance between behavior based on trust and behavior based on wariness and distrust. In this way oxytocin helps us to navigate between the social benefits of openness—which are considerable—and the reasonable caution that we need to avoid being taken for a ride.

—Zak, Paul J. “The Trust Molecule.” April 28, 2012. The Wall Street Journal. C1.

But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

—The Christian Bible. Exodus: 23-25. New International Version.

Tit-for-tat, or returning favors for favors and harms for harms, is not just the rational outcome of repeated interaction but also the foundation of biblical morality and an almost universal moral rule among human societies.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY. Page 37.

There was a certain doctor who disagreed with us, but it proved to be a great opportunity for helping the people understand the light and the spirit. He denied that the light existed in everyone, especially in the Indians, so I called an Indian and asked him if, when he lied or did to someone else what he wouldn’t accept from them or did any wrong, there was something in him that told him this, something that told him that he should not do these things, and told him off for doing them. And he said there was such a thing in him.

—George Fox. Quoted in: Truth of the Heart: An anthology of George Fox. Selected and annotated by Rex Amber. Page 29. This quote is from Fox’s American diary of 1672.

Societal Values

Led by Katherine Dahlsgaard, we read Aristotle and Plato, Aquinas and Augustine, the Old Testament and the Talmud, Confucius, Buddha, Lao-Tze, Bushido (the samurai code), the Koran, Benjamin Franklin, and the Upanishads—some two hundred virtue catalogues in all. To our surprise, almost every single one of these traditions flung across three thousand years and the entire face of the earth endorsed six virtues:

1. Wisdom and knowledge

2. Courage

3. Love and humanity

4. Justice

5. Temperance

6. Spirituality and transcendence

—Martin Seligman. 2002. Authentic Happiness. Free Press: NY, NY.

...the best determinant of global self-esteem from childhood to adulthood is perceived physical attractiveness.

—David C. Geary in Scientific American Mind. "Primal Brain in the Modern Classroom." September/October, 2011. Pages 45-49.

The offspring of a toad is a toad and the offspring of a merchant is a merchant.

—A historical saying in Japan. Quoted in: Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 54.

I think that today if, perhaps not the renowned villain Nero, but some common place entrepreneur, wanted to make a pond of human blood for the diseased rich to bathe in, as prescribed by their learned doctors, he would be able to arrange it all unhindered so long as he respected the accepted and appropriate forms. Thus he would not compel people to lose blood, but would put them in a position such that their life was at risk unless they did.

—Tolstoy, Leo (1828-1910). What Is Religion, Of What Does Its Essence Consist?

When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he things of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this … So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.

—A Ju/’hoansi (Buchman) describing the ‘insulting the meat’ custom, as quoted in The Dobe Ju/’hoansi by Richard Borshay Lee.

To these is then added, also as a result of reflection, a source of pleasure, and consequently of suffering, available to him alone and one which preoccupies him beyond all measure, indeed more than all the rest put together: ambition and the sense of honour and shame – in plain words, what he thinks others think of him.

—Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms (Classics) (Kindle Locations 679-681). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

The Universe and Man Within It

The world is in your hand or at your throat.
—The Strokes, from Razor Blade on the First Impressions of Earth album.

What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, and imbecile norm of the earth; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe. Who shall unravel this confusion?

—Pascal. Quoted in: Will and Ariel Durant. The Age of Louis XIV. The Story of Civilization. Pages 63-64.

How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement! … We would never travel on the sea if we had no hope of telling about it later … We lose our lives with joy provided people talk about it … Even philosophers with for admirers.

—Pascal. Quoted in: Will and Ariel Durant. The Age of Louis XIV. The Story of Civilization. Pages 64.

The universe has placed us into an absurd world. So what’s the problem with man developing absurd beliefs to deal with it?

—F. Bailey Norwood

Man lives two lives. Besides his life in the concrete is his life in the abstract. In the former he struggles, suffers and dies as do the mere animal creatures. But in the abstract he quietly reflects on the plan of the universe as does a captain of a ship on the chart. He becomes in this abstract life of calm reasoning a deliberate observer of those elements which previously moved and agitated his emotions. Withdrawing into this serene contemplation, he is like an actor who has played a lively part on the stage and then withdraws and, as one of the audience, quietly looks on at other actors who are energetically performing.

—Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea.

Terrible things happen in this world. And the only comfort we get is that we didn’t cause them.

--The Leftovers [HBO series]. Season 2. Episode 6. 53:40.

Faint not, poor soul, in God still trust,

Fear not the things thou suffer must;

For, whom he loves he doth chastise,

And then all tears wipes from their eyes.

—William Bradford (one of the Pilgrims) written towards the end of his life.

IF the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full, and which arises out of the need and distress pertaining essentially to life, should be purposeless and purely accidental. Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence; but misfortune in general is the rule.

—Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms (Classics) (Kindle Locations 623-626). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

—Pascal. Quoted in: Will and Ariel Durant. The Age of Louis XIV. The Story of Civilization. Page 64.

Picture a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death; each day some are strangled in the sight of the rest; those who remain see their own condition in that of these their fellows, looking at one another with sorrow and without hope, each awaiting his turn. This is the picture of the condition of man.

—Pascal. Quoted in: Will and Ariel Durant. The Age of Louis XIV. The Story of Civilization. Page 65.

I was not, I was, I am not, I care not.

—Note on a tombstone from ancient Rome. Quoted in: Durant, Will. Caesar and Christ. The Story of Civilization. Page 389.

Now I need never fear hunger, need never pay rent, and am at least free from gout.

—Note on a tombstone from ancient Rome. Quoted in: Durant, Will. Caesar and Christ. The Story of Civilization. Page 389.

Communities do not endure without sacrifice.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 183.

You can’t play God without being acquainted with the Devil.

—From Westworld. Season 1, Episode 2.

Question with boldness the existence of a God; Because, if there is one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

—Thomas Jefferson

… the god’s gifts and griefs we humans by necessity must endure, for the yoke like on our neck.

—Matanaira in Hymn to Demeter in Homeric Hymns.

—Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms (Classics) (Kindle Locations 724-725). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

We have rooms in ourselves. Most of them we have not visited yet. Forgotten rooms. From time to time we can find the passage. We find strange things … old phonographs, pictures, books … they belong to us, but it is the first time we have found them.

—Murakami, Haruki. A Japanese novelist. Quoted in: Koch, Christof. May / June 2014. “Keep it in Mind.” Scientific American Mind.

It’s hard to know how people select a course in life … The big choices we make are practically random.

—Twersky, an economist. Quoted in: Brooks, David. November 25, 2016. “Does Decision-Making Matter?” Editorial. The New York Times.

One discussion turned on the question, "What is the greatest misery?" A Greek philospher answered, "an impoverished and imbecile old age"; a Hindu replied, "A harassed mind in a diseased body"; Khosru's vizier won the dutiful acclaim of all by saying, "For my part I think the extreme misery is for a man to see the end of life approaching without having practiced virtue."

--Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 145. On Persian culture in antiquity.

Jon: What kind of god would do that?

Melisandre: The one we’ve got.

—Game of Thrones. Season 6. Episode 9.

We spend the first half of our lives wishing we looked like someone else and the second half wishing we looked like our former selves.

—Helferich, Gerard. September 3-4, 2016. “Life in the Fourth Quarter.” Book review. C7.

All deities reside in the human breast.

—Blake, William. Proverbs from Hell.

The worship of God is, Honoring his gifts in other men, … and loving the greatest man best. Those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.

—Blake, William. Proverbs from Hell.

We must ensure that what has been granted for an unspecified period is always available, and when we are summoned, we must hand it back without complaint: it is a very poor kind of debtor who starts lashing out at his creditor.

—Seneca in Consolation to Marcia. Seneca is referring to death, and not being excessively distressed at death.

Our minds need frequent prompting to love things on the understanding that we are sure to lose them, or rather that we are already losing them: you should treat all of fortune’s gifts as coming without a guarantee.

—Seneca in Consolation to Marcia

You were born for this, to suffer loss, to perish, to hope and to fear, to upset others and yourself, to dread death and yet also desire it, and, worst of all, never to understand your true condition.

—Seneca in Consolation to Marcia

… imagine me coming to give you advice as you were being born: “You are about to enter a city shared by gods and men, one that embraces everything, is bound by fixed, eternal laws, and ensures that the revolving heavenly bodies carry out their duties untiringly. There you will see countless stars twinkling; you will see the universe filled with the light of a single star, the sun on its daily course marking out the periods of day and night, and on its annual course demarcating summers and winters more evenly … But in that same place there will be thousands of afflictions of body and mind, wars, robberies, poisons, shipwrecks, climatic and body disorders, bitter grief for those dearest to you, and eath, which may be easy or may result from punishment and torture. Think it over and weigh up what you want: to reach the one set of experiences you must run the gauntlet of the other. You will reply that you want to live, of course … So live on the terms agreed.

—Seneca in Consolation to Marcia in Hardship and Happiness. Pages 24-26.

It is no problem being a slave if, when you grow tired of being someone else’s property, you can cross over to freedom with a single step. Life, you are dear to me, thanks to death! Think what a blessing a timely death can be, and how many people have been disadvantaged by living too long.

—Seneca in Consolation to Marcia

You know what you figure out in the middle of [an acid] trip? That all these assumptions and preconceived notions of who you are, they’re all bullshit. You’re just an organism who is trying to find normalcy by repeating patterns.

—Rogan, Joe. November 5, 2015. “The Psychedelic Warrior.” Rolling Stone. Page 48.

There are dreams that cannot be / And there are storms we cannot weather.

—Les Miserables, the musical.

The body and its parts are a river, the soul and dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.

—Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. 2:17.

Dear is my sleep, but more to be mere stone,

So long as ruin and dishonor reign.

To see naught, to feel naught, is my great gain;

Then wake me not; speak in an undertone.

—Michelangelo. Quoted in: —Durant, Will. 1953. The Renaissance. The Story of Civilization. Page 644.

What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.

—Eckhart Tolle

Well it's hard to find a reason, when all you have is doubts,

Hard to see inside yourself when you can't see your way out,

Hard to find an answer when the question won't come out.

Oh everyone's filling me up with noise,

I don't know what they're talking about,

Everyone's filling me up with noise,

I don't know what they're talking about,

Everyone's filling me up with noise,

I don't know what they're talking about,

You see all I need's a whisper in a world that only shouts.

—Lyrics to Whispers by Passenger.

The stars would love nothing more than to reveal your future this week, but unfortunately, they're just large luminous balls of plasma held together by gravity in space..

—Horoscope from The Onion. September 17, 2013. Aries: March 21 - April 19.

Here our highest good is pleasure.

—Motto hung over the entrance to Epicurus’ gardens. From Greenblatt, Stephen. 2012. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. W. W. Norton & Company.

The universe is designed to make us suffer, but that doesn’t mean we have to make each other suffer.

—F. Bailey Norwood

When there are no more good leaders to fight for, you must still fight for good.

—F. Bailey Norwood

Do you not see what sort of life nature promised us, when it decided that the first thing human beings do at their birth should be to cry?

—Seneca in Consolation to Polybius in Hardship and Happiness. Page 84.

… there is nothing more inconsistent than for someone to be upset because he was granted such a brother for too short a time, and yet not rejoice that at any rate he was granted him.

—Seneca in Consolation to Polybius in Hardship and Happiness. Page 84.

Faith is man’s conscious relationship with the infinite universe, from which he derives guidance for his activity. And because genuine faith is never irrational, or incompatible with existing knowledge, its characteristics can be neither supernatural nor senseless…

—Tolstoy, Leo (1828-1910). What Is Religion, Of What Does Its Essence Consist?

It used to be that we adapted to the environment like all the other animals did, and we left as little impact on the environment. Now, what we’ve done is create a human environment in which we’ve embedded nature. We are the dominant force of change on the planet. And for one mammal to be able to generally vex and bother every plant and animal on every continent and in every ocean: that is a level of niche building that really is unknown on the planet.

—Ackeman, Diane. September 8, 2014. “Diane Ackeman: ‘The Human Age’.” The Diane Rehm Show. WAMU. NPR.

I’d gone crazy, couldn’t you tell? / Threw stones at the stars but the whole sky fell.

—Isakov, Gregory Alan. The Stable Song. That Sea, The Gambler [album].

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
—William Hazlitt

To alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
—Homer Simpson

Being asked what was very difficult, he answered, in a famous apophthegm, “To know thyself.”

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 3: The Heroic Age. Page 137.

Farewell my friends, the truths I taught hold fast.

—Epicurus, in his last few hours.

Act, speak, and think like a man ready to depart this life in the next breath. If there are gods, you have no reason to fear your flight from the land of the living, for they will not let any harm come to you; and if there are no gods, or they are indifferent to the affairs of men, why wish to go on living in a world without them or without their guidance and care? But in fact, there are gods, and they do care about me…

—Aurelius, Marcus (121 AD – 180 AD). The Emperor’s Handbook. A new translation of Meditations.

I have lived; I have completed now the course

That fortune long ago allotted me

—Virgil in the Aeneid. IV:653.

Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.

—Oscar Wilde

The only true serenity is the one which represents the free development of a sound mind.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LVI. Penguin Classics. Page 111.

When one has lost a friend one’s eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation .. Let us see to it that the recollection of those we have lost becomes a pleasure to us .. You have buried someone you loved. Now look for someone to love. It is better to make good the loss of a friend than to cry over him … Let us reflect then, my dearest Lucilius, that we ourselves shall not be long in reaching the place we mourn his having reached. Perhaps, too, if only there is truth in the story told by sages and some welcoming abode awaits us, he whom we suppose to be dead and gone has merely been send on ahead.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LXII. Penguin Classics. Page 114.

And harassed by the body’s overwhelming weight, the soul is in captivity unless philosophy comes to its rescue, bidding it breathe more freely in the contemplation of nature, releasing it from earthly into heavenly surroundings.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LVI. Penguin Classics. Page 122.

What is death? Either a transition or an end. I am not afraid of coming to an end, this being the same as never having begun, nor of transition, for I shall never be in confinement quite so cramped anywhere else as I am here.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LVI. Penguin Classics. Page 124.

Slave 1: Do you really believe in gods?

Slave 2: Of course.

Slave 1: What’s your proof?

Slave 2: The fact that I’m cursed by them. Won’t that do?

Slave 1: Well, it’s good enough for me.

—Aristophanes. The Knights. 424 BC.

I remember being on the kitchen floor just crying, praying to God for him to make me normal. That’s how I looked at it: “If it’s this bad for me to be this way, why did God make me? I wish I were dead.”

—Remarks by an interviewee in: Morris, Alex. September 11, 2014. “The Forsaken.” Rolling Stone magazine.

Life would be restricted indeed if there were any barrier to our imagination.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LVI. Penguin Classics. Page 109.

The truth of the matter is that everything that is original is irreplaceable.

—Igor Stravinsky in An Autobiography

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
—Horace Walpole

Only the shallow know themselves.
—Oscar Wilde

This is a strange, rather perverse story…a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.

—Jackson, Tim describing modern consumers in a TED talk. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZsp_EdO2Xk&feature=em-share_video_user.

There are rich and poor in Homer as in life; society is a rumbling cart that travels an uneven road; and no matter how carefully the cart is constituted, some of the varied objects in it will sink to the bottom, and others will rise to the top; the potter has not made all the vessels of the same earth, or strength, or fragility.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 3: The Heroic Age. Simon and Schuster: NY, NY.

I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others.
—Ayn Rand in Anthem

Poor creatures, why did we give you to King Peleus,

A mortal doomed to death…

You immortal beasts who never age or die?

So you could suffer the pains of wretched men?

There is nothing alive more agonized than man

Of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

—Zeus speaking to Achilles’ three horses, two of which are immortal, in The Iliad. Book 17. Translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics.

No one is so ignorant as not to know that some day he must die. Nevertheless when death draws near he turns, wailing and trembling, looking for a way out. Wouldn’t you think a man an utter fool if he burst into tears because he didn’t live a thousand hears ago?

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LXXVII. Penguin Classics. Page 127.

… life itself is slavery if the courage to die be absent.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LXXVII. Penguin Classics. Page 129.

It was my Stoic studies that really saved me. For the fact that I was able to leave my bed and was restored to health I give the credit to philosophy.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LXXVIII. Penguin Classics. Page 131.

Nature in her unlimited kindness to us has so arranged things as to make pain either bearable or brief.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LXXVIII. Penguin Classics. Page 132.

More, I think, is not to be hoped from metaphysics. It does not seem likely that the first principles of things will ever be known. The mice that must be in some little holes of an immense building know not whether it is eternal, or who the architect is, or why he built it. Such mice are we; and the Divine Architect who built the universe has never, that I know of, told his secret to one of us…

—Letter from Voltaire to the young Frederick the Great. Source: Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part IX. The Age of Voltaire. Chapter XIII: Frederick and Maria Theresa. Page 444.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
—Mark Twain

We did not come into existence for pleasure.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality.

—Max Born, as quoted in The Drunkards Walk (p.195) by Leonard Mlodinow

Music is essentially useless, as life is.
—George Santayana

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.
—Anais Nin

Sulla, this is one of Musonius' beautiful and memorable insights— that in order to protect ourselves we must live like doctors and be con¬tinually treating ourselves with reason. One must not, after using rea¬son to treat illness of the soul, discard it, the way we discard hellebore after using it to treat illness of the body. We must instead allow reason to remain in the soul, where it will collect and guard decisions requir¬ing good judgment. The power of reason should be compared to nutri¬tious food rather than to drugs, since along with health it produces good behavior in those who practice it. But words of advice and warn¬ing administered when a person's emotions are at their height and boil¬ing over accomplish little or nothing. They are like the smelling-salts given to epileptics who fall down: they revive them but do not cure the disease. [Plutarch, Moralia 453 D-E (Loeb VI, W. C. Helmbold): "On Controlling Anger." The speakers in this dialogue are Sextius Sulla, Plutarch's friend, and C. Minicius Fundanus, a friend of Pliny the Younger. Fundanus is speaking to Sulla about Musonius.]

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence.

—Upton Sinclair in The Profits of Religion.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
—Alfred North Whitehead

I believe evolution has favored both good and bad traits, and any number of adaptive roles in the world have selected for morality, cooperation, altruism, and goodness, just as any number have also selected for murder, theft, self-seeking, and terrorism.

—Martin Seligman. 2002. Authentic Happiness. Page xiii. Free Press: NY, NY.

"Oh, dear!" moaned Jack; "what an unhappy lot is mine! Why, dear father, did you not make me out of tin—or even out of straw—so that I would keep indefinitely."

"Shucks!" returned Tip, indignantly. "You ought to be glad that I made you at all." Then he added, reflectively, "everything has to come to an end, some time."

—Baum, L. Frank (2010-06-21). The Complete Wizard of Oz Collection (With Active Table of Contents) (Kindle Locations 5185-5188). Bedford Park Books. Kindle Edition.

"It seems strange," said he, as he watched the Tin Woodman work, "that my left leg should be the most elegant and substantial part of me."

"That proves you are unusual," returned the Scarecrow. "and I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed."

—Baum, L. Frank (2010-06-21). The Complete Wizard of Oz Collection (With Active Table of Contents) (Kindle Locations 5270-5273). Bedford Park Books. Kindle Edition.

Empty handed I entered

The world

Barefoot I leave it

My coming, my going --

Two simple happenings

That got entangled.

—poem by Zen master Kozan Ichikyo shortly before his death. Taken from: Martyn-Hemphill, Amelia. June 12, 2013. “A Better Way to Die.” The Atlantic.

The man who insists on seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides.
—Henri-Frederic Amiel

To understand the most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

Why should I alone be depreived of my rights? The heavens are permitted to grant bright days, then blot them out with dark nights; the year may decorate the face of the earth with flowers and fruits, then make it barren again with clouds and frost; the sea is allowed to invite the sailor with fair weather, then terrify him with storms. Shall I, then, permit man’s insatiable cupidity to tie me down to a sameness that is alien to my habits?

—Anicius Boethius. 533 CE. The Consolation of Philosophy.

There is nothing divine about morality; It is a purely human affair
—Albert Einstein

When we grow older we hope—with a little philosophy—we ask more reflectively, and in a larger less ego-centric way: not just what’s the meaning of my life, but what’s the meaning of our lives. What’s the meaning of existence? What’s it all about?...But we do have to ask the question, does life have meaning, and the answer to that might be no. After all, there are some things that simply don’t have any meaning at all. There are some rocks in my garden, right now, that I know are absolutely meaningless. And it might well be that human life is something more like my rocks…full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.

—Jay Garfield. The Meaning of Life: Perspectives from the World’s Great Intellectual Traditions. 2011. Lecture 1: The Meaning of the Meaning of Life. The Teaching Company.

There’s two big dimensions that we need to consider when we pose the big question of the meaning of life…one I’m going to call the personal dimension, and one I’m going to call the collective or the relation dimension.

When we ask the question in the personal dimension, we’re asking the question: If I simply think of myself, as an individual, worrying about my own life, in what does the meaning of my life consist? We might have a number of different kinds of answers to that.

We might say, a meaningful life for me is a life of reason. That is it’s a life led reflectively, thoughtfully, where I make my choices in an informed way, where I’ve got good reasons for the things that I do, where I can look back at my life and I can say, “Yes, I did the right things, and I did them for the right reasons.”

On the other hand, it might be that I say, for me, a meaningful life is a life of faith, where I find faith in some higher value, some spiritual value, and am able to accommodate myself and my concerns to what I see as my dictates of the higher spiritual value. That’s possible.

On the other hand, I might say, that what makes my life meaningful is that I’m able to lead it naturally, in harmony with my own nature, in harmony with the nature that I find around me, where I think of myself fundamentally as an organism and I try to shed social excretions, get back to my natural way of being, and live that way…

I might say, for instance if I’m a Confucian or an Aristotelian, that what gives my life meaning, is that it’s a social life. That I’m a member of a culture, a member of a society, a member of a family.

Or perhaps I could say with Nietzsche…that what makes my life meaningful as an individual is that I live an independent life. That I’m the author of my own life. I create it as a piece of art, and I don’t worry the demands of others, the demands of society around me, or external values: I make my own values, and I make myself, and that kind of autonomy and individuality is what gives my life meaning….

But beyond this individual dimension there’s a second, social dimension…the dimension of connectedness. And in that dimension we need an account of what our relationships are to each other, to the broader world, to the universe, to our society, in order to answer the question: what is the meaning of life?

On this dimension we might ask the question: are we primarily independent agents in voluntary association with one another…when we think about society, is it a group of individuals and get together and say, let’s form a society and make some agreements, as we might see in the social contract dimension, where we see government and social institutions as constituted and legitimated by the wills of individuals.

Or it might be that we are essentially social beings, and that is what our fundamental nature is. And when we think about ourselves as individuals, that’s no more appropriate than to think of my hand as an individual instead of as a part of my body…Do we choose our roles in society, or does society give us our roles?

…

Or, is our context not primarily social but natural? Are we fundamentally animals living within an ecosystem, and what gives our lives meaning is our connection to other animals and plants in that broader ecosystems.

Or, as the Stoics might have it, are we simply tiny parts of a very vast cosmos, and we need to think of ourselves relationally, and in relation to the whole.

—Jay Garfield. The Meaning of Life: Perspectives from the World’s Great Intellectual Traditions. 2011. Lecture 1: The Meaning of the Meaning of Life. The Teaching Company.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
—George Bernard Shaw
(Addendum from Bailey: doesn't this apply to smart men also?)

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
—Soren Kierkegaard

For where the constitutions of living beings are different, there also the acts and the ends are different. In those animals, then, whose constitution is adapted only to use, use alone is enough: but in an animal which has also the power of understanding the use, unless there be the due exercise of the understanding, he will never attain his proper end. Well then God constitutes every animal, one to be eaten, another to serve for agriculture, another to supply cheese, and another for some like use; for which purposes what need is there to understand appearances and to be able to distinguish them? But God has introduced man to be a spectator of God and of His works; and not only a spectator of them, but an interpreter. For this reason it is shameful for man to begin and to end where irrational animals do, but rather he ought to begin where they begin, and to end where nature ends in us; and nature ends in contemplation and understanding, in a way of life conformable to nature. Take care then not to die without having been spectators of these things.

—Epictetus (2011-08-09). Discourses and Enchiridion (Illustrated, Annotated) (Kindle Locations 274-281). . Kindle Edition.

True Happiness, great satisfaction, cannot be found by man in any form of "practical" life, no, not in the fullest and freest exercise possible of the "moral virtues," not in the life of the citizen or of the great soldier or statesman. To seek it there is to court failure and disappointment. It is to be found in the life of the onlooker, the disinterested spectator; or, to put it more distinctly, "in the life of the philosopher, the life of scientific and philosophic contemplation." The highest and most satisfying form of life possible to man is "the contemplative life"; it is only in a secondary sense and for those incapable of their life, that the practical or moral ideal is the best. It is time that such a life is not distinctively human, but it is the privilege of man to partake in it, and such participation, at however rare intervals and for however short a period, is the highest Happiness which human life can offer. All other activities have value only because and in so far as they render this life possible.

—Aristotle (2005-07-01). Ethics (Kindle Locations 241-246). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

The chief aim of their constitution is that, as far as the public needs permit, all citizens should be free to withdraw as much time as possible from the service of the body and devote themselves to the freedom and culture of the mind. For in that, they think, lies the happiness of life.

—Thomas More in Utopia, 1516.

I cannot tell you how often I have received comments from my former students…that went out into the work-world and write to me, “You know, when you read that passage from Marx on alienated labor, I confess it didn’t mean all that much to me. But now—now that I worked in the corporate world, for example—now I know what Marx is talking about. Because when he uses the term that work is external to me, and that I cannot identify with it, I cannot put myself in that process of work, that the product which I create is not part of me and I cannot feel myself as part of that product, now finally I feel that. And sometimes people will write to me a year after they’ve graduated, sometimes ten or twenty years…and as they write back to me their refrain is this: why is it I have spent so much of my life, so many of my hours engaged in an activity that I’ve come to hate, why should I feel the activity itself cannot be part of me

—Dennis Dalton. Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory. Lecture Ten: Marx’s Critique of Capitalism and the Solution of Communism. The Teaching Company. 1998.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
—Soren Kierkegaard

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
—Soren Kierkegaard

The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.
—Tom Stoppard

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
—Oscar Wilde

The determined scholar and the man of virtue will not seek to live at the expense of injuring their virtue. They will even sacrifice their lives to preserve their virtue complete

—Confucius

I am tired. I can control nothing. I am master of nothing. Not my life, not my death. I am in the hands of the gods like any moral. And if the gods have sent someone to save the world, I am not that one.

—Augustus in the movie Augustus played by Peter O’Toole.

Not all motivation is instrumental. Some is identity. One cannot grant the economists that all of life is instrumental without descending into a Benthamite nightmare of corrupted purpose.
—Deirdre N. McClosky in The Bourgeois Virtues

As a politician I see no other way. As a man, I could never do it.

—Character playing Seneca in Nero: The Decline of the Empire

In sheer numbers, the brain is just beaten by the Milky Way with its 200 billion or more stars, but they are spread across 100,000 light years, not packed into a one-and-a-half-litre capacity skull.

—Alun Anderson. The World in 2002. “Brain Work.” The Economist magazine.

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

—Last words of Steve Jobs. As reported by The Wall Street Journal. December 24-25, 2011. A15.

And just like a map of Texas remains remarkable stable over many decades—it doesn’t change with each new pothole in a Dallas street—human self-identity remains stable over a lifetime, despite constant changes on the micro level of proteins and cells. As an individual grows, matures, changes in many minute ways, the conscious self’s identity remains intact, just as Texas remains Texas even as new skyscrapers rise in the cities, farms grow different crops and the Red River sometimes shifts the boundary with Oklahoma a bit.

—Laura Sanders. February 11, 2012. “Emblems of Awareness.” Science News.

Luck is as essential to greatness as will or intelligence. If a great man fails to have luck we never know it, because his greatness remains only potential.

—Richard Winston in Charlemagne (1960).

I was now a happy human being. I possessed the soul of a poet and the heart of youth, all houses began to open to me. I flew from circle to circle.

—Hans Christian Andersen. Quoted on Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast. February 27, 2012. “The Fairy Tale Life of Hans Christian Andersen.

Man is not and should not conceive him or herself as the lord of being, but as the shepherd of being.

—Martin Heidegger

Among so many conflicting ideas, the honest man is confused and distressed. Since one must take sides one must might as well choose the side which is victorious.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, in a letter to his brother, concerning the conquering of his Corsican homeland by the French.

The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth the atoms that make up the human body are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high mass ones among them went unstable in their later years they collapsed and then exploded scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas cloud that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems stars with orbiting planets, and those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small because they’re small and the Universe is big – but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity. That’s really what you want in life, you want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant you want to feel like a participant in the goings on of activities and events around you That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive…

—Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson in a Time magazine interview in 2012. But for goodness sake, see the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D05ej8u-gU.

Say first, of God above, or man below

What can we reason, but from what we know?

—Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, Epistle I.

To live alone, one must be an animal or a God—says Aristotle. The third case is wanting: one must be both—a philosopher.

—Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Maxims and Arrows: p1 s2.

How is it? Is man only a mistake of God? Or God only a mistake of man?

— Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Maxims and Arrows: p1 s7.

We must by all means stretch out the hand, and attempt to grasp this surprising finesse, that the worth of life cannot he estimated. It cannot be estimated by a living being, because such a one is a party—yea, the very object—in the dispute, and not a judge; it cannot be estimated by a dead person for a different reason. —For a philosopher to see a problem in the worth of life, is really an objection to him, a mark questioning his wisdom, a folly.—What?

—Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Maxims and Arrows: p2 s2.

—http://www.icanhasinternets.com/2011/10/mind-blown/

Happiness

Was Flaubert right when he wrote that stupidity, selfishness and good health “are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost”?

—Mattix, Micah. April 11, 2015. “Lessons from Pangloss.” A book review of Happiness by Frederic Lenoir. The Wall Street Journal. C6.

Life is not fair. Get revenge upon life by choosing to be happy anyway.

—F. Bailey Norwood

Henry Ford, after he made his first billion dollars, was asked how much more he wanted. He said he wanted just a little more.

—Steven Hagen in Buddhism Plain and Simple, page 36.

Twin studies show that from 50 percent to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

The unsettling implication of Pehlham’s work is that the three biggest decisions most of us make—what to do with our lives, where to live, and whom to marry—can all be influenced (even if only slightly) by something as trivial as the sound of a name. Life is indeed what we deem it, but the deeming happens quickly and unconsciously.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

We live in a culture where we’re taught to see freedom as the maximization of choice. But this is not true freedom at all. In fact, it’s a form of bondage. True freedom doesn’t lie in the maximization of choice, but, ironically, is most easily found in a life where there is little choice.

—Steven Hagen in Buddhism Plain and Simple, page 38.

...about a third of the variation in people’s happiness is heritable. That is along the lines of, though a little lower than, previous estimates on the subject.

—The Economist. “Transporter of delight: The genetics of happiness.” October 15, 2011. pages 90-91.

Alas, that I was not born one of these!

—Pharoah Ptolemy II, whose gout and excessive wealth and power made him miserable, made this remark while looking out the window and seeing a beggar lying lazily in the sun. Source: —Durant, Will. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Page 586.

The dictator’s life was ended not by any of the assassins whom he feared, but by his own poetry. In 367 his tragedy, The Ransom of Hector, received first prize at the Athenian Lenaea. Dionysius was so pleased that he feasted with his friends, drank much wine, fell into a fever, and died.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 19: Philip. Page 473.

—Aurelius, Marcus (121 AD – 180 AD). The Emperor’s Handbook. A new translation of Meditations. Book 6. 52.

The world is a strange place and the number of happy people very small.

—Catherine the Great

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.

—Bertrand Russell

As Rick Hanson, author of The Buddha’s Brain, says, “our brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.” We tend to take the positive for granted while focusing on the negative as if our life depended on it.

—Neff, Kristin (2011-04-19). Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind (p. 111). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

—Bertrand Russell

Moreover, those respondents who had most strongly feared they were going to die in the earthquake were also most likely to indicate a shift from extrinsic to intrinsic goals…People who pursue intrinsic goals have more success in heading off anxiety associated with death than those who chase material things…The elders who reported having fulfilled more of their intrinsic goals were the least anxious about death and most satisfied with their life. In contrast, respondents who reported the greatest attainment of extrinsic goals indicated the most despair and the least acceptance of death…Intrinsic life goals and the creation of meaning appear to be central to coping with our mortality…members of the group focused on meaning in life showed substantial increases in their scores on measures of meaning, peace and faith, along with decreases in anxiety and desire for death. The members of the group focused on social support showed no statistically significant changes.

—Wielderman, Micheal W. July/August, 2012. “Mortal Thoughts.” Scientific American Mind.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people’s, of course, but chiefly our own.

—John Maynard Keynes remarking on the philosophy of G. E. Moore. Sylvia Nasar. Grand Pursuit. 2011. Page 239.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature.

DUBNER: Stumbling on Happiness was published in 2006.

DUBNER: You write quite explicitly in the beginning of the book that Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book. This is not a guide to being happy, right? But I’m curious: do many people still read it looking for some kind of a happiness formula?

GILBERT: Well I assume they do, and that’s probably the source of any bad reviews– is people who are horribly disappointed because they expected one thing and got the other. On the other hand, I get a lot of email from people who say, “I know this wasn’t meant to be a guide about happiness. But by understanding more about how my mind works, it indeed has helped me achieve greater happiness and fulfillment in my life.” So I’m delighted that happens even though that wasn’t my intention.

DUBNER: Okay, so ignoring that the book is not meant to be any kind of prescription for happiness, if someone does want to learn a shortcut or two for being happy, I’m curious what you tell people, because surely you get asked that.

GILBERT: Look, the answer to your question, what are the shortcuts, could fill many books. And it does. But if you asked me to stand on one leg and say in just a sentence what’s the single–

DUBNER: Like Hillel.

GILBERT: Like Rabbi Hillel, what’s the single, dominating factor in human happiness? I would pull up my leg and say, “We’re a social creature: care about and be interactive with other human beings.”

—Transcript of Freakonomics podcast: “How to Make a Smart TV Add.” August 20, 2015. Dan Gilbert is a psychologist and author of Stumbling Upon Happiness.

...an astounding 50 percent of the differences among people’s happiness levels can be accounted for by their genetically determined set points...Perhaps the most counter-intuitive finding is that as the chart shows, only about 10 percent of the variance in our happiness levels is explained by differences in life circumstances or situations...our pie chart illustrates the potential of the 40 percent that is within our ability to control, the 40 percent for room to maneuver, for opportunities to increase or decrease our happiness levels through what we do in our daily lives and how we think. This is terrific news. It means that all of us could be a great deal happier if we scrutinized carefully what precise behaviors and thoughts very happy people naturally and habitually engage in.

—Sonja Lyubomirsky. 2008. The How of Happiness. Pages 20-22. The Penguin Press: NY, NY.

"...But damn your happiness! So long as life's full, it doesn't matter whether it's happy or not. I'm afraid your happiness would bore me."
—Jane Smily, in A Thousand Acres

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be.
—John Stuart Mill

When I have been contemplating the happiness of my own situation respecting temporals, and comparing it with those of inferior classes, I have felt my heart touched with compassion. But when, on the other hand, I have looked at the situation of those much above me, and considered how unhappy they would think themselves if reduced to mine, it has led me to the conclusion that there is a more equal distribution of happiness than one might, at a casual glance, imagine.

—Margaret Woods, 1818. Quoted in: Cargill, Larry. 1986. Page 33. Daily Readings from Quaker Writings Ancient & Modern.

Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.
—G.K. Chesteron

Happiness is a maybe, but can always be found in Magpie nest.

—French proverb. Note that Magpies build the nest high above ground, usually out of reach. Quoted in: Paterson, Isabel. 1917. The Magpie’s Nest. New York: John Lane Company.

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

Happiness is like Coke - something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.
—Aldous Huxley

Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, to many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies. We cannot dispense with auxiliary constructions, as Theodor Fontane said. There are perhaps three of these means: powerful diversions of interest, which lead us to care little about our misery; substitutive gratifications, which lessen it; and intoxicating substances which make us insensitive to it. Something of this kind is indispensable.

—Sigmend Freud in Civilization and its Discontents

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, or worn. It is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, compassion, and gratitude.

—Bradley, Robert. A student of mine in 2013.

All men, brother Gallio, wish to live happily, but are dull at perceiving exactly what it is that makes life happy: and so far is it from being easy to attain happiness that the more eagerly a man struggles to reach it the further he departs from it, if he takes the wrong road; for, since this leads in the opposite direction, his very swiftness carries him away.

—Seneca in On a Happy Life.

When we are considering a happy life, you cannot answer me as though after a division of the House, “This view has most supporters,” because for that very reason it is the worse of the two. Matters do not stand so well with mankind that the majority should prefer the better course: the more people do a thing the worse it is likely to be.

—Seneca in On a Happy Life

…how far more endurable what I have feared seems to be than what I have lusted after.

—Seneca in On a Happy Life

For no one can be styled happy who is beyond the influence of truth, and consequently, a happy life is unchangeable, and is founded upon a true and trustworthy discernment—for the mind is uncontaminated and freed from all evils only when it is able to escape not merely from wounds but also from scratches, when it will always be able to maintain the position which it has taken up, and defense it even against the angry assaults of fortune…what mortal that retains any traces of human origin would wish to be tickled day and night, and, neglecting his mind, to devote himself to bodily enjoyments?

—Seneca in On a Happy Life

Add to this, that pleasure visits the basest lives, but virtue cannot co-exist with an evil life; yet some unhappy people are not without pleasure, nay, it is owing to pleasure itself that they are unhappy, and this could not take place if pleasure had any connection with virtue…

—Seneca in On a Happy Life

Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.

—Bertrand Russell

Courage, Virtue, Tranquility, and Inspiration

I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

—Henri Bergson. 1937. Speech at the Descartes Conference in Paris.

When is it ever wrong to do the right thing?

—Holzricher, James [guest], a whistleblower of corporate misconduct. September 4, 2013. â€œThe Cost of Truth.â€ The Story. Phoebe Judge [producer]. Dick Gorden [host].

Live for yourself and your fellow creature. I [nature] approve of your pleasures while they injure neither you nor others, whom I have rendered necessary to your happiness â€¦ Be just, since your goodness will attract every heart to you. Be indulgent, since you live among beings weak like yourself. Be modest, as your pride will hurt the self-love of everyone around you. Pardon injuries, do good to him who injures you, that you may â€¦ gain his friendship. Be moderate, temperate, and chaste, since lechery, intemperance, and excess will destroy you and make you contemptible.

—Dâ€™Holback. Source: Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part IX. The Age of Voltaire. Page 706.

When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune.

—Spinoza, Baruch de. Quoted in: Ayan, Steve. January/February 2015. â€œAnd Live Happily Ever After.â€ Scientific American Mind. Page 49.

Letâ€™s make our mistakes slowly.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, as quoted in David Brooksâ€™ The Road to Character

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

—Anne Frank

If everything seems under control, you aren't moving fast enough.

—Mario Andretti

Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world, as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Gandhi, Mahatma. Quoted in: Effendi, Rena and Tom Oâ€™Neill. July 2015. â€œIn the Footsteps of Gandhi.â€ National Geographic.

Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

You should, I need hardly say, live in such a way that there is nothing which you could not as easily tell your enemy as keep to yourself.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC â€“65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 35.

That wonderful, and now almost extinct Christian community, the Shakers, has an old expression that nicely reflects the wisdom of redirecting attention. Their motto is: hands to work, and hearts to God.

—Muesse, Mark. Chapter 9. Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

You ask me to say what you should consider it particularly important to avoid. My answer is this: a mass crowd. â€¦ there is not one of them that will make some vice or other attractive to us.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC â€“65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 41.

It is difficulties which show what men are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. For what purpose? you may say. Why, that you may become an Olympic conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat.

—Epictetus (55-135 AD). Discourses and Selected Writings. Translated by George Long.

Being fearless, undaunted, and bold—these are the products of courage. And how else could these become someone“s qualities more effectively than if he would become firmly convinced that death and pain are not evils? For death and pain are things which derange and frighten those who have been convinced that they are evils. Philosophy alone teaches that they are not evils.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD)

Why do you stand there? What are you looking for? Do you expect the god himself to come and speak to you? Cut out the dead part of your soul, and you will recognize the god.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD)

The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.

—Ralph Sockman

What is it to bear a fever well? Not to blame god or man; not to be afflicted at that which happens, to expect death well and nobly, to do what must be done: when the physician comes in, not to be frightened at what he says; nor I'd he says you are doing well, to be overjoyed.

—Epictetus. 108 AD. The Discourses.

Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

—Beethoven

The uninitiated imagine that one must await inspiration in order to create. That is a mistake. I am far from saying that there is no such thing as inspiration; quite the opposite. It is found as a driving force in every kind of human activity, and is in no wise peculiar to artists. But that force is only brought into action by an effort, and that effort is work

—Igor Stravinsky in An Autobiography

When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrongâ€” or absolutely right.

—Albert Guinon

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

—Walter Bagehot (English economist and journalist; 1826-1877)

I have not yet begun to fight.

—John Paul Jones, father of the American Navy, in response to a British captain asking if he surrendered.

There is a time in every manâ€™s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance

Wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.

—Palmer, Parker J. 2015. The Quaker Tradition: Broken into Wholeness. Keynote Address at 2015 Gathering of Friends General Conference at Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina (July 9, 2015).

They adapted themselves to a circumstance like melting ice.

—Lao Tzu. Tao The Ching. 15.

Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.

—Epictetus. Discourses and Selected Writings. VIII.

The secret to having it all is knowing that you already do.

—Unknown. From The Art of Ancient Knowledge Facebook page

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.

—Eckhart Tolle.

I am a soldier, and am unable to weep or to exclaim on fortuneâ€™s fickleness.

—Shakespeare in Henry VI

To love only what happens, what was destined. No greater harmony.

—Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. 7:57

It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.

—Charlotte Bronte. 1947. Quoted in Laphamâ€™s Quarterly. IX:3. Summer 2016. Page 30.

Beware good luck: fattening hogs think themselves fortunate.

—German proverb.

I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

—Henri Bergson. 1937. Speech at the Descartes Conference in Paris.

When is it ever wrong to do the right thing?

—Holzricher, James [guest], a whistleblower of corporate misconduct. September 4, 2013. “The Cost of Truth.” The Story. Phoebe Judge [producer]. Dick Gorden [host].

Live for yourself and your fellow creature. I [nature] approve of your pleasures while they injure neither you nor others, whom I have rendered necessary to your happiness … Be just, since your goodness will attract every heart to you. Be indulgent, since you live among beings weak like yourself. Be modest, as your pride will hurt the self-love of everyone around you. Pardon injuries, do good to him who injures you, that you may … gain his friendship. Be moderate, temperate, and chaste, since lechery, intemperance, and excess will destroy you and make you contemptible.

—D’Holback. Source: Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part IX. The Age of Voltaire. Page 706.

This is a moment of suffering.

Suffering is a part of life.

May I be kind to myself in this moment.

May I give myself the compassion I need.

—Neff, Kristin. 2011. Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind. HarperCollins e-books.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

—Aldous Huxley, 1929. Quoted in: Lapham’s Quarterly. Food. Summer 2011. “The Midas Touch.” Page 20.

It belittles us to think of our daily tasks as small things, and if we continue to do so, it will in time make us small. It will narrow our horizon and make of our work just drudgery.

—Laura Ingalls Wilder from her newspaper column As a Farm Woman Thinks. 1923. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. Summer 2011. Page 101.

My dream—my fantasy—is that one day in the future everyone on the planet will stop at noon and say, ‘Peace and Love’.

—Ringo Starr in Rolling Stone. August 10, 2017. Page 30.

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

—Ralph Ellison, 1952. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. Spring 2016. Page 21

When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune.

—Spinoza, Baruch de. Quoted in: Ayan, Steve. January/February 2015. “And Live Happily Ever After.” Scientific American Mind. Page 49.

Cease to hope and you will cease to fear.

—Hector, a Stoic writer, quoted in: Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 40.

For about 10 years I’ve suffered from primary progressive multiple sclerosis. This is not the form of MS that you read about in optimistic articles. It is relentless, and it doesn’t go into remission or on vacation. It concentrates on the limbs and rarely affects the brain. There’s no treatment. However, I’m not in pain and I’m not in Syria. I can read; I breathe without assistance. I can talk and think. This is a picnic. It may not always be thus.

—Weller, Anthony. April 10, 2015. “Paralyzed From the Neck Down.” The Wall Street Journal. A13.

If he does that, he would be the greatest man in the world.

—King George III of Great Britain, when it was suggested that George Washington retire when the Revolutionary War ended (which he did).

There are two kinds of people in the world: Givers and Takers. The takers may eat better, but the givers sleep better.

—Marlo Thomas

Let’s make our mistakes slowly.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, as quoted in David Brooks’ The Road to Character.

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

—Anne Frank

My son, I commend thee to the most high God … Do his will, for that way lies peace. Abstain from shedding blood … for blood that is spilt never sleeps. Seek to win the hearts of thy people, and watch over their prosperity; for it is to secure their happiness that thou art appointed by God and me. Try to gain the hearts of thy ministers, nobles, an demirs. If I have become great it is because I have won men’s hearts by kindness and gentleness.

—Saladin’s death-bed instructions to his son in 1193. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 602. Refers to feudalism in the High Middle Ages.

Even fools seem smart when they are quiet.

—Proverbs 17:28

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.

—Randy Pausch. The Last Lecture.

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

—Gandhi, Mahatma. Quoted in: Effendi, Rena and Tom O’Neill. July 2015. “In the Footsteps of Gandhi.” National Geographic.

If everything seems under control, you aren't moving fast enough.
—Mario Andretti

There’s no starting over, no new beginnings—time races on

You just, gotta keep on keepin on

—First Aid Kit. “My Silver Lining.” Stay Gold [album]. June 10, 2013.

If you put up with the crimes of a friend, you make them your own.

—Roman proverb in classical antiquity.

There are two kinds of people in the world: givers and takers. The takers may eat better, but the givers sleep better.

—Marlo Thomas.

Others are affected by what I am, and say, and do. So that a single act of mine may spread and spread in widening circles, through a nation or humanity. Through my vice I intensify the taint of vice throughout the universe. Through my misery I make multitudes sad. On the other hand, every development of my virtue makes me an ampler blessing to my race. Every new truth that I gain makes me a brighter light to humanity.

—William Ellery Channing. The Father’s Love for Persons.

Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world, as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Gandhi, Mahatma. Quoted in: Effendi, Rena and Tom O’Neill. July 2015. “In the Footsteps of Gandhi.” National Geographic.

Let man be noble,

Helpful and good.

For that alone

Marks him off

From all beings

That we know ….

Quite unfeeling

Is Nature:

The sun shines

Upon the base and the good;

And upon the lawbreaker

Gleam, as upon the best,

The moon and the stars.

Winds and streams,

Thunder and hail,

Roar on their way,

And snatch up

And sweep before them

One after another ….

By eternal, ironclad

Great laws

Must we all,

Of all existence,

Fulfill the round.

But man alone

Can do the impossible;

He distinguishes,

Chooses, and judges;

He can to the fleeting moment

Give duration.

He alone can

Reward the good,

Punish the bad,

Heal and save.

And to the erring and straying

Bring wise counsel.

Let the noble man

Be helpful and good.

—Goethe in Wanderjahre

Each day, too, acquire something which will help you to face poverty, or death, and other ills as well. After running over a lot of different thoughts, pick out one to be digested thoroughly that day.

—Seneca. Quoted in: Campbell, Robin. 2004. Seneca: Letters from a Stoic. Introduction. Penguin Books: NY, NY. Page 18..

Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

You should, I need hardly say, live in such a way that there is nothing which you could not as easily tell your enemy as keep to yourself.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 35.

Perhaps the hardest part of meditation practice is facing your own mind. Being alone with your own thoughts can be terrifying, which is why many people avoid it at all costs.

—Muesse, Mark. “Chapter 3: Expectations—Relinquishing Preconceptions.” Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

Breathing also reminds us of our collective dependence on our fellow human beings. [A] great 20^th century physicist mathematically demonstrated that with each breath we inhale at least one molecule breathed by virtually every human being—indeed, every living being, human or not—who has ever lived.

—Muesse, Mark. “Chapter 6: Breathing—Finding a Focus For Attention.” Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

One way to reduce our suffering, then, is to align our minds with reality. Believing that pain shouldn’t happen to us is delusional. It’s inconsistent with the nature of the world. When pain makes its appearance, it does us not good to protest or panic. We’re better served by simply accepting its advent.

—Muesse, Mark. Chapter 7. Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

You may be familiar with the old tell, claimed by both Sufi and Jewish traditions of an ancient king who asked his wise-men to construct a single sentence that would sober him when he was happy and would cheer him when he was sad. The expression they offered him was: this, too, shall pass.

—Muesse, Mark. Chapter 9. Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.

—Ran, Dass.

‘What progress have I made? I am beginning to be my own friend.’ That is progress indeed. Such a person will never be alone, and you may be sure he is a friend to all.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 40.

You ask me to say what you should consider it particularly important to avoid. My answer is this: a mass crowd. … there is not one of them that will make some vice or other attractive to us.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 41.

It’s normal to feel pain in your hands and feed, if you’re using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal—if he’s living a normal human life. And if it’s normal, how can it be bad?

Marcus Aurelius in Meditations. 6:33

… if you wish to be loved, love.

—Hector quoted by Seneca in: Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 49.

If you pray a thing may

And it does come your way

Tis a long way from being your own.

—Publilus, quoted by: Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 47.

But you have your choices.

And these are what make man great,

his ladder to the stars.

—Mumford & Sons.

I think he knows where he stands, and I don't think he's going to make any very large plans. He's a pompous, unimpressive little fellow, and he would be of no account at all—if only he didn't have some right to the use of that name. That alone won't get him very far, but it has proved annoying.

—Mark Antony, in a letter to a friend regarding Caius Octavius Thurinus, who later became Caius Julius Caeser, and even later become Augustus. From: Boye, Brendan. August 15, 2014. “The Truths of History.” The Wall Street Journal. C7.

"I shall advance," he said, "till He, the invisible God who marches before me, thinks proper to stop."

—Durant, Will, quoting Constantine the Great on his growing empire. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 4.

A demographer calculates that 93 percent of all the human beings who ever existed on Earth—more than 100 billion people—have vanished before us.

—Salopek, Paul. December 2013. “Out of Eden.” National Geographic.

If there’s any message I’m trying to send to younger people, it’s the songs. You gotta do the work. I’m asked, “How did you write so many songs?” I was just trying to write another one. Then you look up, and there’s a lot of them.

—Tom Petty, quoted in: Fricke, David. August 14, 2014. “Tom Petty’s Rock & Roll Refuge.” Rolling Stone. Pages 44-47, 66.

Ah my friend, if you and I could escape this fray

And live forever, never a trace of age, immortal,

I would never fight on the front lines again

Or command you to the field where men win fame.

But now, as it is, the fates of death await us,

Thousands poised to strike, and not a man alive

Can flee them or escape—so in we go for attack!

Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves!

—Sarpedon in The Iliad. Book 12.374-381. Translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics.

—Epictetus (55-135 AD). Discourses and Selected Writings. Translated by George Long.

Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 33.

Nothing in excess (motto inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, attributed to Solon).

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 118.

You’re only as tall as your heart will let you be / And you’re only as small as the world will make you seem.

—Never Shout Never [band / musician]. “On the Brightside.” The Summer EP.

Being fearless, undaunted, and bold--these are the products of courage. And how else could these become someone's qualities more effectively than if he would become firmly convinced that death and pain are not evils? For death and pain are things which derange and frighten those who have been convinced that they are evils. Philosophy alone teaches that they are not evils.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

It is not possible to live well today unless you treat it as your last day.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in the pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

Why do you stand there? What are you looking for? Do you expect the god himself to come and speak to you? Cut out the dead part of your soul, and you will recognize the god.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

Bad luck borne nobly is good luck.

—Aurelius, Marcus (121 AD – 180 AD). The Emperor’s Handbook. A new translation of Meditations.

In the end, what would you gain from everlasting remembrance? Absolutely nothing. So what is left worth living for? This alone: justice in thought, goodness in action, speech that cannot deceive, and a disposition glad of whatever comes, welcoming it as necessary as familiar, as flowing from the same source and fountain of yourself.

—Aurelius, Marcus (121 AD – 180 AD). The Emperor’s Handbook. A new translation of Meditations.

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing.

It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

—Confucius

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despaire, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

—John Stuart Mill in 1828. Source: Shermer, Michael. October 5-6, 2013. “Menace to the Planet?” The Wall Street Journal. C10.

I’ve never had any shame in quitting. I’ve quit economic theory, I’ve quit macroeconomics—I’ve pretty much quit everything that I’m bad at....If I were to say one of the single best explanations for how I managed to succeed against all odds in the field of economics: it was by being a quitter. Ever since the beginning, my mantra has been: fail quickly. If I started with 100 ideas, I’m lucky if two or three of those ideas will ever turn into academic papers. One of my great skills as an economist has been to recognize the need to fail quickly and the willingness to jettison a project as soon as I realize its likely to fail.

—Steven Levitt

in Freakonomics Podcast. Episode: the upside of quitting. September 29, 2011.

Anyone who recalls how often he’s been falsely suspected, how many of his own appropriate actions bad luck has made look like wrongs, how many people he came to like after hating them, will be able to avoid becoming angry instantly, at least if he says to himself, each time he’s offended, “I myself have made this mistake also.”

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). On Anger. From Anger, Mercy, Revenge. 2010. The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Robert A. Kaster.

I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking the time to plant some.
—Herbert Rappaport

It’s better to feel pain, then never feel at all. The opposite of love’s indifference.

—The Lumineers. Stubborn Love [song].

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

—Blaise Pascal. Quoted from: Hagan, Steve. 2007. Meditation: Now or Never. Harper One: NY, NY.

To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quite, still; but if I think I am going to achieve stillness at some future date, I have destroyed the possibility of stillness. It is now or never.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'
—Sam Levenson

The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.
—Ralph Sockman

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
—James Branch

Is there not modesty, fidelity, justice? Show yourself superior in these, that you may be superior as a man.

—Epictetus. 108 AD. The Discourses.

Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

—Beethoven

—Igor Stravinsky in An Autobiography

For no one is worthy of a god unless he has paid no heed to riches.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter XVIII. Penguin Classics. Page 69.

When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong— or absolutely right.
—Albert Guinon

To change one's life, start immediately, do it flamboyantly, no exceptions.
—William James

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
—Arthur Schopenhauer

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
—Emily Dickinson

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
—Walter Bagehot (English economist and journalist; 1826-1877)

I have not yet begun to fight.
—John Paul Jones, father of the American Navy, in response to a British captain asking if he surrendered.

All genius is heterogeneous; a great man is a sum of many men;—let the soul give its selves a voice, and it will speak in dialogue.

—Durant, Will. 1917. Philosophy and the Social Problem. The Macmillan Company.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance

Suppose someone becomes angry with you. You, by contrast, should challenge him to match you in kindness.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). On Anger. From Anger, Mercy, Revenge. 2010. The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Robert A. Kaster.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance

You’re imaginary, you’re not real.

—Fiona Apple to an audience, trying to control her anxieties. Rolling Stone. April 12, 2012. P. 5

…God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance

…it is our nature to be unconstrained by nature.

—Sapolsky, Robert M. September 2012. “Super Humanity.” Scientific American.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron strong.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance

If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side—the permitted side—not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinions. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance

…strength of body is nobility only in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in man.

—Democritus (460-370 BC). Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Chapter 16: The Conflict of Philosophy and Religion. Page 354.

I’m spending the morning waiting for my car in the repair shop. Four men in flannel (I missed the flannel memo) and I sit around smelling tires and inhaling exhaust fumes while an enchanting little fairy is in constant motion around her daddy. She climbs on him, giggles, turns around, and then she’s back to twirling on the tile.

She’s bouncing and spinning around in her pink frilly skirt. Her black cable knit tights are sagging around her tiny knees, and her puffy coat makes her arms stand out further than is natural. To top off the ensemble is a shiny crystal tiara. It’s been tacked down to her head with what appears to be about 60 haphazard bobby pins.

She’s probably four years old. So little, so vulnerable. She doesn’t seem concerned about it as she sings about teapots and ladybugs in her black Mary Janes. I feel myself tear up as I watch her. I tear up as I watch him watch her. She could not possibly know at four what impact this man, his character, or his words will have on her for years to come. And, maybe he doesn’t know either.

So, to all the daddies with little girls who aren’t old enough yet to ask for what they need from you, here is what we wish you knew:

1. How you love me is how I will love myself.

2. Ask how I am feeling and listen to my answer, I need to know you value me before I can understand my true value.

3. I learn how I should be treated by how you treat my mom, whether you are married to her or not.

4. If you are angry with me, I feel it even if I don’t understand it, so talk to me.

5. Every time you show grace to me or someone else, I learn to trust God a little more.

6. I need to experience your nurturing physical strength, so I learn to trust the physicality of men.

7. Please don’t talk about sex like a teenage boy, or I think it’s something dirty.

8. When your tone is gentle, I understand what you are saying much better.

9. How you talk about female bodies when you’re ‘just joking’ is what I believe about my own.

10. How you handle my heart, is how I will allow it to be handled by others.

11. If you encourage me to find what brings joy, I will always seek it.

12. If you teach me what safe feels like when I’m with you, I will know better how to guard myself from men who are not.

13. Teach me a love of art, science, and nature, and I will learn that intellect matters more than dress size.

14. Let me say exactly what I want even if it’s wrong or silly, because I need to know having a strong voice is acceptable to you.

15. When I get older, if you seem afraid of my changing body, I will believe something is wrong with it.

16. If you understand contentment for yourself, so will I.

17. When I ask you to let go, please remain available; I will always come back and need you if you do.

18. If you demonstrate tenderness, I learn to embrace my own vulnerability rather than fear it.

19. When you let me help fix the car and paint the house, I will believe I can do anything a boy can do.

20. When you protect my femininity, I learn everything about me is worthy of protecting.

21. How you treat our dog when you think I’m not watching tells me more about you than does just about anything else.

22. Don’t let money be everything, or I learn not to respect it or you.

23. Hug, hold, and kiss me in all the ways a daddy does that are right and good and pure. I need it so much to understand healthy touch.

24. Please don’t lie, because I believe what you say.

25. Don’t avoid hard conversations, because it makes me believe I’m not worth fighting for.

It’s pretty simple, really. Little girls just love their daddies. They each think their daddy hung the moon. Once in a while when you look at your little gal twirling in her frilly skirt, remember she’ll be grown one day. What do you want her to know about men, life, herself, love? What you do and say now matters for a lifetime. Daddies, never underestimate the impact of your words or deeds on your daughters, no matter their age.

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WHAT LITTLE GIRLS WISH DADDIES KNEW

December 14, 2013 by taralee73 — 131 Comments ↓

http://tarahedman.com/girls-daddies-knew/

Love and relationships

THE CIVIL WARS LYRICS

"Poison & Wine"

You only know what I want you to

I know everything you don't want me to

Oh your mouth is poison, your mouth is wine

You think your dreams are the same as mine

Oh I don't love you but I always will

I always will

I wish you'd hold me when I turn my back

The less I give the more I get back

Oh your hands can heal, your hands can bruise

I don't have a choice but I'd still choose you

Oh I don't love you but I always will [x7]

I always will [x5]

"Is there, my love, anything in the world left you to desire?" "Yes," he said," Habiba." The dutiful wife sent for Habiba, presented her to Yezid, and retired into the obscurity of the harem. One day, feasting with Habiba, Yezid playfully through a grape pit into her mouth; choked her, and she die in his arms. A week later Yezid died of grief.

--Will Durant On the deep love Yezid II (717-724), one of the Umayyad caliphates, had for the slave girl Habiba. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 195.

When you enter a sick man's room, bear in mind your manner of sitting, reserve, arrangement of dress, decisive utterance, brevity of speech, composure, bedside manners...self-control, rebuke of disturbance, readiness to do what has to be done.

—Hippocrates

Death

I was not, I was, I am not, I care not.

—Note on a tombstone from ancient Rome. Quoted in: Durant, Will. Caesar and Christ. The Story of Civilization. Page 389

Now I need never fear hunger, need never pay rent, and am at least free from gout.

—Note on a tombstone from ancient Rome. Quoted in: Durant, Will. Caesar and Christ. The Story of Civilization. Page 389.

—Seneca in Consolation to Marcia. Seneca is referring to death, and not being excessively distressed at death.

Our minds need frequent prompting to love things on the understanding that we are sure to lose them, or rather that we are already losing them: you should treat all of fortuneâ€™s gifts as coming without a guarantee.

—Seneca in Consolation to Marcia

... imagine me coming to give you advice as you were being born: â€œYou are about to enter a city shared by gods and men, one that embraces everything, is bound by fixed, eternal laws, and ensures that the revolving heavenly bodies carry out their duties untiringly. There you will see countless stars twinkling; you will see the universe filled with the light of a single star, the sun on its daily course marking out the periods of day and night, and on its annual course demarcating summers and winters more evenly â€¦ But in that same place there will be thousands of afflictions of body and mind, wars, robberies, poisons, shipwrecks, climatic and body disorders, bitter grief for those dearest to you, and eath, which may be easy or may result from punishment and torture. Think it over and weigh up what you want: to reach the one set of experiences you must run the gauntlet of the other. You will reply that you want to live, of course â€¦ So live on the terms agreed.

—Seneca in Consolation to Marcia in Hardship and Happiness. Pages 24-26.

It is no problem being a slave if, when you grow tired of being someone elseâ€™s property, you can cross over to freedom with a single step. Life, you are dear to me, thanks to death! Think what a blessing a timely death can be, and how many people have been disadvantaged by living too long.

—Seneca in Consolation to Marcia

There are dreams that cannot be / And there are storms we cannot weather.

—Les Miserables, the musical.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC â€“65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LVI. Penguin Classics. Page 124.

No one is so ignorant as not to know that some day he must die. Nevertheless when death draws near he turns, wailing and trembling, looking for a way out. Wouldnâ€™t you think a man an utter fool if he burst into tears because he didnâ€™t live a thousand hears ago?

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC â€“65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LXXVII. Penguin Classics. Page 127.

Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

—Walt Whiman. 1855. Discourses on the Condition of the Great. Quoted in Laphamâ€™s Quarterly. IX:3. Summer 2016. Page 147.

Quaker

All my days I grew up among the sages, and I have found nothing better for a person than silence …

—Talmud. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 363.

If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidas, or an Egyptian by worshipping animals, or another man by a river or a fire, I have no anger for their divergences; only let them note, let them remember, let them love.

—Maximua, defending the use of idols in pagan worship against Christian scorn. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 10.

In whatever work you do to make a living speak the truth, act on the truth, do what is just and right in all your actions, in all your practices, in all your words, in all your buying, selling, exchanging and commercial dealings with people. Let truth be your first concern and put it into practice.

—George Fox. Truth of the Heart: An Anthology of George Fox. Selected and annotated by Rex Amber. Page 81.

Once you hear the details of a victory it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1951. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. Spring 2016. Page 86.

We can’t find out who we are until we let go of who we think we are … we need the Light within because there is darkness within where the Light needs to shine.

—Griswold, Robert. The Role of the Personal Ego in Meeting and Its Effect on Spiritual Communion.

Let us then try what love can do to heal a broken world.

—William Penn. 1693.

… there is a more equal distribution of happiness than one might, at a casual glance, imagine.

—Margaret Woods, 1818. Dailey Readings: From Quaker Writings Ancient & Modern. Edited by Linda Hill Renfer. 1988. Page 33.

Wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an

integral part of life.

—Palmer, Parker J. 2015. The Quaker Tradition: Broken into Wholeness. Keynote Address at 2015 Gathering of Friends General Conference at Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina (July 9, 2015).

Nonviolence is not a weapon of the weak. It is a weapon of the strongest and bravest.

—Gandhi, Mahatma. Quoted in: Effendi, Rena and Tom O’Neill. July 2015. “In the Footsteps of Gandhi.” National Geographic.

Individuals can resist injustice, but only in community can we do justice.

—Jim Corbett, Sanctuary as a Quaker Testimony.

We will aim for the transparency of heart; we will never manipulate each other’s consciences, or try to force other members of our Religious Society into our own scheme of things. No one will seek a procedural victory, or a formulation for faith and practice, or the advancement or postponement of a concern, which leaves someone else defeated.

—Seeger, Daniel E in 1985. Dailey Readings: From Quaker Writings Ancient & Modern. Edited by Linda Hill Renfer. 1988. Page 14.

Three years earlier, in March 1965, Doc told the White House that, no, he could not accept an invitation to a joint session of Congress where the president was introducing the Voting Rights Act. Doc had worked tirelessly for the legislation, but his heart led him to Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama. There he delivered a eulogy for Reverend James Joseph Reeb, a white man who had become a Quaker social worker in the Boston tenements before joining SCLC’s campaign. While marching for civil rights, Reeb was attacked and murdered on the streets of Selma.

Doc began the eulogy with lines from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

“And if he should die,

Take his body, and cut it into little stars.

He will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night.

“These beautiful words… so eloquently describe the radiant life of James Reeb. He entered the stage of history just thirty-eight years ago, and in the brief years that he was privileged to act on this mortal stage, he played his part exceedingly well. James Reeb was martyred in the Judeo-Christian faith that all men are brothers. His death was a result of a sensitive religious spirit. His crime was that he dared to live his faith; he placed himself alongside the disinherited black brethren of this community.…

“Naturally, we are compelled to ask the question, Who killed James Reeb? The answer is simple and rather limited, when we think of the who. He was murdered by a few, sick, demented, and misguided men who have the strange notion that you express dissent through murder. There is another haunting, poignant, desperate question we are forced to ask this afternoon.… It is the question, What killed James Reeb? When we move from the who to the what, the blame is wide and the responsibility grows.

“James Reeb was murdered by the indifference of every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows.…

“He was murdered by the irresponsibility of every politician who has moved down the path of demagoguery, who has fed his constituents the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. He was murdered by the brutality of every sheriff and law enforcement agent who practices lawlessness in the name of law. He was murdered by the timidity of a federal government that can spend millions of dollars… in South Vietnam, yet cannot protect the lives of its own citizens seeking constitutional rights. Yes, he was even murdered by the cowardice of every Negro who tacitly accepts the evil system of segregation, who stands on the sidelines in the midst of a mighty struggle for justice.

“So in his death, James Reeb says something to each of us, black and white alike—says that we must substitute courage for caution, says to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered him, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murder. His death says to us that we must work passionately, unrelentingly, to make “ the American dream a reality, so he did not die in vain.…

“So in spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not despair.”

“… We must not become bitter nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence; we must not lose faith in our white brothers who happen to be misguided. Somehow we must still believe that the most misguided among them will learn to respect the dignity and worth of all human personalities.…

“So we thank God for the life of James Reeb. We thank God for his goodness. We thank God that he was willing to lay down his life in order to redeem the soul of our nation. So I say—so Horatio said as he stood over the dead body of Hamlet—‘Good night sweet prince: may the flight of angels take thee to thy eternal rest.’”

—Excerpt From: Tavis Smiley & David Ritz. “Death of a King.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/4lFqV.l

Life is meant to be lived from a Center, a divine center. Each one of us can live such a life of amazing power and peace and serenity, of integration and confidence and simplified multiplicity, on one condition—that is, if we really want to.

—Thomas R. Kelly. 1941. From Daily Readings From Quaker Writings Ancient & Modern. Page 1.

Let us accustom ourselves to pity the faults of men, and to be truly sorry for them, and then we shall take no pleasure in publishing them.

—Wm. Crouch. From Daily Readings From Quaker Writings Ancient & Modern. Page 3.

What is primary for friends is our direct experience of the Divine … the essence of Quaker spirituality is right listening.

—Irwin Abrams. 1987. From Daily Readings From Quaker Writings Ancient & Modern. Page 3.

… people are the most tangible evidence of God’s Kingdom and most deserve our attention.

—Arthur Rifkin. 1987. From Daily Readings From Quaker Writings Ancient & Modern. Page 4.

—??????. From Daily Readings From Quaker Writings Ancient & Modern. Page ????.

[George Fox] felt a covenantal relationship with the creatures and therefore bound to consume moderately and work with the creatures responsibly. He mentions the creatures being “in their covenant,” probably referring to God’s blessing of the creatures and promise to preserve the creation.

—Gwyn, Douglas. 2014. A Sustainable Life: Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation. Quaker Press of Friends General Conference. Page xvi.

We have indeed dominated the earth and subdued it in selfish, exploitative, and ruinous ways. But we cannot mend our ways by pretending that we are just one of the species. We have God-given abilities that increasingly dominate life on the planet, for good or for ill.

—Gwyn, Douglas. 2014. A Sustainable Life: Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation. Quaker Press of Friends General Conference. Page xvii.

We do not live a sustainable life alone. We are sustained by relationships that nourish our spirits and by communities that both encourage us and challenge us to live more faithfully into the measure of light we have been given.

—Gwyn, Douglas. 2014. A Sustainable Life: Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation. Quaker Press of Friends General Conference. Page 19.

What is it to “wait upon the Lord”? It is to put one’s entire being at the disposal of the divine mind and will. It is a readiness to be God’s witness in word and action. These traits mark Quaker worship as a prophetic spirit … Quakerism is prophetic and moral, because it has a social dimension, a concern for justice and peace.

—Gwyn, Douglas. 2014. A Sustainable Life: Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation. Quaker Press of Friends General Conference. Page 21-22.

War was then rated the highest and noblest work of kings; unwarlike rulers were despised, and three such in England’s history were deposed. If one may venture a slight anachronism, a natural death was a disgrace that no man could survive.

—Durant, Will. 1957. The Reformation. The Story of Civilization. Page 29. Refers to England in the 14^th century.

Hence the relationship of man to God is direct, and requires no intermediary; any claim of Church or priest to be a necessary medium must be repelled. In this sense all Christians are priests, and need no ordination.

—Durant, Will. 1957. The Reformation. The Story of Civilization. Page 29. Refers to the theology of Wycliff. in the 14^th century.

It is true that Quaker prophetic ministry has consistently augured for social progress. Quaker ministry has been the work of both women and men, rich and poor. Arising from their experience of prophetic worship and ministry, Friends became standard bearers for more equal relations between women and men, religious freedom, the abolition of slavery, racial justice, civil rights, prison reform, and more. They made these contributions not through great visions for the future, but through deep insight and stubborn faithfulness. Early and traditional Friends appear at last as much like conservatives as they do progressives. But they were neither. They advocated for a more just and peaceful society. But most of all, they stood still in the light, day by day, spoke truth from that place, and let the powers make their decisions in response. And some things have changed.

—Gwyn, Douglas. 2014. A Sustainable Life: Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation. Quaker Press of Friends General Conference. Page 33.

Love is his name, Love is his nature, Love is his life.

—Sarah Blackborow. 1658. A Visit to the Spirit in Prison.

Nothing is more pathetic than people who run around in circles, “delving into the things that lie beneath” and conducting investigations into the souls of the people around them, never realizing that all you have to do is to be attentive to the power inside you and worship it sincerely To worship it is to keep it from being muddied with turmoil and becoming aimless and dissatisfied with nature—divine and human. What s divine deserves our respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us. And our pity too, sometimes, for its inability to tell good from bad—as terrible a blindness as the kind that can’t tell white from black.

—Marcus Aurelius in Meditations. 2:13. A New Translation, with an Introduction, by Gregory Hayes. 2002. The Modern Library: NY, NY.

It’s because I take God so seriously that I can’t bring myself to believe in him. In that way, it’s really a sign of respect.

—Julia Sweeny. Quoted in Scientific American. January 2017. Page 19.

Quaker faith and practice is rooted in a living experience and deep understanding of Christ. But the light we may understand as Christ abides in people everywhere. Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, pagans, nontheists, atheists—all have access to this transforming, enlightening, saving presence … The more attuned we become to the light within ourselves, the more we recognize it in widening varieties of people. Our belief that the same light enlightens all kinds of people invites new friendships; it calls us to mutual respect and cooperation between women and men, different races, classes, and cultures. It prohibits us from resorting to violence—physical, verbal, emotional—to solve our conflicts.

—Gwyn, Douglas. 2014. A Sustainable Life: Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation. Quaker Press of Friends General Conference. Page 9.

In this receptive state of mind, let the real concerns of your life emerge. Ask yourself, “What is really going on in my life?” but do not try to answer the question. Let the answer come. You can be specific: “What is happening in my relationshipos, my work, my meeting, in my own heart and mind?” And more specifically still, ask: “Is there anything here that makes me feel uncomfortable, uneasy?” As we gradually become aware of these things, we are beginning to experience the light.

—Gwyn, Douglas. 2014. A Sustainable Life: Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation. Quaker Press of Friends General Conference. Page 14.

But people being strangers to the covenant of life with God, they eat and drink to make themselves wanton with the creatures, devouring them upon their own lusts, and living in all filthiness, loving foul ways and devouring the creation; and all this in the world, in the pollutions thereof, without ‘god; and therefore I was to shun all such.

—Fox, George. From his journal. Quoted in: Gwyn, Douglas. 2014. A Sustainable Life: Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation. Quaker Press of Friends General Conference. Page xv.

It controlled the prices and qualities of goods traded in by its members, and established such a reputation for integrity that the name Easterlings (men from the East), which the English gave them, was adopted by the English as meaning sterling worth, and was in this form attached to silver or pound as meaning trustworthy or real.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 618. Refers to feudalism in the High Middle Ages, and how honesty and integrity can be good for business. This story is similar to how the name Quaker Oats was not chosen because the business was owned or operated by Quakers, but because Quakers had earned such a high reputation for honesty, fair prices, and integrity, the name itself bestowed upon the product greater value.

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation…and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.

—HERMAN HESSE, Wer lieben kann ist glücklich. Über die Liebe. Neff, Kristin (2011-04-19). Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind (p. 109). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Such Sufis were distinguished only by their simplicity of life, their piety and quietism, very much like the early Quakers …

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 259. Note: Sufis are a mystic branch of Islam.

Denied access to the university and the professions, Quaker work in the world was focused on commerce. The Quaker position in favour of fixed-price trading was influential but also gained them a reputation for honesty.

—Dandelion, Pink. 2007. An Introduction to Quakerism. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. Page 79.

Scott Baker introduced the idea of a ‘commonwealth’ at his factory, whereby all those working there had a share of the decision-making and the profits, but in general Quakers have moved away from such direct involvement with industrial capitalism.

—Dandelion, Pink. 2007. An Introduction to Quakerism. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. Page 79.

The light, which light is the life in Christ,

will also show you your condition, what is in your heart;

loving it, the light will change you and purify you,

as you repent, carrying your cross.

Believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.

—John 12:36

…the heart of all mysticism is a sense of the insufficiency of a merely historical faith.

— Yungblut, John. 1974. Quakerism of the Future: Mystical, Prophetic, & Evangelical. Pamphlet 194. Pendle Hill.

The mystical faculty, whether developed or not, resides in all men and women by virtue of our shared humanity.

—Yungblut, John. 1974. Quakerism of the Future: Mystical, Prophetic, & Evangelical. Pamphlet 194. Pendle Hill.

Coming of age amidst this uncertainty was a young man from a Puritan family in Leicestershire, George Fox. Born in 1624, Fox was by his own account an unusually solemn, pious youth. He was tormented by the claims of the competing groups around him, convinced that if he made the wrong choice in faith, a just and jealous God would damn him. So he embarked on a kind of spiritual pilgrimage, seeking out both clergy and laypeople with reputations for piety, yet, as he put it, “none spoke to my condition.”

…

Fox was certain that God spoke directly to him. As he described it later: “when all my hopes . . . were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, Oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.’”

—(2011-01-25). Quaker Writings: An Anthology, 1650-1920 (Penguin Classics) . Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

By the time of George Fox’s death in 1691, Quakerism’s survival was no longer in question. In 1689, Parliament instituted religious freedom. While Quaker scruples against bearing arms, swearing oaths, and paying tithes to the established church still caused problems, Quaker worship was now legal. Second- and third-generation Friends, generally more prosperous than most of their neighbors, found themselves respectable. On (2011-01-25). Quaker Writings: An Anthology, 1650-1920 (Penguin Classics) . Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

Paradoxically, the era of quietism was also one of innovation in Quaker attempts to influence the larger world. Although war in Pennsylvania ended peace with Native Americans, Friends shifted their attention to attempting to defend Indian rights. English Friends became pioneers in humane treatment of the mentally ill. English and American Friends were at the forefront of prison reform movements. And Quakers were at the heart of the eighteenth-century antislavery movement. By 1784, Friends had ruled that no member could own a slave and that Friends who did own slaves must free them unconditionally. American Friends John Woolman and Anthony Benezet are recognized as central to eighteenth-century antislavery, while British Friends were at the heart of the movements to abolish first the slave trade in 1807 and then slavery in the British Empire in 1833. (2011-01-25). Quaker Writings: An Anthology, 1650-1920 (Penguin Classics) . Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

As evangelical Friends innovated and transformed themselves, a liberal Quaker renaissance was emerging in the late nineteenth century. It had two sources. One was the Hicksite wing of American Quakerism. While rejecting revivalism and pastors, American Hicksites were receptive to other changes, significantly relaxing the rules on dress, amusements, and marriage to non-Quakers. By the 1880s, most identified themselves as liberal Protestants and reached out to Unitarians and other religious liberals. A parallel movement began in the London yearly meeting in the 1880s. A turning point came at a conference in Manchester in 1895, after which it was clear that liberal Friends would have the upper hand. In turn, by the early twentieth century, a small but influential group of liberal American Gurneyite Friends, led by Haverford College professor Rufus Jones, had emerged. (2011-01-25). Quaker Writings: An Anthology, 1650-1920 (Penguin Classics) . Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

While differing on some issues, these liberals shared certain fundamental views about Christianity and Quakerism. They embraced modernist, critical study of the Bible. They emphasized the love and mercy of God, envisioning the death of Christ not as an atoning sacrifice but as an ultimate act of love. They became adherents of the Social Gospel, arguing that Quakerism required social activism on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged. While embracing modern life, however, they also embraced the Quaker past. (2011-01-25). Quaker Writings: An Anthology, 1650-1920 (Penguin Classics) . Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

Lao Tzu

As soon as the world regards something as beautiful,

Ugliness simultaneously becomes apparent

As soon as the world regards something as good,

Evil simultaneously becomes apparent

—Lao Tzu. Tao The Ching. 2.

The guidance of the Universal One

Of natural wholeness is therefore:

Empty your mind.

Enjoy good health.

Weaken your ambitions.

Strengthen your essense.

—Lao Tzu. Tao The Ching. 3.

Loss is not as bad as wanting more.

—Lao Tzu

Thirty spokes together make a wheel for a cart.

It is the empty space in the center

Which enables it to be used.

Mold clay into a vessel;

It is the emptiness within

That creates the usefulness of the vessel.

Cut out doors and windows in a house;

It is the empty space inside

That creates the usefulness of the house.

Thus, what we have may be something substantial,

But its usefulness lies in the unoccupied, empty space.

The substance of your body is enlivened

By maintaining the part of you that is unoccupied.

—Lao Tzu. Tao The Ching. 11.

Many words lead one nowhere.

Many pursuits in different directions

Bring only exhaustion.

Rather, embrace the subtle essence within.

—Lao Tzu. Tao The Ching. 5.

He, too, dissolves all consciousness of self

and lives as the universe

By putting himself behind others

he finds himself foremost

By not considering his own personal ends,

his personal life is accomplished

He finds himself safe, secure and preserved.

Because he does not hold a narrow concept of self,

his true nature can fully merge

with the one universal life.

—Lao Tzu. Tao The Ching. 7.

They adapted themselves to a circumstance

like melting ice.

—Lao Tzu. Tao The Ching. 15.

To know constant renewal is to have achieved clarity.

If one does not know constant self renewal

and thus acts foolishly,

disaster will soon occur.

Knowing constancy in renewing oneself,

one can extend the duration of one’s life.

If one can deeply understand the extension of life’s duration,

one is able to contain all things within oneself.

—Lao Tzu. Tao The Ching. 16.

Everyone seems so clever and self-assured,

I alone appear unlearned and original,

insistent upon a different direction

than other people pursue.

I alone value taking my sustenance

from the Mother.

—Lao Tzu. Tao The Ching. 20.

Because he does not flaunt his brightness,

he becomes enlightened.

Because he is not self-important,

he becomes illustrious.

—Lao Tzu. Tao The Ching. 22.

One of natural, integral virtue

Is good at helping all people impartially.

Thus, no one is abandoned.

Because he is good at protecting and preserving all things,

nothing is ever thrown away.

This is called “embodying the light of the subtle truth.”

—Lao Tzu. Tao The Ching. 27.

One with wholeness of virtue

has an unconditioned mind.

He regards the mind of all being

As his own mind.

He is kind to the kind.

He is also kind to the unkind,

For the subtle nature of the universe is kind.

—Lao Tzu. Tao Teh Ching. 49. Translated by Hua-Ching Ni. Seven Star Communications: Los Angeles, California. 1979.

Only by cultivating the virtue of wholeness

And by returning injury with kindness

can there be true harmony.

Therefore, one of deep virtue always gives

Without expecting gratitude.

…

Although the subtle Way of the universe

Holds no favoritism or partiality,

It always supports those who are naturally virtuous.

—Lao Tzu. Tao Teh Ching. 59. Translated by Hua-Ching Ni. Seven Star Communications: Los Angeles, California. 1979.

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

—Buddha.

Stoicism

… on the day on which he becomes proof against pleasure he also becomes proof against pain.

—Seneca. On a Happy Life.

… nothing is good except what leads to fairness, and self-control, and courage, and free will. And nothing bad except what does the opposite.

—Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. 8:1.

Five years down there at the least. I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.

—James B. Stockdale, after he was ejected from his fighter plane after being shot down in Vietnam, and floated down to his enemies, surely to be captured and tortured. From How to be a Stoic.

Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.

—Epictetus. Discourses and Selected Writings. VIII.

When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune.

—Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza. Quoted in: Ayan, Steve. January/February 2015. “And Live Happily Ever After.” Scientific American. Page 49.

The secret to having it all is knowing that you already do.

—Unknown. From The Art of Ancient Knowledge Facebook page.

If you conquer yourself, then you will conquer the world.

—Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho. Quoted in: Baumeister, Roy F. April 2015. “Conquer yourself, conquer the world.” Scientific American.

If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people’s opinions, you will never be rich.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter XVI. Penguin Classics. Page 65.

...we must not get rid of poverty, but of the opinion of poverty, and then we shall be happy.

—Epictetus. 108 AD. The Discourses.

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
—Socrates

Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don’t try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, “Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?” You’ll be embarrassed to answer.

—Marcus Aurelius. Meditations.

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.

—Eckhart Tolle.

Nothing gets us into greater troubles than our subservience to common rumour, and our habit of thinking that those things are best which are most generally received as such, of taking many counterfeits for truly good things, and of living not by reason but by imitation of others…

—Seneca in On a Happy Life

In a great crush of people, when the crowd presses upon itself, no one can fall without drawing someone else down upon him, and those who go before cause the destruction of those who follow them. You may observe the same thing in human life: no one can merely go wrong by himself, but he must become both the cause and adviser of another’s wrong doing.

—Seneca in On a Happy Life

I am a soldier, and am unable to weep or to exclaim on fortune’s fickleness.

—Shakespeare in Henry VI

Meanwhile, I follow nature, which is a point upon which every one of the Stoic philosophers are agreed: true wisdom consists in not departing from nature and in molding our conduct according to her laws and model.

—Seneca in On a Happy Life

As a prokopton I pledge to follow these precepts and rules of conduct:

I. The most important thing in my life is the practice of virtue, in order to live in accordance to nature.

“Pleasure is not the reward or the cause of virtue, but comes in addition to it; nor do we choose virtue because she gives us pleasure, but she gives us pleasure also if we choose her.” (Seneca, On the Happy Life, IX)

II. I will not be discouraged by setbacks in my practice. I will get up in the morning and try again.

“When faced with anything painful or pleasurable, anything bringing glory or disrepute, realize that the crisis is now, that the Olympics have started, and waiting is no longer an option; that the chance for progress, to keep or lose, turns on the events of a single day.” (Epictetus, Enchiridion, 51.2)

III. I will do my best to behave ethically, regardless of the popularity of my opinions and actions.

“I will do nothing because of public opinion, but everything because of conscience.” (Seneca, On the Happy Life, XX)

IV. I will be concerned for the welfare of all humanity, regardless of people’s gender, ethnicity, religion, or political persuasion.

“Labor not as one who is wretched, nor yet as one who would be pitied or admired; but direct your will to one thing only: to act or not to act as social reason requires.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IX.12)

V. I will reject nationalism and any other kind of parochial view of humanity. My creed is that of cosmopolitanism.

“I will view all lands as though they belong to me, and my own as though they belonged to all mankind.” (Seneca, On the Happy Life, XX)

VI. I will refrain to the best of my abilities from judging people’s actions, especially without forming a good opinion as to their motivations.

“Someone bathes in haste; don’t say he bathes badly, but in haste. Someone drinks a lot of wine; don’t say he drinks badly, but a lot. Until you know their reasons, how do you know that their actions are vicious?” (Epictetus, Enchiridion, 45)

VII. I will cultivate true friendships because they are important for a eudaimonic life.

“Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Speak as boldly with him as with yourself.” (Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, III.2)

VIII. I will treat everyone kindly and with respect.

“I will be agreeable with my friends, gentle and mild to my foes: I will grant pardon before I am asked for it, and will meet the wishes of honorable men half way.” (Seneca, On the Happy Life, XX)

IX. I will do my best to contribute to discourse about important matters, while at the same time avoiding to lecture people or become overbearing.

“Be silent for the most part, or, if you speak, say only what is necessary and in a few words. Talk, but rarely, if occasion calls you, but do not talk of ordinary things — of gladiators, or horse-races, or athletes, or of meats or drinks — these are topics that arise everywhere — but above all do not talk about men in blame or compliment or comparison. If you can, turn the conversation of your company by your talk to some fitting subject; but if you should chance to be isolated among strangers, be silent.” (Epictetus, Enchiridion, 33)

X. I will follow a simple, largely vegetarian diet, because it is healthy (and thus helps the practice of virtue), it has a lower impact on the environment, and it reduces needless pain and suffering in the world.

“Just as one should choose inexpensive food over expensive food, and food that is easy to obtain over food that is hard to obtain, one should choose food suitable for a human being over food that isn’t. And what is suitable for us is food from things which the earth produces: the various grains and other plants can nourish a human being quite well. Also nourishing is food from domestic animals which we don’t slaughter.” (Musonius Rufus, Lectures, 18a)

XI. I will cultivate an attitude of indifference toward material possessions.

“Whatever I may possess, I will neither hoard it greedily nor squander it recklessly.” (Seneca, On the Happy Life, XX)

XII. I will adopt a reasonably minimalist life style.

“On the whole, we can judge whether various household furnishings are good or bad by determining what it takes to acquire them, use them, and keep them safe. Things that are difficult to acquire, hard to use, or difficult to guard are inferior; things that are easy to acquire, are a pleasure to use, and are easily guarded are superior.” (Musonius Rufus, Lectures, XX.3)

XIII. I will remind myself that just as we ought to endure the blows that Fortuna delivers, so we ought to enjoy the gifts she bestows.

“It does good also to take walks out of doors, that our spirits may be raised and refreshed by the open air and fresh breeze: sometimes we gain strength by driving in a carriage, by travel, by change of air, or by social meals and a more generous allowance of wine: at times we ought to drink even to intoxication, not so as to drown, but merely to dip ourselves in wine: for wine washes away troubles and dislodges them from the depths of the mind, and acts as a remedy to sorrow as it does to some diseases.” (Seneca, On the Tranquility of Mind, XVII)

—The Stoic Pledge from Massimo at https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2017/02/27/the-stoic-pledge/

The highest good is immortal: it knows no ending, and does not admit of either satiety or regret: for a right-thinking mind never alters or becomes hateful to itself, nor do the best things ever undergo any change, but pleasure dies at the very moment when it charms us most—it has no great scope, and therefore it soon cloys and wearies us, and fades away as soon as its first impulse is over. Indeed, we cannot depend upon anything whose nature is to change.

—Seneca in On a Happy Life

To love only what happens, what was destined. No greater harmony.

—Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. 7:57.

Look at who they really are, the people whose approval you long for, and what their minds are really like. Then you won’t blame the ones who make mistakes they can’t help, and you won’t feel a need for their approval.

—Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. 7:62.

Joy for humans lies in human actions. Human actions: kindness to others, contempt for the senses, the interrogation of appearances, observation of nature and of events in nature.

—Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. 8:26.

… pain is neither unbearable nor unending, as long as you keep in mind its limits and don’t magnify them in your imagination.

—Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. 7:64.

It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.

—Charlotte Bronte. 1947. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. IX:3. Summer 2016. Page 30.

What follows from this? That you should have a double thought, like the man of whom we have spoken, and that if you act externally with men in conformity with your rank, you should recognize, by a more secret but truer thought, that you have nothing naturally superior to them. If the public thought elevates you above the generality of men, let the other humble you and hold you in a perfect equality with all mankind, for this is your natural condition.

—Blaise Pascal. 1660. Discourses on the Condition of the Great. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. IX:3. Summer 2016. Page 36.

There is not wealth enough in the whole world to satisfy gamblers.

—Somadeva. 1070. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. IX:3. Summer 2016.

Beware good luck: fattening hogs think themselves fortunate.

—German proverb.

Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

—Walt Whiman. 1855. Discourses on the Condition of the Great. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. IX:3. Summer 2016. Page 147.

This world is a zero; on its own, it’s worth nothing; joined to heaven, a great deal. Indifference to its variety constitutes good sense—the wise are never surprised. Our life is arranged like a play, everything will be sorted out in the end. Take care, then, to end it well.

—Baltasar Gracian. 1647. The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. IX:3. Summer 2016. Page 171.

In misfortune we usually regain the peace that we wree robbed of through the fear of that very misfortune.

—Marie von Ebner-Eschenback. 1880. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. IX:3. Summer 2016. Page 200.

Society

Social Harmony

Human sociability is not a historical or cultural acquisition, but something hardwired into human nature.

—Francis Fukuyama in The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.

…the reason you should do things for other people, at bottom, is selfish. There’s no real difference between selfish and selfless if you understand how the world works.

—Clinton, William Jefferson. April 8, 2013. “Bill Clinton.” The Colbert Report at the Clinton Global Initiative University Meetings. Comedy Central.

“Group selection,” he said, “brings abut virtue, and—this is an oversimplification, but—individual selection, which is competing with it, creates sin. That, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the human condition.

—Howard W. French quoting E.O. Wilson. “E.O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything.” The Atlantic. November, 2011. Pages 70-82.

Both society and conflict have existed for as long as there have been human beings, because human beings are by nature both social and competitive animals.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY. Page 25.

“Within groups, the selfish are more likely to succeed,” Wilson told me in a telephone conversation. “But in competition between groups, groups of altruists are more likely to succeed. In addition, it is clear that groups of humans proselytize other groups and accept them as allies, and that that tendency is much favored by group selection.” Taking in newcomers and forming alliances had become a fundamental human trait, he added, because “it is a good way to win.”

—Howard W. French quoting E.O. Wilson. “E.O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything.” The Atlantic. November, 2011. Pages 70-82.

Without customs and shared beliefs to breathe life into democracy and the market, we are reduced to the Darwinian struggle of atomistic and selfish actors that many on the left rightfully see as inhuman.

—Mario Vargas Llosa. November 8, 2011. “Literature and the Search for Liberty.” The Wall Street Journal. A19.

The biggest cultural predictor that you will be trusting, trustworthy, generous, fair, and so on is the extent to which you come from a market-oriented society. People from traditional societies, from tribal societies, from non- or pre-market societies, and from socialist societies are not nice.

—Brennan, Jason [interviewee]. November 2, 2014. Rob Montz Interviews Jason Brennan About Why Capitalism Is Good and Socialism Sucks. Rob Montz [interviewer]. Accessed November 7, 2014 at http://reason.com/blog/2014/11/02/rob-montz-interviews-jason-brennan-about.

Thank God that he made you so much abler, stronger, to help your brother; but take care lest your poorer brother do not someday have to help you, when you are crippled, or ill, or disabled.

—Dr. Keil of Aurora commune. 1856. Reference: Charles Nordhoff. American Utopias. 1875.

“We are as prosperous and as happy as any one; we have here all we need.”

As all work for the common good, so all are supplied from the common stores. I asked the purchasing agent about the book-keeping of the place; he replied, “As there is no trading, few accounts are needed. Much of what we raise is consumed on the place, and of what the people us no account is kept. Thus, if a family needs flour, it goes freely to the mill and gets what it requires. If butter, it goes to the store in the same way. We need only to keep account of what we sell of our own products, and of what we buy from abroad, and these accounts check each other. When we make money, we invest in land.” Further, I was told that tea, coffee, and sugar are roughly allowanced to each family.

Each family has either a house, or apartments in one of the large houses. Each has a garden patch, and keeps chickens; and every year a number of pigs are set apart for each household, according to its number. These are fed with the leavings of the table, and are fattened and killed in the winter, and salted down. Fresh beef is not commonly used. If any one needs vegetables, he can get them in the large garden. There seemed to be an abundance of good plain food everywhere.

…

In fact there is little room for poetry or for the imagination in the life of Aurora. What is not directly useful is sternly left out. There are no carpets, even in Dr. Keil’s house; no sofa or easy chairs...no books, except a Bible and hymn-book, and a few medical works; no pictures—nothing to please the taste; no pretty out-look, for the house lies somewhat low down. Such was the house of the founder and president of the community; and the other houses were neither better nor much worse. There is evidently plenty of scrubbing in-doors, plenty of plain cooking, plenty of every thing that is absolutely necessary to support life—and nothing superfluous.

—Charles Nordhoff. American Utopias. 1875. This passage concerned the Aurora commune.

When our corn is getting ripe, our young people watch with anxiety for the signal to pull roasting ears, as none dare tough them till the proper time. When the corn is fit to use, another great ceremony takes place, where feasting and returning thanks to the great spirit for giving us corn.

—Blackhawk. 1955. The Autobiography of Black Hawk.

…the human capacity for cooperation is double-edged. It is not only the foundation of social trust and peaceful living but also what makes for the most successful acts of aggression between one group and another. Like chimpanzees, though with more deadly refinement, human beings are distinguished by their ability to harness the virtues of altruism and solidarity, and the skills of rational reflection, to the end of making brutal and efficient warfare against rival groups. What modern society needs, therefore, is not more cooperation but better-directed forms of cooperation.

—Seabright, Paul. 2004. In the Company of Strangers: A Modern History of Economic Life.

In our view, the competitive edge that led to the rise of the ants as a world-dominant group is their highly developed, self-sacrificial colonial existence. It would appear that socialism really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species.

—Holldobler, Bert and Edward O. Wilson. 1994. Journal to the Ants. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.

The history of philosophy is essentially an account of the efforts great men have made to avert social disintegration by building up natural moral sanctions to take the place of the supernatural sanctions which they themselves have destroyed.

—Durant, Will. 1917. Philosophy and the Social Problem. The Macmillan Company.

Socrates proposed to prove that if a man were intelligent, he would see that those same qualities which make a man a good citizen—justice, wisdom, temperance, courage—are also the best means to individual advantage and development.

—Durant, Will. 1917. Philosophy and the Social Problem. The Macmillan Company.

TO understand Plato one must remember the Pythagorean motif: harmony is the heart of Plato’s metaphysics, of his psychological and educational theory, of his ethics and his politics. To feel such harmony as there is, and to make such harmony as may be,—that to Plato is the meaning of philosophy.

—Durant, Will. 1917. Philosophy and the Social Problem. The Macmillan Company.

—Muesse, Mark. “Chapter 6: Breathing—Finding a Focus For Attention.” Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

If there is any lesson which shines out through all the kaleidoscope of history, it is that a political system is doomed to early death if its charter offer no provision and facility for its own reform. Plasticity is king. Human ideals change, and leave nations, institutions, even gods, in their wake. “Law and order in a state are” not “the cause of every good”;[42] they are the security of goods attained, but they may be also the hindrance of goods conceived.

—Durant, Will. 1917. Philosophy and the Social Problem. The Macmillan Company.

Truth is a social value, and has its justification only in that; if untruth prove here and there of social value, then untruth is just.[45]

—Durant, Will. 1917. Philosophy and the Social Problem. The Macmillan Company.

Justice means, for politics at least, that each member of society is minding his natural business, is doing that for which he is fitted by his own natural capacity. Injustice is the encroachment of one part on another; justice is the efficient functioning of each part. Justice, then, is social coördination and harmony.

—Durant, Will. 1917. Philosophy and the Social Problem. The Macmillan Company.

History of Civilization

Climate did not draw civilization to Greece; probably it has never made a civilization anywhere.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 3.

It is as difficult to begin a civilization without robbery as it is to maintain it without slaves.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 10.

A nation is born stoic and dies epicurean.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 21.

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

—Thomas Sowell

Civilization is always older than we think; and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 27.

Few nations have been able to reach intellectual refinement and esthetic sensitivity without sacrificing so much in virility and unity that their wealth presents and irresistible temptation to impecunious barbarians. Around every Rome hover the Gauls; around every Athens some Macedon.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 470.

History does not repeat itself, save perhaps in terms of the emotions that drive human beings to behave in certain ways: love, anger, fear. And thus there are certain patterns of human behavior, but history never repeats itself in terms of events. Each event is unique, as is each era in human history, and as is each new interpretation of the past that arises within each era. Historical interpretation is always linked to specific eras. Always try…to think of history as neither a single straight line or as a circle…but instead as a spiral…We are separate from all past events and thus unique, but we are also linked to them in a multidimensional time-stream of which we are a part.

—Stoler, Mark A. 2012. The Skeptics Guide to American History [lectures]. Lecture 24. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company: Chantilly, Virgnia.

Religion

The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another.

—James, Williams. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience.

I believe that the practice of compassion and love—a genuine sense of brotherhood and sisterhood—is the universal religion. It does not matter whether you are a Buddhist or Christian, Moslem or Hindu, or whether you practice religion at all. What matters is your feelings of oneness with humankind.

—Fourteenth Dalai Lama. 2002. How to Practice The Way to a Meaningful Life. Page 12.

All religions are born in the mind of a crazy person. It is the job of reasonable people to take those nuggets of lunacy and transform them into something useful for society.

—F. Bailey Norwood

The Trump presidency has convinced me that we are living in a post-Christian America … I think the fact that so many people voted for [Donald Trump] means that there aren’t that many good Christian people left in rural America. God is gone from these people.

—Jason Isbell in Rolling Stone. August 10, 2017. Page 26.

Religions are not for separating men from one another; they are meant to bind them.

—Gandhi, Mahatma. Quoted in: Effendi, Rena and Tom O’Neill. July 2015. “In the Footsteps of Gandhi.” National Geographic.

Man is quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot, and he creates gods by the dozen.

—Michel de Montaigne 1533-1592.

In all our dealings we are not only I and you but also he or she; in other words, an agent in the eyes of the spectator, an object of judgment, including judgment made by our selves. And this too is the inescapable result of the I-You relationship. In seeing myself as a you in your eyes, I am lifted outside myself, to adopt the attitude of the spectator: and I demand the same of. You. The impartial spectator comes into being as a kind of shadow of our relation; he is “the third who walks always beside you,” in whose eyes we are both being judged. This sentiment too “overreaches” itself, and points to the horizon of our world. Nor should this surprise us. For the sense that we are judged in all our dealings is the heart of religion.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 81.

… faith is hard; and when the question “why” most troubles us, we press more firmly on the snake that wriggles underfoot.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 191.

But faith is not the same thing as religion. It is an attitude to the world, one that refuses to rest content with the contingency of nature.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 192.

Many people who might call themselves agnostics or even atheists live the life of faith, or something like it—in an attitude of openness toward meanings, recognizing the sacramental moments, and giving thanks, after their fasion, for the gift of the world. Yet they adhere to no religion. So what difference does religion make? The heart of religion is ritual, and it is a mark of religion that its rituals are meticulous.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 192.

The afterlife, conceived as a condition that succeeds death in time, is an absurdity. … Religion, as I have been considering it, does not describe the natural world but the Lebenswelt, the world of subjects, using allegories and myths in order to remind us at the deepest level of who and what we are. And God is the all-knowing subject who welcomes us as we pass into that other domain, beyond the veil of nature. … The life of prayer rescues us from the Fall, and prepares us for a death that we can meaningfully see as a redemption, since it unites us with the soul of the world.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 198.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 81.

“How happy are the astrologers!” exclaimed Guicciardini, “who are believed if they tell one truth to a hundred lies, while other people lose all credit if they tell one lie to a hundred truths.

—Durant, Will. 1953. The Renaissance. The Story of Civilization. Page 528.

Most men are harassed and buffeted by life, and crave supernatural assistance when natural forces fail them; they gratefully accepts faiths that give dignity and hope to their existence, and order and meaning to the world; they could hardly condone so patiently the careless brutalities of nature, the bloodshed and chicaneries of history, or their own tribulations and bereavements, if they could not trust that these are parts of an inscrutable but divine design. A cosmos without known cause or fate is an intellectual prison; we long to believe that the great drama has a just author and a noble end.

—Durant, Will. 1957. The Reformation. The Story of Civilization. Page 3.

Averring his inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism, [William] James, toward the close of his book, writes: “Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? Are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.

—Epstein, Joseph. September 27-28, 2014. “Human Nature and the Fruits of Faith.” Review of William James 1902 book, Varieties of Religious Experience. The Wall Street Journal. C13.

There are no living Christians today. I know this because Jesus said, “For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and will then repay every man according to his deeds. Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom,” (Matthew 16:27, 28) so if you believe in the Bible, then you believe the world has already ended. It is not only impossible that you are a living Christian today, but it is impossible that you exist.

—Anonymous

What is the difference between Noah’s flood and a school shooter?

—Anonymous

—Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood.

Historians of religion tell us that absolutely anything can become a symbol of the divine, and that such epiphanies occur in every area of psychological, economic, spiritual, and social life.

—Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood.

Yet, whenever a fundamentalist movement is attacked, either with violence or in a media campaign, it almost invariably becomes more extreme. It shows malcontents that their fear is well-grounded: the secular world is really out to destroy them.

—Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood.

Religious stories establish a secret spirit police.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 64.

Shankar Vedantam

Don's lawyer said that if members believed the angels were real, that was on them. As Don told me many years later--

Don Lowry

People believed what they wanted to believe. You cannot dissuade them. Most members believed the angels lived forever in a never-never-land called retreat. We told them they live forever. They never grew old. Does that tell you anything? Huh?

Shankar Vedantam

Wait, you're surprised that they believed you?

Don Lowry

Yeah. Yeah. And it helped them. I mean, it made them happy. So, big deal.

—From This American Life. Episode 571. “The Heart Wants What It Wants.” Don Lowry was a con-man who posed as a woman establishing a distant relationship with men through letters, in return for payment. He became a millionaire letting people believe what they wanted to believe. The “angels” here were not heavenly angels but the women corresponding to men.

I don’t think any of us deserve to go to heaven…I think the only way any of us get into heaven is God’s grace.

—Rick Warren, being interviewed by Jake Tapper on This Week (ABC). April 8, 2012.

Question from audience: … why do we need a god?

Answer from Armstrong: We probably don’t. Buddhists do fine without one. A god, again, is an example of how inept our theological thinking is. I don’t think we do need a god, but some people find it helpful. God is only a symbol of transcendence. That’s where our theology is weak. … We hear about god for the first time, very often, when we first learn about Santa Claus, and over the years our idea of Santa Claus develops … our religion gets stuck at this rather infantile level. … I think that transcendence is a fact of life, but transcendence … means something we can never describe or know.

—Armstrong, Karen. October 12, 2014. “Karen Armstrong on Religion and the History of Violence.” Intelligence Squared.

Jesus copied Pythagoras

Pythagoras (570 – 495 BC) was said to have

• been the son of the god Apollo

• his mother was called “virgin”

• said to have returned from the dead, 3 days after his death

• said to have appeared two places at once

• the ability to control waters and the wind

• the ability to walk on water

• preached that you should love your enemies

• believed that possessions got in the way of truths

• gathered disciples and lived in a communal lifestyle

Source: Mlodinow, Leonard. 2002. Euclid’s Window. Free Press.

… in Greece he became a god of wine, the nourisher and guardian of wine; he gban as a goddess of fertility, became a god of intoxication, and ended as a son of god dying to save mankind … the Titans captured him, cut his body into pieces, and boiled them in a caldron. Athena, like another Trelawney, saved the heart, and carried it to Zeus; Zeus gave it to Semele, who, impregnated with it, gave to the god a second birth under the name of Dionysus.

Mourning for Dionysus’ death, and joyful celebration of his resurrection formed the basis of a ritual extremely widespread among the Greeks. In the springtime, when the vine was bursting into blossom, Greek women went up into the hills to meet the reborn god. For two days they drank without restraint, and like our less religious bacchanalians, considered him witless who would not lose his wits. They marched in wild procession, led by the Maenads, or mad women, devoted to Dionysus; they listened tensely to the story they knew so well, of the suffering, death, and resurrection of their god; and as they drank and danced they fell into a frenzy in which all bonds were loosed. The height and center of their ceremony was to seize upon a goat, a bull, sometimes a man (seeing in them incarnations of the god); to rear the live victom to pieces in commemoration of Dionysus’ dismemberment, then to drink the blood and eat the flesh in a sacred communion whereby, as they thought, the god would enter them and possess their souls. In that divine enthusiasm they were convinced that they and the god became one in a mystic and triumphant union … and knew that now they would never die.

… the rulers of Athens tried to keep the cult at a distance, but failed; all they could do was to adopt Dionysus into Olumpus, Hellenize and humanize him … For a while they won Dionysus over to Apollo, but in the end Apollo yielded to Dionysus heir and conqueror, Christ.

…

…But through all forms the basic idea of the mysteries remained the same; as the seed is born again, so may the dead have renewed life; and not merely the dreary, shadowy existence of Hades, but a life of happiness and peace. When almost everything else in Greek religion had passed away, this consoling hope, reunited in Alexandria with that Egyptian belief in immortality from which the Greek had been derived, gave to Christianity the weapon from which to conquer the western world.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 187-188.

It was not merely that the average Greek accepted miracle stories—of Theseus rising from the dead to fight at Marathon, or of Dionysus changing water into wine: such stories appear among every people, and are part of the forgivable poetry with which imagination brightens the common life.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 195.

Superstition is one of the most stable of social phenomena; it remains almost unchanged through centuries and civilizations, not only in its bases but even in its formulas

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 197.

Mr Johnson’s own research into 186 preindustrial cultures found that moralising religious beliefs were more prevalent in larger and more complex societies; these were more likely to be policed, use money and pay taxes. Others have noticed that religious kibbutzim in Israel are thriving, whereas secular socialist ones are in decline. The fact that moralising religious beliefs are more prevalent in more complex societies does not prove that one caused the other. But the striking number and variety of examples add credence to Mr Johnson’s theory.

—The Economist. January 23, 2016. “Religion and psychology: In the hands of an angry God.” Review of book God is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human by Dominic Johnson.

Learning religion is part of human nature. Learning science is a battle against human nature.

In ancient Greece, members of the Dionysian cult would demonstrate their religious devotion by tearing apart the flesh of a live animal, and then eating it raw, believing the body of Dionysus was present in the flesh, and his blood was in the wine they drank. Scripture from this cult states, "He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood will not be made one with me, or I with him, and he shall not know salvation." This verse probably sounds family to many Christians.^(A1) The idea of food being the substance of a god has a long history. Why did they do this? Dionysus was the god of many things, including wine, ritual madness, and ecstasy. So, I guess if you want to curry the favor of Dionysus, you would get drunk and go mad.

—From one of my lectures. Quote taken from: Albala, Ken. Food: A Cultural Culinary History [lectures]. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

The findings at Gobekli Tepe suggest that we have the story backward—that it was actually the need to build a sacred site that first obliged hunter-gatherers to organize themselves as a workforce, to spend long periods of time in one place, to secure a stable food supply, and eventually to invent agriculture.

—Elif Batuman. December 19 & 26, 2011. “The Sanctuary.” The New Yorker magazine.

In spite of a hell so horrid even in description, what crowds of abandoned criminals fill our cities! … Are condemned thieves and murders either atheists or skeptics? Those wretches believe in a God … Does the most religious father, in advising his son, speak to him of a vindictive God? … His constitution destroyed by debauchery, his fortune ruined by gambling, the contempt of society—these are the motives that the father employes.

—D’Holback. Source: Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part IX. The Age of Voltaire. Page 705.

I know nothing so indecent, and so injurious to religion, as these vague declamations against reason on the part of some theologians. One would say, to hear them, that men cannot enter into the bosom of Christianity except as a flock of beasts enters a stable, and that one has to renounce commone sense to embrace our religion or to persist in it. To establish such principles, I repleat, is to reduce man to the level of the brute, and place falsehood and truth on an equal footing.

—Diderot. Source: Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part IX. The Age of Voltaire. Page 639.

But we must think of the superstitions, apocalypses, idolatery, and credulity of medieval Christians, Moslems, and Jews with the same sympathy with which we should think of their hardships, their poverty, and their griefs. The flight of thousands of mean and women from “the world, the flesh, and the Devil” into monasteries and nunneries suggests not so much their cowardice as the extreme disorder, insecurity, and violence of medieval life. It seemed obvious that the savage impulses of men could be controlled only by a supernaturally sanctioned moral code. Then, above all, the world needed a creed that would balance tribulation with hope, soften bereavement with solace, redeem the prose of toil with the poetry of belief, cancel life’s brevity with continuance, and give an inspiring and ennobling significance to a cosmic drama that might else be a meaningless and intolerable procession of souls, species, and stars stumbling one by one into an inescapable extinction.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 732.

The greatest gift of medieval faith was the upholding confidence that right would win in the end, and that every seeming victory of evil would at last be sublimated in the universal triumph of the good.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 732.

Christ was to this age no “gentle Jesus meek and milk,” but the stern avenger of every mortal sin … Many mystics claimed to have had visions of hell … Most Christians believed that all Moslems—and most Moslems [Mohammed excepted] believed that all Christians—would go to hell hell; and it was generally accepted that all “heathen” were damned.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 733-734.

Very many folk, considering the wicked life of monks and friars, nuns and secular clergy, are shaken by this; nay, oftentimes, they fail in faith, and believe in nothing higher than the roofs of their houses, not esteeming those things to be true that have been written concerning our faith, but believing them to have been written by the cozening invention of men, and not by God’s inspiration … They despise the sacraments … and hold that the soul has no existence; neither do they … fear hell nor desire heaven, but cling with all their hearts to transitory things, and resolve that this world shall be their paradise.

—St. Bernard, circa 1420. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1957. The Reformation. The Story of Civilization. Page 16.

If I could lay hold on that god who, out of a thousand men whom he has made, saves one and damns all the rest, I would tear and rend him tooth and nail as a traitor, and would spit in his face.

—A 1247 weaver of Toulouse. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 735.

The power of Christianity lay in its offering to the people faith rather than knowledge, art rather than science, beauty rather than truth. Men preferred it so.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 737.

Most Native American cultures stress that myths are not stories created by humans but truths revealed by suprahuman powers. To remind the listeners that reciting a myth is a sacred, powerful process, some storytellers preface the myths with special phrases … Words themselves are thought to have the power to reintegrate myth into today.

—Brown, Joseph Epes (with Emily Cousins). 2001. Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Tradiations. Oxford University Press. Pages 16.

From Diognetus I learned to shun trivialities; to doubt the claims of wonder-workers and wizards about spells and exorcisms…My father taught me…to avoid being superstitious toward the gods…

—Aurelius, Marcus (121 AD – 180 AD). The Emperor’s Handbook. A new translation of Meditations.

I place my conscience above any scripture. You may argue: there are evil people in the world, and perhaps even they follow their own conscience. If that is the case then scripture may be needed to prevent the evil from following their evil conscience. I don’t know. What I do know is that the only way I could become evil is if I betrayed my conscience and followed the words of apocalyptic prophets who spoke millennia ago.

—F. Bailey Norwood

More often, on the contrary, it is Religion breeds

Wickedness, and that has given rise to wrongful deeds.

—Lucretius (100 – 50 BC). The Nature of Things. Translated by A. E. Stallings. Penguin Classics.

Or here on earth whose causes they can’t fathom, they assign

The explanation for these happenings to powers divine.

—Lucretius (100 – 50 BC). The Nature of Things. Translated by A. E. Stallings. Penguin Classics.

All this for fair and favourable winds to sail the fleet along!—

So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong.

—Lucretius (100 – 50 BC). The Nature of Things. Translated by A. E. Stallings. Penguin Classics.

Wilson was particularly unsparing of organized religion, likening the Book of Revelation, for example, to the ranting of “a paranoid schizophrenic who was allowed to write down everything that came to him.”

—Howard W. French. “E.O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything.” The Atlantic. November, 2011. Pages 70-82.

The most famous legend about [Jemima Wilkinson] was that she would walk on water. A test was set up. Opponents claimed she had a platform just beneath the surface to stand on; others claimed it had been taken away by the opponents before the time of the test. At the appointed time, Wilkinson asked her supporters if they doubted her ability to walk on water. They said they did not, and with that Wilkinson felt no further need to prove her divinity and turned back from the water’s edge.

—Dandelion, Pink. 2007. An Introduction to Quakerism. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. Page 78.

The isles of science and philosophy are everywhere washed by mystic seas. Intellect narrows hope, and only the fortunate can bear it gladly. The Medieval Jews, like the Moslems and Christians, covered reality with a thousand superstitions, dramatized history with miracles and portents, crowded the air with angels and demons, practiced magical incantations and charms, frightened their children and themselves with talk of witches and ghouls, lightened the mystery of sleep with interpretations of dreams, and read esoteric secrets into ancient tomes.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 416.

Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact business together, as though they were all of the same religion, and give the name of Infidels to none but bankrupts; there the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends upon the Quaker’s word. At the breaking up of this pacific and free assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass. This man goes and is baptized in a great tub, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; that man has his son’s foreskin cut off, and causes a set of Hebrew words—to the meaning of which he himself is an utter stranger—to be mumbled over the infant; others retire to their churches, and there wait the inspiration of heaven with their hats on; and all are satisfied.

If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another’s throats; but, as there is such a multitude, they all live happy, and in peace.

—Alan Charles Kors. 2001. Voltaire and the Triumph of the Enlightenment. Lecture 4: Philosophical Letters, Part II.

If I governed a nation of Jews, I should restore the Temple of Solomon. Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

—Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, after he signed an agreement making Catholicism the major, but not the only, religion of France.

That’s the reason, in the book, that we don’t really think much about government solutions. Because these things cross borders. Temptations are everywhere. You have to somehow find ways yourself. There is certainly room for social support, and that’s an important thing. Twelve-step groups work in part because of social support. People who go to churches—I’m not religious myself, but you can’t deny the evidence that people who are religious have much better self-control, and they get that because of these rules.

—John Tierney, interviewed by Katherine Mangu-Ward in Reason, “Triumph of the Willpower,” March, 2012.

I wouldn’t have had the courage to do this on my own but since they throw me out, I go happily.

—Baruch Spinoza, it is said, made this remark after being excommunicated.

If you have a monopoly on God, you can get away with anything.
—Sabrina Rubin Erdely. “Church Sex Crimes.” Rolling Stone. September 15, 2011.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY. Page 38.

…collective action begins to break down as the size of the cooperating group increases…Religion solves this collective action problem by presenting rewards and punishments that greatly reinforce the gains from cooperation in the here and now.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY. Page 38.

Mental models and norms that help human beings cooperate and thus survive may be generated rationally, as the economists assert. But religious beliefs are never held by their adherents to be simple theories that can be discarded if proved wrong; they are held to be unconditionally true, and there are usually heavy social and psychological penalties attached to asserting their falsehood.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY. Page 38.

Actually, to become a professor or a clergy member in Europe even a hundred years following Spinoza’s death, you had to have your denunciation of him ready. That was part of the oral exam, knowing where he’d made his mistakes. And this meant that everyone was reading Spinoza; they had to read him in order to denounce him, so he was radicalizing Europe, and in about a hundred years they were ready for the Enlightenment.

—Rebecca Goldstein’s acceptance speech for the 2011 Humanist of the Year award. Published in The Humanist. November-December, 2011. Pages 12-16.

In every human society people hold beliefs and perform actions. So they must come by these beliefs in some way, and they must have some way of deciding how to act. For most people throughout history these processes are neither long nor complex, nor conscious. There are authorities that lay down what is true and what is right.

The most powerful and ubiquitous of these authorities is tradition—what anthropologist William Sumner called the “folkways,” whereby people simply think and act as their forbears did. Any departure from these patterns is viewed with suspicion; often it will be condemned as immoral.

…

A philosopher who carries on the work of Socrates is one who refuses to defer unthinkingly to any of these authorities. Why should I believe this? one asks. Why should I do that? What do you mean by that term? Where is your evidence? What is your argument? Socrates greatest legacy is to tell us that such questions are always in order.

…

When Rene Descartes, writing in 1638, championed the scientific outlook by praising those who use their own reason rather than putting their faith in old books, he was continuing Socrates’ work. The astonishing achievements of modern science are the fruits of this attitude.

—Emrys Westacott writing in The Humanist. “Will the Next Great Corrupters Please Rise?” November-December, 2011. Pages 37-38.

...being too good a Christian was at times as big a problem as not being Christian enough.
— Michael Frassetto in The Great Medieval Heretics, discussing the relationship between the Medieval Catholic Church and its laity.

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
—Sir Richard Francis Burton

I would be willing to wager that if I cared to come out and announce that I had a visit from God last night, and to devote such literary and emotional power as I possess to communicating a new revelation, I could have a temple, a university, and a million dollars within five years at the outside. And if at the end of five years I were to announce that I had played a joke on the world, some of my followers would convince the faithful that I had been an agent of God without knowing it, and that leadership had now been turned over to him.

—Upton Sinclair, from The Profits of Religion

I’ve always been of the opinion, and again I can’t prove it, because we don’t have the evidence, that in the dark age crisis, if you had prayed to the saints—to the icons in your town—and the Arabs had sacked your town, you probably would question the validity of this type of worship. On the other hand, if you were lucky to be in Thessalonica or Odessa and you had paraded your icon around and the invaders left, well then you were probably inclined to see that the icons worked. And it probably came down to such considerations for many people in dark age.

—Kenneth Harl in The World of Byzantium. Lecture 16: The Iconoclastic Controversy. Lectures published by The Teaching Company.

Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 3.

...the daily recurring phenomena, which to us, who know them to be the result of certain well-ascertained laws of nature, are so familiar as to excite no remark, were, to the early Greeks, matter of grave speculation, and not infrequently of alarm. For instance, when they heard the awful roar of thunder, and saw vivid flashes of lightning, accompanied by black clouds and torrents of rain, they believed that the great god of heaven was angry, and they trembled at his wrath. If the calm and tranquil sea became suddenly agitated and the crested billows rose mountains high, dashing furiously against the rocks, and the threatening destruction to all within within their reach, the sea-god was supposed to be in a furious rage. When they beheld the sky glowing with the hues of coming day they thought that the goddess of the dawn, with rosy fingers, was drawing aside the dark veil of night, to allow her brother, the sun-god, to enter upon his brilliant career. Thus personifying all the powers of nature, this very imaginative and highly poetical nation beheld a divinity in every tree that grew, in every stream that flowed, in the bright beams of the glorious sun, and the clear cold rays of the silvery moon; for them the whole universe lived and breathed, peopled by a thousand forms of grace and beauty.

—E. M. Berens in The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome

For if men could perceive there is a set limit to their troubles, they would, with some reason, have strength enough to resist religion and prophets’ threats. But now, since we must fear that, when we die, we will be punished for eternity, there is no means, no possibility,[110] of fighting back.

—Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. Sometime in first century, BC.

Let’s perform a mental experiment to test how culture can “make all the difference.” No fair using hindsight. Suppose that in a very backward country—call it R—the established church decides to clean up the liturgy by eliminating some old corruptions in the holy texts. A group of believers, themselves stupidly conservative in every way, rejects the new liturgy: they are not interested in the application of thought to textual criticism. Which of the following does your social theory predict? (1) The establishment is hostile to these Old Believers. (2) The Old Believers retreat into self-imposed isolation. Outcome? Either (3), the Old Believers sink into poverty and obscurity, on account of (1) and (2). Or (4), the Old Believers go on to become the dominant force in the country’s economy for the next two centuries, on account of (1) and (2).

The bizarre scenario played out in seventeenth-century Russia gives the correct answer to our quiz: (1) and (2); then not ( 3), but (4), as Alexander Gerschenkron explained in Russia in the European Mirror (1970). The example does not refute Lande’s vague hypothesis of “culture.” But it shows as difficult what he things is easy: to tell who will win. The Old Believers in Russia were the only successfully bourgeois portion of Russian society in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, except for an occasional Jew and a good mayh of what Landes calls by the Greek name “metics” (metoikoi, “people beyond the household,” noncitizen workers, in Russian mainly Germans).

There was nothing easy or inevitable about this. Some minorities do well when the establishment tries to crush them—witness the Old Believers, but also the overseas Chinese, and of course the European Jews, sometimes. But some badly treated minorities just do badly—witness Gypsies in Eastern Europe and American blacks under segregation, and European Jews, sometimes.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 39.

Religious and artistic practices, from the Owerri Igbo of Nigeria’s constructing mbari houses over years but leaving them immediately to decay as soon as the construction has ended, to Lorenzo Ghiberti’s half-century of work on Florence’s Baptistery doors, still there for all to admire more than a half millenium later, are nothing if not complex and improbable—and also, I suggest, part of the behaviors as adaptive to humans as the waggle-dance is to honeybees.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 35.

In science, however, “God did it” is not a testable hypothesis. Inquiring minds would want to know how God did it and what forces or mechanisms were employed (and “God works in mysterious ways” will not pass peer review).

—Michael Shermer. December, 2011. “Sacred Salubriousness: Why Religious Belief Is Not The Only Path To A Healthier Life.” Scientific American Mind.

People say, “What’s wrong with moderate religion?” And there are those nice folks who go to church on Sunday simply to take part in their neighborhoods. And here’s the problem with that. Moderate religion is religion where people do a little bit of cherry-picking. They take the best bits of religion and some of the more embarrassing or difficult or barbaric bits they leave to one side. Unkind people would call that hypocrisy. On the other end of the scale, however, are those who take their religion very seriously—extremists we call them. The point about the extremists is that they’re the most honest of the people who have religious views, because they commit themselves to what their tradition tells them. They stay closest to the texts. Now if that’s real religion, if that’s honest religion, the world is better off without it. And if the world is better off without the true or honest form of religion, why not put the hypocrites in with them too.

—A. C. Grayling. November 15, 2011. Intelligence Squared Debates. Motion: The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion.

Humanism also differs from all supernaturalist religions in centering its long-term aims not on the next world but on this. One of its fundamental tenets is that this world and the life in it can be improved, and that it is our duty to try and improve it, socially, culturally, and politically. The humanist goal must therefore be, not technocracy, nor theocracy, not the omnipotent and authoritarian state, nor the welfare state, nor the consumption economy, but the fulfillment society. By this I mean a society organized in such a way as to give the greatest number of people the fullest opportunities of realizing their potentialities—of achievement and enjoyment, morality and community.

—Sir Julian Huxley. January / February, 1962. “The Coming New Religion of Humanism. The Humanist.

...other studies have used twins research to examine all kinds of behaviors and attitudes...for example...suggesting that genetic factors somehow set the stage for criminal behavior. Another study found that the strength of an individual’s religious fervor was significantly shaped by heredity.

—Peter Miller. “A Thing or Two About Twins.” National Geographic. January, 2012.

—Richard Wiseman. January/February, 2012. “Wired for Weird.” Scientific American Mind.

Religions seem to know a great deal about our loneliness. Even if we believe very little of what they tell us about the afterlife or the supernatural origins of their doctrines, we can nevertheless admire their understanding of what separates us from strangers and their attempts to melt away one or two prejudices that normally prevent us from building connections with others.

—Alain de Botton. Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion as printed in The Wall Street Journal on February 18-19, 2012, Sections C1-C2.

The church does more, however, than merely declare that worldly success doesn’t matter. In a variety of ways, it enables us to imagine that we could be happy without it. Appreciating the reasons why we try to acquire status in the first place, it establishes conditions under which we can willingly surrender our attachment to it…It is the genius of the Mass to confront these fears…If the Mass has done its job and we are awake to its lessons, it should succeed by its close in shifting us at least fractionally off our accustomed egocentric axes.

—Alain de Botton. Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion as printed in The Wall Street Journal on February 18-19, 2012, Sections C1-C2.

An ancient Greek military strategist…writing three hundred years after Hannibal, made the following observation, “Soldiers are far more courageous when they believe that they are facing dangers with the good will of the gods; for they themselves are watchful, each man, and they look out keenly for omens of sight or sound, and an auspicious sacrifice for the whole army encourages even those who have private doubts
—Richard Miles in Carthage Must Be Destroyed. Chapter 10. 2011.

...Hellenistic armies apparently developed their esprit de corps based on the mystic of their leaders who could be seen as having almost supernatural powers as they were granted triumphs by the gods.
—Richard Miles in Carthage Must Be Destroyed. Chapter 10. 2011.

...the claim to divine endorsement was the key development of Hannibal’s campaign against the Romans, and certainly played to the expectations of Hannibal’s Celtic allies whose chieftans were often accompanied by bards, who eulogized their deeds in song.
—Richard Miles in Carthage Must Be Destroyed. Chapter 10. 2011.

...in the writings of the later historian Cassius Dio, “The equation between successful leadership and divine sanction is made explicit.” Dio attributes Hannibal's ability to predict future events to the fact that he understood divination by the inspection of entrails. At those critical moments when confidence in their mission had begun to ebb away from his troops, Hannibal seems to have ensured that some evidence of divine favor was presented by which the stock of Carthaginian self-belief was replenished and the troops were reminded that they were literally following in the footsteps of Heracles [or, Hercules] and his army.
—Richard Miles in Carthage Must Be Destroyed. Chapter 10. 2011.

What made Hannibal such a potent threat was not merely his military might, but the challenge that he presented to the previously successful Roman model of territorial conquest and incorporation. The relentless divine associations attributed to the Carthaginian general by his literary entourage represented something far more potent than mere self-indulgence. Hannibal was intent on setting now a clear alternative, not only to Roman political hegemony, but also to the Roman mythology by which that hegemony was justified.

—Richard Miles in Carthage Must Be Destroyed. Chapter 10. 2011.

One of the volunteers, Mike Clayton, a former preacher from Seminole, Okla., reads out of the Bible from Isaiah 61:5: "The son of the foreigner will come and tend your vines."

Then he adds: "Well, a few days ago, myself and my son got off a plane ... and I got to watch as I handed my son ... a pair of pruners, and I took a picture as he walked out there. He fulfilled scripture. ... Is the Bible true? Is all this happening? I saw it with my own eyes."

—Lourdes Garcia-Navarro . March 7, 2012. “Christians Provide Free Labor On Jewish Settlements.” All Things Considered. NPR.

"We take the Bible and we look at those things and we see that one of the exciting things for us is that prophecy of scripture is being fulfilled," Waller says.

Many evangelical Christians believe that the end of days and the coming of the Messiah will center around Israel. And they interpret the foundation of the Jewish state as biblical prophecy becoming reality.

It's a hugely emotional issue for the Christians who come. They believe it is their duty to help Jews expand their control over Judea and Samaria — the biblical names for what is now the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

—Lourdes Garcia-Navarro . March 7, 2012. “Christians Provide Free Labor On Jewish Settlements.” All Things Considered. NPR.

We humbly recognize that God may not tell his people the date when Christ will return…[there is] no new evidence pointing to another date for the end of the world…

—Eyder Peralta. March 9, 2012. “Doomsday Prophet Camping Says Predictions Were ‘Incorrect and Sinful’”. National Public Radio. Quote is from Harold Camping, after he claimed the world would end on May 21, 2011, and when he was wrong, changed the date to October 21, 2012.

The primitive man, unable to understand his being, much less the unity of all life, felt himself absolutely dependent on blind, hidden forces ever ready to mock and taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the LEIT-MOTIF of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, MAN IS NOTHING, THE POWERS ARE EVERYTHING.

—Emma Goldman in Anarchism and Other Essays.

This is no fringe phenomenon. In 2006, the Pew Foundation reported that 26% of Americans said they had had a direct revelation from God…Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life sets out to teach people how to know God as a best friend. It has sold more than 30 million copies, making it the best-selling hardback book in American history apart from the Bible…

—T. M. Luhrmann. “Houses of Worship.” The Wall Street Journal. April 6, 2012. A11.

Among renewalist evangelicals I spoke to during a decade of research, I often encountered people who felt a little foolish about this at first. As one man remarked about his first real attempt: "I thought, 'I have lost my marbles. I am actually talking to the ceiling and thinking that that will do something.'"

And yet people also report that when they pray in this way, they begin to experience God's presence in a personal way, something that is comforting and empowering. Research, including my own, shows they tend to be less stressed and less lonely than others.

—T. M. Luhrmann. “Houses of Worship.” The Wall Street Journal. April 6, 2012. A11.

Most of the more than 30 evangelical Christians interviewed by Luhrmann recalled one or a few times when they heard God’s voice or had a holy vision. But hallucinatory experiences don’t affect just the religious.

Surveys conducted over the last century find that 10 to 15 percent of U.S. and British adults report having been startled by briefly hearing a voice when alone or seeing something that could not be seen by others. About three-quarters of bereaved adults acknowledge having heard, seen or otherwise sensed their departed partners.

—Bruce Bower in Science News (April 7, 2012) discussing a book by T. M. Luhrmann called Houses of Worship.

Almost half of American adults, for example, have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lifetime, and most do so before age 24…once people enter adulthood they tend to stick with one category, retaining either faith in God or the absence thereof…

…

Recent research suggests, however, that this is not the whole story. By studying the correlations among thousands of individuals’ religious beliefs and measures of their thoughts and behaviors, scientists have discovered that certain personality types are predisposed to land on different spots of the religiosity spectrum. Genetic factors account for more than half of the variability among people on the core dimensions of their character, which implies that a person’s feelings regarding religion also contain a genetic component.

…

…religious individuals tend to display agreeable and conscientious behaviors. For example, religious people are inclined to show cooperation in laboratory experiments and to volunteer in real life. They also endorse healthy lifestyles that reflect self-control such as low alcohol, drug and tobacco use.

…

…In a way, we are born to be inclined toward religion or atheism. Does God call us? For some of us, the answer is yes: through our genes, parents, acquaintances and life events.

—Saroglou, Vassilis. May/June, 2012. “Are We Born to Be Religious?” Scientific American Mind.

Tools from the earliest Neolithic period, about 10,000 years ago, include instruments clearly designed for fighting. One might think that the influence of pacific Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, has been consistent in opposing violence. Such is not the case. Whenever Buddhism dominated and became the official ideology, war was tolerated and even pressed as part of faith-based state policy. The rational is simple, and has its mirror image in Christianity: Peace, non-violence, and brotherly love are core values, and a threat to Buddhist law and civilization is an evil that must be defeated.

—E. O. Wilson. “Is War Inevitable?” Discover Magazine. June, 2012.

—Hume, David. 1776. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

I think that evil remains an insurmountable problem for the belief that our universe is somehow governed by an omnipotent, omniscient, and beneficent creator. I think the horrors of this life shows [us] that it is not and cannot be the role of value in the universe. But I also think that’s just as well.

The picture of an omnipotent and beneficent rule of the universe is often assumed to support our notions of value. But there are many ways in which that picture is a threat for notions of value…a ruler who guided everything to the good first of all would have to manipulate our choices toward the good. That alone threatens the notion that values are that something we act upon in free choice.

Moreover, a good that is ultimately inevitable is one that one need not strive for, if God is going to make sure everything comes out right, no matter what I do, it doesn’t matter what I do. Why try for a cure for cancer, if that’s part of God’s plan, it’ll be there. If it’s not, I’d be trying to work against God. I’d be trying to make something worse by producing such a cure.

If something’s inevitable, striving for it is of no value: in the end, it’s only because everything is not guaranteed to come out right, I think that value has the value it has. To picture the universe as guided toward inevitable goodness by an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-perfect being is thus not to give it value from on high, but a way to rob it from value from below.

—Patrick Grim. 2005. Questions of Value. Lecture 16: Life’s Horrors. The Teaching Company.

A few days ago I asked why not become religious, if it will give you a better life, even if the evidence for religious beliefs is weak? Commenters eagerly declared their love of truth. Today I’ll ask: if you give up the benefits of religion, because you love far truth, why not also give up stories, to gain even more far truth? Alas, I expect that few who claim to give up religion because they love truth will also give up stories for the same reason. Why?

One obvious explanation: many of you live in subcultures where being religious is low status, but loving stories is high status. Maybe you care a lot less about far truth than you do about status.

—Robin Hanson. May 8, 2012. “Storiesd Are Like Religion.” Overcomingbias blog.

But if we tried to converse with the ancients about God, we would find a much larger chasm separating us. I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation…you can’t literally listen to to God or literally sit beside Him, but these would be strange claims indeed to the original monotheists. The Old Testament Jehovah, or Yahweh, was quite definitely a super-man (a He, not a She) who could take sides in battles, and be both jealous and wrathful.

—Daniel C. Dennett. 2006. Breaking the Spell. Viking: NY, NY.

In religion, however, the experts are not exaggerating for effect when they say they don’t understand what they are talking about. The fundamental incomprehensibility of God is insisted upon as a central tenet of faith, and the propositions in question are themselves declared to be systematically elusive to everybody.

—Daniel C. Dennett. 2006. Breaking the Spell. Viking: NY, NY.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

World religions, as we shall see, are full of this kind of ambivalence. On the one hand they are outcries against the market; on the other, they tend to frame their objections in commercial terms—as if to argue that turning human life into a series of transaction is not a very good deal. What I think even these few examples reveal, though, is how much is being papered over in the conventional accounts of the origins and history of money.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

Some lodge in the village makes a feast daily to the great spirit…everyone makes his feast as he sees best, to please the great spirit, who has the care of all beings created. Others believe in two spirits: one good and one bad, and makes feasts for the bad spirit to keep him quite. If they can make peace with him, the good spirit will not hurt them. For my part, I am of the opinion that so far as we have reason, we have a right to use it, in determining what is right or wrong, and should pursue that path which we believe to be right, believing that whatever is, is right. If the great and good spirit wished us to believe and do as the whites he could easily change our opinions, so that we would see and think and act as they do.

—Blackhawk. 1955. The Autobiography of Black Hawk.

Morality

He who dispenses charity in private is greater than Moses.

—Talmud. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 361.

Devotion to what is right is simple, devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations. It is the same with people’s characters; in those who follow nature they are straightforward and uncomplicated, and differ only in minor degree, while those that are warped are hopelessly at odds with the rest and equally at odds with themselves.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter CXXII. Penguin Classics. Page 225.

For people abstain from forbidden things far more often through feelings of inhibition when it comes to doing what is wrong than through any will to do good …

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LXXXVIII. Penguin Classics. Page 143.

—Tolstoy, Leo (1828-1910). What Is Religion, Of What Does Its Essence Consist?

You know, we deplore what happened to the elephant—it was brutal!—there’s no doubt about it; but we have to put it in context. These men—these men who ran this industry—were upstanding, moral, high-minded people who didn’t think they were doing anything wrong.

—Smith, Dick [interviewee] on the trade in elephant tusks that was once conducted in his hometown of Deep River, Connecticut. Quoted in: Joyce, Christopher. August 18, 2014. “Elephant Slaughter, African Slavery and America’s Pianos.” National Public Radio.

One of the Connecticut buyers who sailed to Zanzibar was Ernst Moore, who worked for Pratt, Read. Moore spent years in the trade, and it made him wealthy, but he grew to hate it. He wrote a book called Ivory: Scourge of Africa. Yet, says Conniff, quoting Moore's book, "He is the one who also said, 'Our lives were so crammed with our business and adventure that we were perfectly content to take what we had and make the best of it.' "

— Joyce, Christopher. August 18, 2014. “Elephant Slaughter, African Slavery and America’s Pianos.” National Public Radio.

My research indicates that a small set of innate moral intuitions guide and constrain the world’s many moralities, and one of these intuitions is that the body is a temple housing a soul within.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

If the process of the universe is inherently opposed to the ethical order, it follows that the ethical order is inherently opposed to the process of the universe. In this state of things the position of humanity would be very unfortunate.

—Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse in Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911, page 10). The Columbia University Press.

So, if we can’t get our philosophy exactly “right” it’s because we know that knowledge of the world is fallible, probabilistic, and tentative. The fallibility of our knowledge requires we admit that everything we know may actually be wrong. Accepting this requires humility and, at the same time, courage to stand up for what we best believe without dogmatism or fear of being wrong.

…

A recent study found that one of the biggest differences between social and religious liberals and their conservative counterparts is that liberals have a better ability to hold views in an ambiguous, adaptive manner.

…

...as Samuel Bulter said, “Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”

—Michael Werner writing in The Humanist. “How Humanists Get It Right.” November-December, 2011. Page 39.

I can't help feeling that if justice is observed, mercy is forever unneeded.
—Wallace Stegner, from The Angel of Repose

And yet, as Darwin knew, altruism is everywhere, a stubborn anomaly of nature. Bats feed hungry brethren; honeybees commit suicide with a sting to defend the hive; birds raise offspring that aren’t their own; humans leap onto subway tracks to save strangers. The ubiquity of such behavior suggests that kindness is not a losing life strategy.

—Jonah Lehrer. “Kin and Kind: A fight about the genetics of altruism.” The New Yorker. March 5, 2012.

Our bloody nature, it can now be argued in the context of modern biology, is ingrained because group-versus-group competition was a principal driving force that made us what we are. In prehistory, group selection (that is, the competition between tribes instead of between individuals) lifted the hominids that became territorial carnivores to heights of solidarity, to genius, to enterprise—and to fear. Each tribe knew with justification that if it was not armed and ready, its very existence was imperiled…

…

Any excuse for a real war will do, so long as it is seen as necessary to protect the tribe. The remembrance of past horrors has no effect…

…

Once a group has been split off from other groups and sufficiently dehumanized, any brutality can be justified, at any level, and at any size of the victimized group up to and including race and nation…

…

…War and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture…

—E. O. Wilson. “Is War Inevitable?” Discover Magazine. June, 2012.

…war is not a primordial biological “curse.” It is a cultural innovation, an especially vicious, persistent meme, which culture can help us transcent.

—John Horgan. “War Is Not Inevitable.” Discover Magazine. June, 2012.

… one’s life should be a compromise between the ideal and the popular morality.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 35.

Moral arguments are much the same: Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other. When you refute a person’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was made.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

…raised in a strict environment, the ancient Spartans were thought to be and in fact were the best of the Greeks, and they made their very poverty more enviable than the king of Persia's wealth.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

Being sick harms the body only; living in luxury harms both the soul and body, by making the body weak and powerless and the soul undisciplined and cowardly. Surely luxurious living fosters injustice because it also fosters greed.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

No one can acquire many things without being unjust.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

The person who lives luxuriously would also be entirely unjust, inasmuch as he would shrink from performing tasks he ought to undertake on behalf of his own city, if performing them meant abandoning his luxurious lifestyle...Because it is responsible for injustice, luxurious living must be completely avoided.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; this, in a few words, is the entire Torah; all the rest is but an elaboration of this one, central point.

—Analects of Confusius

From rape to robbery and even to theft, evolution has made violence and antisocial behavior a profitable way of life for a small minority of the population.

—Raine, Adrian [interviewee]. June 2013. “CSI, Science.” Shermer, Michael [interviewer]. Scientific American. Page 90.

“Cooperation is the fundamental principle of evolution,” Nowak says today. “Without it, you don’t get construction or complexity in life. Whenever you see something interesting, like the evolution of multicellular creatures or human language, cooperation is involved.”

—Ohlson, Kristin. December, 2012. “Cooperative Instinct.” Discover Magazine.

"Every nation, convinced that it alone knows what wisdom is, despises the folly of all the others," remarked Helvétius, one of the Enlightenment figures Mr. Pagden so admires. But it was only in free Europe that we find a passion for traveler's tales and for investigating the lives of other cultures as well as criticizing our own. At the moment when every other culture illustrated Helvétius's broad claim about insularity and close-mindedness, Europeans were curious, outward-looking and inquisitive. "Persian Letters" was a best seller in the France of 1721. Did anyone outside write a book called "French Letters"?

Mr. Pagden thinks that it is the enlightened who have taught us to behave altruistically toward distant people we have never meet. He admits that caritas is a Christian virtue but then solemnly explains to us that Christians merely practiced it so as to increase their credit with God. On the very same page we learn of Diderot's complaint that theatergoing Parisians wept over the fate of Phaedra but, as Mr. Pagden puts it, "never gave a single thought to the plight of African slaves." Mr. Pagden fails to note that William Wilberforce and his Christian supporters got the slave trade eliminated.

—Minogue, Kenneth. June 8-9, 2013. “When the Lamps Went On.” The Wall Street Journal. C6.

Ultrasociality—living in large cooperative societies in which hundreds or thousands of individuals reap the benefits of an extensive division of labor—evolved independently at least four times in the animal kingdom: among hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps); termites; naked mole rats; and humans.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

I would jump into a river to save two brothers, but not one. Or to save eight cousins but not seven.

—Comments by a drunken J. B. S. Haldane when he and his drinking buddies discovered the inclusive fitness theory. It is unclear whether he was speaking for the theory or making sarcastic comments about it. Either way, its incongruence with our intuitive morality suggests it to be a bad theory.

Jonah Lehrer. “Kin and Kind: A fight about the genetics of altruism.” The New Yorker. March 5, 2012. This is Martin Nowak describing how theoretical biologist Robert May described inclusive fitness theory.

...the logarithm of the brain size [of animal species] is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.
—Ayn Rand in Anthem

The word "We" is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.
—Ayn Rand in Anthem

—Seabright, Paul. 2004. In the Company of Strangers: A Modern History of Economic Life.

What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey.
—Ayn Rand in Anthem

Half a century later Milgram’s obedience studies still resonate. They showed that it does not take a disturbed personality to harm others. Healthy, well-adjusted people are willing to administer lethal electric shocks to another person when told to do so by an authority figure...Milgram’s subjects seemed willing to deliver shocks sufficient to kill a person simply because they were asked to do so by a gray-coat lab assistant in a science experiment...65 percent, continued administering shocks to the maximum, 450-volt level...When subjects sat in the same room as the learner and watched as he was shocked, however, the percentage of obedient teachers went down to 40..And it went below 20 percent when two other “participants”—actually actors—refused to comply...it tells us that individuals are not narrowly focused on being good followers. Instead they are more focused on doing the right thing...Evidence suggests that we enact an authority figure’s wishes only when we identify with that person and his or her goals. In essence, obedience is a consequence of effective leadership. followers do not lose their moral compass so much as choose particular authorities to guide them them the ethical dilemmas of everyday life. Obedient peopel are not mindless zombies after all.

—Stephen Reicher and Alexander Haslam. November/December 2011. “Culture Of Shock.” Scientific American Mind. Pages 57-61.

Biology rules out invariably unstinting altruism...Yet if unconditional altruism is impossible, conditional cooperation exists. But how could it establish itself?...have come to accept the need for multilevel selection theory, which rests on one key postulate: “Selfishness beats altruism within single groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.”

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 52.

...stories have multiple origins and functions, but among them not least is that they have so often discouraged defection and aided cooperation.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 64.

—Peter Miller. “A Thing or Two About Twins.” National Geographic. January, 2012.

…there is a baffling indeterminacy in history.

—Joel Mokyr. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850.

The enemy attacked us, we killed a great many of them. Now, all is quite. I could not be happier.

—Napoleon Bonaparte in a letter to his brother after killing and wounding hundreds of French citizens as they tried to reinstate the monarchy.

“This question ‘why family?’ was only the beginning. ‘Why family?’ led him to a bigger question: why does anybody help anybody? If you think about Darwin’s idea (survival of the fittest) think about what that really means. It means if you are a creature you have two big important jobs.”

“You gotta survive and you’ve gotta be fit.”

“Right. Fitness means: how many babies can you make? And so if you do some stupid, hair-brained thing [act of altruism], that means you can’t stay alive, or you can’t make babies…that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Right.”

“And yet, wherever you look in nature…”

“You see creatures doing this.”

“From bacteria.”

“Insects.”

“Birds.”

“Bees.”

“Ants and wasps.”

“Fish.”

“I’ll give you an example. There’s a species of amoeba called xxxx, which usually the amoeba usually lives on its own—it’s a single celled organism—in the forest. But when resources are low, what it does is send out its chemical signal, and all the other amoeba…”

“They start sending out signals…”

“And they start crawling until they all meet, and they become one slug, which is now a single organism.”

“And this slug begins to crawl until it finds a place that’s windy and sunny, at which point…”

“It stops, and the top twenty percent of the slug—the top twenty percent of the amoeba, the slug—begin to create out of their own body, a stalk, which hardens, and they die while doing so. But the stalk allows the bottom eighty percent to climb up the stalk and to create an orb at the top of the stalk…”

“And from there, all the amoeba that aren’t, you know, dead, can catch a wind…”

“To better pastures.”

“It’s like a dandelion.”

“So what’s happened is, that the top twenty percent have really sacrificed themselves for the back eighty percent: and that’s an amoeba…

—various voices on the Radiolab podcast. Season 9. Episode 1. “The Good Show.”

“…the coccolithophores are not doing very well.”

“Well, they’ve got a couple of tricks up their little calcified sleeves. Sometimes when a virus enters, the coccolithophores will send out a chemical signal…”

“They’re saying, ‘Hey, it’s too late for me…”

“but save yourselves…and initially this signal is pretty weak in the water but as more and more coccolithophores are infected the chorus of this chemical beacon grows louder and louder…”

“And so the other cells hear these messages…”

“And they change by messing with their DNA a little bit and they go from having those white shields on the outside to having these jaggedy scales…”

“Which we think might be impenetrable…”

“Well, why aren’t they scaly all the time?”

“Because when they’re scaly, they can’t be the best Coccolithophores they can be. They just don’t grow as well.”

“So [being] scaly is an adaptation against the virus.”

“Exactly.”

“And then finally, if all else fails…”

“Program cell death.”

“The Coccolithophores just commit suicide.”

“It just shuts down and kills itself to prevent propagation of viruses.”

—various voices on the Radiolab podcast. March 5, 2012. “A War We Need.” Below is a Coccolithophore bloom, which occur when the Coccolithophores are shedding their white shields. This picture was taken from space off Brittany, France. Coccolithophores are microscopic plant-like creatures.

…if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense...people's moral arguments [are] mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

For millions of years, therefore, our ancestors faced the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions that could fend off challenges and attacks from rival groups. We are the descendants of successful tribalists, not their more individualistic cousins.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

When groups compete, the cohesive, cooperative group usually wins. But within each group, selfish individuals (free riders) come out ahead...A gene for suicidal self-sacrifice would be favored by group-level selection (it would help the team win), but it would be so strongly opposed by selection at the individual level that such a trait could only evolve in species such as bees, where competition within the hive has been nearly eliminated and almost all selection is group selection.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

Asking people to give up all forms of sacralized belonging and live in a world of purely "rational" beliefs might be like asking people to give the Earth and live in colonies orbiting the moon.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

…if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you're asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism....Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

If you are thinking about a business decision you are significantly more likely to lie than if you were thinking from an ethical frame.

—Psychologist on the Planet Money podcast. “Why People Do Bad Things.” April 17, 2012.

Why are some people very selfish and others very altruistic? Previous studies indicated that social categories like gender, income or education can hardly explain differences in altruistic behavior. Recent neuroscience studies have demonstrated that differences in brain structure might be linked to differences in personality traits and abilities. Now, for the first time, a team of researchers from the University of Zurich headed by Ernst Fehr, Director of the Department of Economics, show that there is a connection between brain anatomy and altruistic behavior.

—University of Zurich (2012, July 11). The more gray matter you have, the more altruistic you are. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 13, 2012, from http://www.sciencedaily.com.

We [humans] can follow extraordinarily complex scenarios of social interaction and figure out if a social contract has been violated (and are better at detecting someone cheating than someone being overly generous.) And we are peerless when it comes to facial recognition: we even have an area of the cortex in the fusiform gyrus that specializes in this activity.

The selective advantages of evolving a highly social brain are obvious. It paved the way for us to fine-tune our capacities for reading one another’s mental states, to excel at social manipulation, and to adeptly deceive and attract potential mates and supporters. Among Americans, the extent of social intelligence in youth is a better predictor of our adult success in the occupational world than are SAT scores.

—Sapolsky, Robert M. September 2012. “Super Humanity.” Scientific American.

Morality (Impartial Spectator)

We need to set our affections on some good man and keep him constantly before our eyes, so that we may live as if he were watching us and do everything as if he saw what we were doing.

—Seneca quoting Epicurus in: Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 56.

How much scope there would be for renown if whenever we were sick we had an audience of specators! Be your own spectator anyway, your own applauding audience.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LXXVIII. Penguin Classics. Page 136.

And we should, indeed, live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts—which someone can! For what is to be gained if something is concealed from man when nothing is barred from God?

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter LXXXVIII. Penguin Classics. Page 140.

…the tendency to project your feelings onto others does not extend to people who are very different from you, even when the feelings otherwise overwhelm your judgments. This might reveal a surprising limit to our ability to empathize with people we differ from or disagree with.

—Science Daily. “Empathy Doesn’t Extend Across the Political Aisle.” April 2, 2012. Refers to study: Ed O’Brien and Phoebe C. Ellsworth. “More than skin deep: Visceral states are not projected onto dissimilar others.” Psychological Science. 2012.

Generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship and esteem, all the social and benevolent affections, when expressed in the countenance or behavior, even towards those who are not peculiarly connected with ourselves, please the indifferent spectator upon almost every occasion…We have always, therefore, the strongest disposition to sympathize with the benevolent affections.

—Adam Smith in A Theory of Moral Sentiments

A further way to reduce an obsession with the self and the problems that fixation generates, is to use a technique called self-distancing. Using this strategy, you see yourself from the perspective of a third-party observer, the proverbial “fly on the wall,” rather than from inside your own head…The results suggest that creating mental distance from an emotional situation buffers us from the slings and arrows of fortune.

— Crocker, Jennifer and Jessica J. Carnevale. September/October 2013. “Letting Go of Self-Esteem.” Scientific American Mind.

Why should we be more ashamed to weep than to laugh before company? We may often have as real occasion to do the one as to do the other. but we always feel that the spectators are more likely to go along with us in the agreeable, than in the painful emotion.

—Adam Smith in A Theory of Moral Sentiments

In the steadiness of his industry and frugality, in his steadily sacrificing the ease and enjoyment of the present moment for the probable expectation of the still greater ease and enjoyment of a more distant but more lasting period of time, the prudent man is always both supported and rewarded by the entire approbation of the impartial spectator, and of the representative of the impartial spectator, the man within the breast. The impartial spectator does not feel himself worn out by the present labour of those whose conduct he surveys; nor does he feel himself solicited by the importunate calls of their present appetites. To him their present, and what is likely to be their future situation, are very nearly the same: he sees them nearly at the same distance, and is affected by them very nearly in the same manner. He knows, however, that to the persons principally concerned, they are very far from being the same, and that they naturally affect them in a very different manner. He cannot therefore but approve, and even applaud, that proper exertion of self-command, which enables them to act as if their present and their future situation affected them nearly in the same manner in which they affect him.

—Adam Smith in A Theory of Moral Sentiments

Society and Comedy

[Comedy is] … a tube that transports something really ugly into something that’s still ugly but a little bit of funny to it.

—Joey “CoCo” Diaz. December 24, 2018. The Joe Rogan Experience. Episode #1220—Joey Diaz.

Societal Behavior

In the feudal regime, where the judges and executors of civil law were usually illiterate, custom and law were largely one. When question rose as to law or penalty, the oldest members of the community were asked what had been the custom thereon in their youth. The community itself was therefore the chief source of law. The baron or king might give commands, but these were not laws; and if he exacted more than custom sanctioned he would be frustrated by universal resistance, vocal or dumn.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 566. Refers to feudalism in the High Middle Ages.

Homo Sapiens are basically a bunch of sheep that got nuclear weapons and atomic power.

—Yuval Noah Harari. September 25, 2015. “Yuval Noah Harari on the myths we need to survive.” Intelligence Squared.

… you can turn your back on civilization if you like, but you’re not necessarily going to escape the social contract.

—Keizer, Garrett. Spring 2016. “Solidarity and Survival.” Lapham’s Quarterly. Volume IX, Number 2: Disaster. Page 201.

From an interview with cognitive scientist Steven Sloman by Vox.com’s Sean Illing, April 16:

Illing: How do people form opinions?

Sloman: I really do believe that our attitudes are shaped much more by our social groups than they are by facts on the ground. We are not great reasoners. Most people don’t like to think at all, or like to think as little as possible. And by most, I mean roughly 70 percent of the population. Even the rest seem to devote a lot of their resources to justifying beliefs that they want to hold, as opposed to forming credible beliefs based only on fact.

Think about if you were to utter a fact that contradicted the opinions of the majority of those in your social group. You pay a price for that. If I said I voted for Trump, most of my academic colleagues would think I’m crazy. They wouldn’t want to talk to me. That’s how social pressure influences our epistemological commitments, and it often does it in imperceptible ways.

Illing: This is another way of saying that we live in a community of knowledge.

—in Wall Street Journal. April 17, 2017. A17.

Whoever wishes to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature whenever they find occasion for. If their evil disposition remains concealed for a time, it must be attributed to some unknown reason; and we must assume that it lacked occasion to show itself; but time … does not fail to bring it to light … The wish to acquire is in truth very natural and common, and men always acquire when they an; and for this they will be praised, not blamed.

—Machiavelli. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1953. The Renaissance. The Story of Civilization. Page 557.

An unconscious relationship is more powerful than a conscious one.

—Soren Kierkegaard

It seems clear to me that the desire of dominating one’s fellows and asserting superiority is natural to man, so that there are few so in love with liberty that they would not seize a favorable opportunity of ruling and lording it. Look closely at the behavior of the indwellers of the selfsame city; mark and examine their dissensions, and you shall find that the object is preponderance rather than freedom. Those, then, who are the foremost citizens do not strive after liberty, though that be in their mouths; but the increase of their own sway and pre-eminence is really in their hearts. Liberty is a cant term with them, and disguises their lust of superiority in power and honor.

—Guicciardini (16^th century Italy) Durant, Will. 1953. The Renaissance. The Story of Civilization. Page 546.

Guicciardini [16^th century Italy] was one of thousands in Renaissance Italy who had no faith whatever; who had lost the Christian idyl, had learned the emptiness of politics, expected no utopia, dreamed no dreams; and who sat back helpless while a world of war and barbarism swept over Italy; somber old men, emancipated in mind and broken in hope, who had discovered, too late, that when the myth dies only force is free.

—Durant, Will. 1953. The Renaissance. The Story of Civilization. Page 546.

So in Renaissance Italy civilization was of the few, by the few, and for them. The simple common man, named legion, tilled and mined the earth, pulled the carts and bore the burdens, toiled from dawn to dusk, and at evening had no muscle left for thought. He took his opinions, his religion, his answers to the riddles of life from the air about him, or inherited them with ancestral cottage; he let others think for him because others made him work for them. He accepted not only the fascinating, comforting, inspiring, terrifying marvels of traditional—which were daily reimpressed upon him by contagion, inculcation, and art—but he added to them, in his mental furniture, the demonology, sorcery, portents, magic, divination, astrology, relic-worship, and miraclemongering that composed, so to speak, a popular metaphysics unauthored by the which, which deprecated them as a problem sometimes more troublesome then unbelief.

—Durant, Will. 1953. The Renaissance. The Story of Civilization. Page 525.

My death needs to mean something … Fix society. Please.

—Alcorn, Leelah. A transgender 17-year-old who wrote this message and then committed suicide by stepping into the path of a tractor-trailer. Quoted in: Tulsa World. “News Briefs.” January 25, 2015. A6.

The fox barks not when he would steal the lamb.

—Shakespeare in Henry 6th

But, for a kingdom, any oath may be broken

—Shakespeare in Henry 6th

Tears, then for babes; blows and revenge for me.

—Shakespeare in Henry 6th

Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?

And, live we how we can, yet die we must.

—Shakespeare in Henry 6th

… and seem a saint, when most I play the devil

—Shakespeare in Richard III

Anne: O Wonderful, when devils tell the truth!

Gloster: More wonderful, when angels are so angry.

—Shakespeare in Richard III

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York

—Shakespeare in Richard III

I wasted time, and now time doth time waste me.

—Shakespeare in Richard III

How much more broadly the norm of appropriate actions extends than the rule of law!

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). On Anger. From Anger, Mercy, Revenge. 2010. The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Robert A. Kaster.

The greatest playwright of the 20^th century … his leading character says, “My drama lies entirely in this one thing: In my being conscious, that each one of us believes himself to be a single person.” But it’s not true. We are many people … so with one person we are one person, and with others we’re somebody different, and all the time we are under the illusion of being one and the same person with everybody … Now you see my tragedy.”

—Panelist on Intelligence Squared [podcast]. December 20, 2013. “An Anatomy of Truth: Conversations on Truth-telling.”

The world can be a bewildering place, but not if you see it as a righteous war between whites and blacks, between straights and gays. The neo-Nazis are not the first group to discover that war is a force that can give an empty life meaning, even a race war.

—Brooks, David. August 15, 2017. “How to roll back fanaticism.” The New York Times.

If you let a creature develop in a world with laws that themselves have been through some interesting selection process, then that creature will be different from one in a world with different institutions.

—Robert Kurzban quotes in the Wall Street Journal. November 5-6, 2011. C4.

To begin with, we don’t have a good theory of social behavior from which to start.

—David Weinberger, discussing the difficulties of taking enormous amounts of data and and using it to predict the future of the world. December, 2011. “The Machine That Would Predict The Future.” Scientific American. Pages 52-57.

The human is born to give and receive assistance—anger to destroy. The one wants to form associations, the other, to secede; the one wants to be of benefit, the other, to do harm; the one wants to aid even strangers, the other, to assault even the nearest and dearest. Human beings are prepared even to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others’ advantage; anger is prepared to plunge into danger, provided it drags the other down.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). On Anger. From Anger, Mercy, Revenge. 2010. The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Robert A. Kaster.

Comedian Tom Shillue said it perfectly after our third beer at a local tavern: “The only people hurt by racism these days are the racists.” And thank God for that.

Even actual racists must crawl back under their rocks, knowing that if you express racism you are destroyed, never your target of derision.

—Gutfeld, Gregg. 2012. The Joy of Hate. Crown Forum: NY, NY.

We should still study and celebrate the creative genius of individuals. Nevertheless, we need to recognize that the psychology of creativity also involves the groups in which creators developed their work, whose boundaries they seek to extend and through which they have their sway. “I did it my way” may be an appealing anthem for great creators, but as with Frank Sinatra, their success generally also requires promoters, producers, and an approving public.

—Haslam, Inmaculada Adarves-Yorno, and Tom Postmes. July/August 2014. “Creativity is Collective.” Scientific American Mind. Page 32.

…public opinion, which is always more fearful than the law…

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 13: The Morals and Manners of the Athenians. Page 201.

To find the answer, the Hopkins researchers undertook a massive study. They followed nearly 800 kids in Baltimore — from first grade until their late-20s.

They found that a child's fate is in many ways fixed at birth — determined by family strength and the parents' financial status.

The kids who got a better start — because their parents were married and working — ended up better off. Most of the poor kids from single-parent families stayed poor.

—Summers, Juana. August 7, 2014. “Rich Kid, Poor Kid: For 30 Years, Baltimore Study Tracked Who Gets Ahead.” National Public Radio.

There is not a lot to be gained from asking people why they like something because they don’t bloody know.

—Francis McGlone, former Unilever scientist. Page 150 of Michael Moss’s book Salt, Sugar, and Fat.

Human beings are rule-following animals by nature; they are born to conform to the social norms they see around them, and they entrench those rules with often transcendent meaning and value. When the surrounding environment changes and new challenges arise, there is often a disjunction between existing institutions and present needs. Those institutions are supported by legions of entrenched stakeholders who oppose any fundamental reform.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY.

On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire in a protest against the local culture of corruption. That singular act set into motion a popular revolution that burned across the Arab world, leading to uprisings that overthrew decades of dictatorial rule in Egypt, Libya, and beyond, upending forever the balance of power in the world’s most oil-rich region.

What model would have been able to foresee this?

—David Weinberger. December, 2011. “The Machine That Would Predict The Future.” Scientific American. Pages 52-57.

Biologists have termed humans ultrasocial.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 15.

The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people...When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight...But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then [one] tries to find the truth in the other person's arguments.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

When he was very close to the end [of his life, a nurse] brought over a glass of water and a little dropper they’d been using to moisten his mouth. And she told us each to take the dropper and give him some water and say our names close to his ear so he’d know who was giving him each bit of water. As a ritual it felt comforting, and sad, and vaguely religious … I had no idea how badly we’d needed a ritual that moment until [the nurse] gave us one.

—This American Life. Episode 423: Death and Taxes. April 25, 2014.

Language is a social art.

—Willard Van Orman Quine

For many in the modern humanities and social sciences, there is no human nature, only the constructions of local culture, and to think otherwise can only endanger hopes for changing what we are and do.

This position is confused.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 19.

...acceptance matters for social animals as much as do oxygen and food.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 103.

This is the foundation of all of social science, the foundation of religion, the foundation of war. Social psychologists like me come along and say, "Yeah, people are the actors on the stage, but you'll have to be aware of what that situation is. Who are the cast of characters? What's the costume? Is there a stage director?" And so we're interested in, what are the external factors around the individual -- the bad barrel? And social scientists stop there, and they miss the big point that I discovered when I became an expert witness for Abu Ghraib. The power is in the system. The system creates the situation that corrupts the individuals, and the system is the legal, political, economic, cultural background. And this is where the power is of the bad-barrel makers.

So if you want to change a person, you've got to change the situation. If you want to change the situation, you've got to know where the power is, in the system. So the Lucifer effect involves understanding human character transformations with these three factors. And it's a dynamic interplay. What do the people bring into the situation? What does the situation bring out of them? And what is the system that creates and maintains that situation?

—Zimbardo, Philip. February 2008. “The psychology of evil.” TED talk.

Evolution has allowed humans to develop our singular capacity for culture because culture helps us track changes in the environment more rapidly than genes do. Genetic change normally takes many generations to pervade a population; culture can enable advantageous options to spread rapidly in a single generation and to be passed on to successive generations.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 25.

When a person cannot deceive himself, the chances are against his being able to deceive others.

—Mark Twain.

But when man found that the best means of survival, for individual as well as species, was social organization, he expanded the hunting pack into a system of social order in which the instincts once so useful in the hunting stage had to be checked at every turn to make society possible. Ethically every civilization is a balance and tension between the jungle instincts of men and the inhibitions of a moral code. The instincts without the inhibitions would end civilization; the inhibitions without the instincts would end life. The problem of morality is to adjust inhibitions to protect civilization without enfeebling life.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 819.

Nature naturally produces thieves, the envious, forgers, murderers; they cover the face of the earth; and without the laws which repress vice each individual would abandon himself to the instincts of nature, and would think only of himself…

—Letter from the young Frederick the Great to Voltaire. Source: Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part IX. The Age of Voltaire. Chapter XIII: Frederick and Maria Theresa. Page 445.

The secret of getting away with lying is believing it with all your heart.

—Elizabeth Bear.

“Do you think she means it?”

“Of course. All the best liars mean what they say...until they’ve said it.”

—Dialog between two senators in Nero: The Decline of the Empire.

Jerry, just remember: it’s not a lie if you believe it.

—George Castanza.

…the desire for recognition ensures that politics will never be reducible to simple economic self-interest.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY. Page 45.

We need to change the way the public thinks about it. Okay, well that might be where it gets quixotic, one would think. I don't think so. I think you can change the way the public thinks about these things and I think you could do it very quickly. You can look at examples of it. Look at the way the pork industry changed the way people think about pork from a fatty heart-attack waiting to happen to 'the other white meat.' Or the way the egg industry changed the image of the egg as a high cholesterol food that was bad for you to 'the incredible, edible egg.' They just got methodical about it. The non-profit sector has remained utterly silent about these issues. It has no anti-defamation mechanism like other communities have, so it takes punches to the face in the media all the time and doesn't respond. It has no legal defense fund mechanism the way the Mexican-American community, the African-American community, the gay and lesbian community do, so its First Amendment rights are constantly trampled. It has no, you know, pork-the-other-white-meat advertising campaign where it actually tries to tell the media what overhead actually is. And it doesn't organize itself. There is no database where all 10 million people who are employed in the non-profit sector are listed and you could punch a button in order to get them to advocate on behalf of themselves. So we just need to do those things. And I'll tell you where my faith in the ability of us to change this comes from. One thing, like if we could change the way people think about pork, we could absolutely change the way they think about charity. But secondly, I happen to be gay. And I'm 52 years old now. And when I came out to my parents when I was 21, they were totally depressed and they thought: you'll never have a normal life and you'll never have a family and you'll never have children. Well, it's 30 years later; I'm married to a wonderful man that I've been with for 12 years; I have three beautiful children; they are our own biological kids. I could not have dreamed that that kind of change would have happened in the United States in the course of those 30 years. But it has. If we can make that kind of change on something as polarizing as gay rights and gay marriage, we can absolutely get people to think more rationally about charity.

—Pallotta, Dan [interviewee]. June 17, 2013. “Pallotta on Charity and the Culture of the Non-Profit Sector.” EconTalk.org. Russell Roberts [host]. Library of Economics and Liberty.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 15: The Advancement of Learning. Page 347.

Gossip creates a non-zero-sum game because it costs us nothing to give each other information, yet we both benefit by receiving information...When people pass along high-quality (“juicy”) gossip, they feel more powerful, they have a better shared sense of what is right and what’s wrong, and they feel more closely connected to their gossip partners...a second study revealed that most people hold negative views of gossip and gossipers, even though almost everyone gossips....many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the value of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006. Basic Books.

Whenever a way is found to suppress free riding so that individual units can cooperate, work as a team, and divide labor, selection at the lower level becomes less important, selection at the higher level becomes more powerful, and that higher-level selection favors the most cohesive superorganisms.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

All of our life is nothing but a mass of habits.

—William James

Scientists are discovering that habits are simply an extreme form of learning, a behavior that’s so familiar we no longer need to think about it.

—Jonah Lehrer in The Wall Street Journal. February 18-19, 2012. C12.

The other prediction, of course, is that as countries conquer disease, the intelligence of their citizens will rise. A rise in intelligence over the decades has already been noticed in rich countries. It is called the Flynn effect after James Flynn, who discovered it. Its cause, however, has been mysterious—until now. If Mr Eppig is right, the near-abolition of serious infections in these countries, by vaccination, clean water and proper sewerage, may explain much if not all of the Flynn effect.

When Dr Lynn and Dr Vanhanen originally published their IQ data, they used them to advance the theory that national differences in intelligence were the main reason for different levels of economic development. This study turns that reasoning on its head. It is lack of development, and the many health problems this brings, which explains the difference in levels of intelligence. No doubt, in a vicious circle, those differences help keep poor countries poor. But the new theory offers a way to break the circle. If further work by researchers supports the ideas of Mr Eppig and his colleagues, they will have done the world a good turn by providing policymakers with yet another reason why the elimination of disease should be one of the main aims of development, rather than a desirable afterthought.

—The Economist. “Disease and Intelligence: Mens sana in corpore sano.” July 1, 2010.

But actions actually speak louder than words. In one study, researchers actually made up a new fantastical figure called the Candy Witch, who gives you a toy in exchange for some of your Halloween candy. (My inner child loves and hates this witch!) They found, understandably, that kids who were told that such a being existed and then were actually able to complete the candy-for-toy exchange had a higher level of belief that those who merely heard the tale. The proof of the Tooth Fairy is in the cash under your pillow, am I right?

—The Economist. “Disease and Intelligence: Mens sana in corpore sano.” July 1, 2010.

But if this was what the ancients called liberty, they admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community. You find among them almost none of the enjoyments which we have just seen form part of the liberty of the moderns.

All private actions were submitted to a severe surveillance. No importance was given to individual independence, neither in relation to opinions, nor to labor, nor, above all, to religion. The right to choose one's own religious affiliation, a right which we regard as one of the most precious, would have seemed to the ancients a crime and a sacrilege.

—Benjamin Constant in The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of Moderns. 1816. Quoted in The Wall Street Journal. May 12-13, 2012. A13.

All movements go too far.

—Bertrand Russell

The truism that abusive childhoods lead to troubled adulthoods is as valid in Beijing as Baltimore. That’s the conclusion of a study recently published in the journal Children and Youth Services Review.

In a first-of-its-kind survey of 2,690 inmates in the Chinese capital’s 11 jails, 90 percent reported they were victims of at least two of five forms of childhood abuse: emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, or physical neglect.

—Jacobs, Tom. July 2, 2012. “In China, Adult Criminals Were Abused Kids.” Pacific Standard.

Anthropology has shown us just how different and numerous are the ways in which humans have been known to organize themselves. But it also reveals some remarkable commonalities—fundamental moral principles that appear to exist everywhere…

One of the reasons that human life is so complicated, in turn, is because many of these principles contradict one another.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began “comparing power with power, measuring, calculating” and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

We’ll kill everyone who has fought against us.

—Abu Anas, faction leader in the Syrian revolt, who led the siege of Azaz and wants to establish an Islamic state in Syria. Quoted in: Anderson, Jon Lee. August 27, 2012. “The War Within.” The New Yorker.

To describe the role of these developments in the growth of entitlements, the usual dyad of dependence/independence is too crude. We must take account of a third term—interdependence—and the principle of reciprocity that undergirds it. When I do something for you that you would be hard-pressed to do for yourself and you respond by helping me with something I find difficult, we depend on one another and are the stronger for it.

Well-functioning societies are replete with relations of this sort and often use them as models for public policy. But the move from small groups to large-scale collective action makes a difference. Reciprocity becomes extended not only demographically and geographically but also chronologically. Political communities exist not just for the here and now but for future generations as well. Many of our entitlement policies rest on the idea of interdependence extended through time—in other words, on an intergenerational compact.

To be entitled to something under such a compact is not necessarily to be dependent on it—at least not in a way that should trouble us. Consider a nongovernmental example. If I use my life savings to purchase a retirement annuity, I have a legally enforceable expectation of receiving over time the stream of income specified in the contract. I am entitled to these payments, and I certainly "depend" on them to fund my living expenses when I am no longer working.

…

I would make a similar argument about the Earned Income Tax Credit, which supplements the earnings of low-wage workers. Since the Ford administration, both political parties have usually agreed on the proposition that people who work full-time, year-round, should not live in poverty, and neither should their families. To the extent that market wages do not suffice to meet this standard, the public sector should step in to fill the gap. Though these low-wage workers are not self-sufficient, they are not dependent either, because dependency is a matter of character, not arithmetic.

It is acceptable for society to help those adults who are doing their best to provide for themselves but cannot manage to do so. Our worry focuses on those who could be doing more to help themselves but choose not to do so. That is the kind of dependence that troubles us.

But what about means-tested programs such as Medicaid, eligibility for which depends on status (such as poverty) rather than activity (such as work)? Do they increase dependence?

Again, consider the low-wage worker in a full-time job that does not provide health insurance. Given current costs in the market, that worker is in no position to purchase insurance for himself. So he has three options: he can go without needed health care, seek charity care delivered through the voluntary sector, or participate in public programs financed mostly by taxpayers with higher incomes.

Having the government help him out with life's essentials does not contribute to dependence. Indeed, one could argue that it does just the reverse, by rewarding work. There is no necessary relation between the growth of means-tested government benefits and the increase in the kind of dependence we care about from a moral point of view.

—Galston, William A. September 1-2, 2012. “They’re Part of the Civic Compact.” One of two articles addressing the question: are entitlement’s corrupting us? The Wall Street Journal. C1.

…modern society is an opportunistic experiment, founded on a human psychology that had already evolved before human beings ever had to deal with strangers in any systematic way. It is like a journey to the open sea by people who have never yet had to adapt to any environment but the land.

—Seabright, Paul. 2004. In the Company of Strangers: A Modern History of Economic Life.

About two years after the break-up of the Soviet Union I was in discussion with a senior Russian official whose job it was to direct the production of bread in St. Petersburg. “Please understand that we are keen to move towards a market system,” he told me. “But we need to understand the fundamental details of how such a system works. Tell me, for example: who is in charge of the supply of bread to the population of London?” There was nothing naïve about his question, because the answer (“nobody is in charge”), when one thinks carefully about it, is astonishingly hard to believe. Only in the industrialized West have we forgotten just how strange it is.

—Seabright, Paul. 2004. In the Company of Strangers: A Modern History of Economic Life.

Another politically important form of affection is identification with a leader. This is what [David] Hume calls “imaginary interest,” whereby individuals attach themselves psychologically to a leader whom they will never meet and from whom they can expect no material benefits. Quasi-erotic fixation on prominent individuals may sometimes inspire acts of personal foolhardiness or courage. But it usually has less dramatic effects. For instance, it allows devotees to live national events vicariously, to feel involved in large affairs.

—Holmes, Stephen. “Chapter 17: The Secret History of Self-Interest.” Beyond Self-Interest. Edited by Mansbridge, Jane J.

Each of us has within us the mind of a monarch, wanting to be granted complete freedom of action but not wanting it to be used against him.

Food isn’t about Nutrition
Clothes aren’t about Comfort
Bedrooms aren’t about Sleep
Marriage isn’t about Romance
Talk isn’t about Info
Laughter isn’t about Jokes
Charity isn’t about Helping
Church isn’t about God
Art isn’t about Insight
Medicine isn’t about Health
Consulting isn’t about Advice
School isn’t about Learning
Research isn’t about Progress
Politics isn’t about Policy

The above summarizes much of my contrarian world view. (What else should go on this list?) When I say “X is not about Y,” I mean that while Y is the function commonly said to drive most X behavior, in fact some other function Z drives X behavior more. I won’t support all these claims here; for today, let’s just talk politics.

High school students are easily engaged to elect class presidents, even though they have little idea what if any policies a class president might influence. Instead such elections are usually described as “popularity contests.” That is, theses elections are about which school social factions are to have higher social status. If a jock wins, jocks have higher status. If your girlfriend’s brother wins, you have higher status, etc. And the fact that you have a vote says that others should take you into account when forming coalitions – you are somebody.

Civics teachers talk as if politics is about policy, that politics is our system for choosing policies to deal with common problems. But as Tyler Cowen suggests, real politics seems to be more about who will be our leaders, and what coalitions will rise or fall in status as a result. Election media coverage focuses on characterizing the candidates themselves – their personalities, styles, friends, beliefs, etc. You might say this is because character is a cheap clue to the policies candidates would adopt, but I don’t buy it.

The obvious interpretation seems more believable – as with high school class presidents, we care about policies mainly as clues to candidate character and affiliations. And to the extent we consider policies not tied to particular candidates, we mainly care about how policies will effect which kinds of people will be respected how much.

For example, we want nationalized medicine so poor sick folks will feel cared for, military actions so foreigners will treat us with respect, business deregulation as a sign of respect for hardworking businessfolk, official gay marriage as a sign we accept gays, and so on.

This perspective explains why voters tend to prefer proportional representation, why many refuse to vote for any candidate when none have earned their respect, and why so few are interested in institutional reforms that would plausibly give more informed policies. (I’m speaking on such reform at a Trinity College symposium Monday afternoon.)

In each case where X is commonly said to be about Y, but is really X is more about Z, many are well aware of this but say we are better off pretending X is about Y. You may be called a cynic to say so, but if honesty is important to you, join me in calling a spade a spade.

—Hanson, Robin. September 21, 2008. “Politics isn’t about Policy.” overcomingbias.com [blog]. Accessed November 26, 2012 at http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html.

Individuality

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

—Albert Einstein. Quoted in: Haslam, Inmaculada Adarves-Yorno, and Tom Postmes. July/August 2014. “Creativity is Collective.” Scientific American Mind. Page 32.

Historically, abuses have been most rampant—and body counts have run the highest—when the individual is sacrificed for the good of the group. It happens when people are judged by the skin of their skin, or by their gender, or by whom they prefer to sleep with, or by which political or religious group they belong to, or by any other distinguishing trait our species has identified to differentiate among members instead of by the content of their individual character.

Honesty

The Jew … prided himself on his reproductive ability and his children; his most solemn oath was taken by laying his hand upon the testes of the man receiving the pledge; hence the word testimony.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 381.

People and Culture

Custom is king.

—Herodotus (484 – 425 BC).

The concept of linear time has deep roots in Western society … Dominant American culture has even laid this preference for straight lines onto the natural landscape … linear time has generate the myth of progress … A core perspective and an accompanying human problem in linear time is the reality that the straight line of time does not support the experience of a center … people oriented toward both past and future are likely to be distracted from the human and spiritual possibilities inherent in being in the now … In contrast to the linear concepts of time, most Native American traditions follow the example of nature and perceive that cyclical, not linear, processes of change are inherent in all forms and patterns of nature.

—Brown, Joseph Epes (with Emily Cousins). 2001. Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Tradiations. Oxford University Press. Pages 10-12.

Many tribes believe that these renewal ceremonies, farm from being mere New Year’s celebrations, are responsible for sustaining life … We can see an extension of this belief in hunting cultures, in which humans assumed the sacred responsibility for taking the life of living beings and so became partners, or links, in the cyclical chain of life and death—they believed that there would be life again. The implications of such beliefs to spiritually meaningful concepts of death are of the greatest importance and offer alternatives to the linear understanding of death as “the end of time.”

—Brown, Joseph Epes (with Emily Cousins). 2001. Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Tradiations. Oxford University Press. Pages 13.

The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.
—Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
—Lillian Hellman

If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden in mine—which I consider it probably- as I have no particular reason to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity—it is the key to many reservations.

—Charles Dickens in Great Expectations

It was cooperation, then, whether in the form of monogamous pairs, nuclear families or tribes, that enabled humans to succeed when all our fossil ancestors and cousins went extinct. In fact, cooperation may be the greatest skill we have acquired during the past two million years—one that enabled our young genus to survive through periods of environmental change and stress and one that may well determine our geologically young species’ future.

—Edgar, Blake. September 2014. “Powers of Two.” Scientific American. Page 67.

In fact, humans have evolved rapidly and remarkably in the past 30,000 years. Straight, black hair, blue eyes and lactose tolerance are all examples of relatively recent traits.

—Hawks, John. September 2014. “Still Evolving (After All These Years).” Scientific American. Page 86.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
—Leo Tolstoy

To be in health is the best thing for a man; the next best, to be of form and nature beautiful; the third, to enjoy wealth gotten without fraud; and the fourth, to be in youth’s bloom among friends.

—Simonides of Ceos, a Greek poet (556-468 BC)

It may sound depressing to think that our righteous minds are basically tribal minds, but consider the alternative. Our tribal minds make it easy to divide us, but without our long period of tribal living there'd be nothing to divide in the first place. There's be only small families of foragers—not nearly as sociable as today's hunter-gatherers—eking out a living and losing most of their members to starvation during every prolonged drought.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

What was the secret ingredient that gave religious communes a longer shelf life? [Richard Sosis] found one master variable: the number of costly sacrifices that each commune demanded from its members. It was things like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code or hairstyle, or cutting ties with outsiders...Why doesn't sacrifice strengthen secular communes? Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized...when secular organizations demand sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis...Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

Hiving comes naturally, easily, and joyfully to us. Its normal function is to bond dozens or at most hundreds of people together into communities of trust, cooperation, even love. These bonded groups may care less about outsiders than they did before their bonding...But is that really such a bad thing overall, given how shallow our care for strangers is in the first place?

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

As it is this disposition which forms that difference of talents, so remarkable among men of different professions, so it is this same disposition which renders that difference useful.
—Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations

The American poet Wallace Stevens once wrote, "After the final 'no' there comes a 'yes'/And on that 'yes' the future world depends." There were many no's before the emergence of a global consensus to abolish chattel slavery, before the consensus that women must have the right to vote, before the fever of the nucleararms race was broken, before the quickening global recognition of gay and lesbian equality, and indeed before every forward advance toward social progress. Though a great many obstacles remain in the path of this essential agreement, I am among the growing number of people who are allowing themselves to become more optimistic than ever that a bold and comprehensive pact may well emerge from the Paris negotiations late next year, which many regard as the last chance to avoid civilizational catastrophe while there is still time.

—Gore, Al. June 18, 2014. “The Turning Point: New Hope for the Climate.” Rolling Stone. Page 87.

How long will it take? When Martin Luther King Jr. was asked that question during some of the bleakest hours of the U.S. civil rights revolution, he responded, "How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever. . . . How long? Not long. Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

And so it is today: How long? Not long.

—Gore, Al. June 18, 2014. “The Turning Point: New Hope for the Climate.” Rolling Stone. Page 87.

...nowhere in the ethnographic literature is there any description of what real people did that is not shot through with the signs of a universal human nature...anthropologists routinely conduct research that can only be done because in crucial ways the differences between us and the peoples we study are not in fact very great; yet because everybody likes to hear that “they” are different from “us”, anthropologists dwell on the differences.

—Donald E. Brown in Human Universals, page 5.

Lies, truth: it’s irrelevant. The best story wins.

—Character of Leonardo da Vinci in Da Vinci’s Demons. Season 1. Episode 5.

...From 1915 to 1934 American anthropologists established three fundamental principles about the nature of culture: that culture is a distinct kind of phenomenon that cannot be reduced to others (in particular, not biology or psychology), that culture (rather than our physical nature) is the fundamental determinant of human behavior, and that culture is largely arbitrary.

—Donald E. Brown in Human Universals, page 6.

There can surely be nobody so petty or so apathetic in his outlook that he has no desire to discover by what means, and under what system of government, the Romans succeeded in less than 53 years, in bringing under their rule almost the whole of the inhabited world—an achievement which without parallel in human history.

—Polybius (220-118 BC). The Rise of the Roman Empire.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid and cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

—Bertrand Russell. However, Bailey’s experience with economists suggests Russell’s comment is not always true.

There are two features of a lot of ideologies that make them deadly. One of them is demonizing...The other is if your ideology promotes some utopia—and often they’re linked, because it’s usually some demonic group that stands in the way of your utopia...

—Steven Pinker in an interview with Ronald Bailey. February, 2012. “The Decline of Violence.” Reason magazine.

For people raised in the same culture with the same opportunities, differences in IQ reflected largely differences in inheritance rather than in training or education.

—Peter Miller. “A Thing or Two About Twins.” National Geographic. January, 2012.

It was as if it didn’t matter in which family the twins had been raised.

—Peter Miller. “A Thing or Two About Twins.” National Geographic. January, 2012.

…most of the cells in the human body are not human at all. Bacterial cells in the human body outnumber human cells 10 to one. Moreover, this mixed community of microbial cells and the genes they contain, collectively known as the microbiome, does not threaten us but offers vital help with basic physiological processes—from digestion to growth to self-defense.

So much for human autonomy.

…

Indeed, all humans have a microbiome from very early in life, even though they do not start out with one…because the womb does not normally contain bacteria…

…

…In the early 2010 the European group published its census of microbial genes in the human digestive system—3.3 million genes (from more than 1,000 species)—about 150 times the 20,000 to 25,000 genes in the human genome.

Research into the nature of the human microbiome has yielded many surprises: no two people share the same microbial makeup, for instance—even identical twins…

Our individual fates, health and perhaps even some of our actions may have much more to do with the variation in the genes found in our microbiome than in our genes.

—Ackerman, Jennifer. June 2010. “The Ultimate Social Network.” Scientific American.

Without a loving and supportive environment, no child can reach his or her full potential, they said. But when it came to explaining why a particular group of children ended up with different IQ scores, 75 percent of the variation was due to genetics, not parenting.

—Peter Miller. “A Thing or Two About Twins.” National Geographic. January, 2012.

We forget that 50 years ago things like alcoholism and heart disease were thought to be caused entirely by lifestyle. Schizophrenia was thought to be due to poor mothering. Twin studies have allowed us to be more reflective about what people are actually born with and what’s caused by experience.

—Peter Miller. “A Thing or Two About Twins.” National Geographic. January, 2012.

I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, nor more than the poet could help the inspiration to song, nor the ambition of the intellectual man to be great.

—H. H. Holmes. As quoted in “H. H. Holmers and the Mysteries of the Murder Castle, Part 2.” Stuff You Missed in History Class. January 25, 2012.

—Richard Winston in Charlemagne (1960).

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!

—Emma Goldman in Anarchism and Other Essays.

Thirty-six percent of Americans, about 80 million people, believe UFOs exist, and a tenth believe they have spotted one, a new National Geographic poll shows.

—Harish, Alon. June 27, 2012. “UFOs Exist, Say 36 Percent in National Geographic Survey.” ABC News. Accessed July 10, 2012 at http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ufos-exist-americans-national-geographic-survey/story?id=16661311.

Back in the late 1960s psychologist Walter Mischel…offered preschoolers attending the Bing Nursery School a choice: they could pick out a cookie, pretzel or marshmallow and eat it now, or if they waited a while, they would get two treats instead of one. Fast-forward to high school: the kids who could wait for the second treat had higher SAT scores…The patient preschoolers also were better able to pay attention as adolescents; they found it easier to maintain friendships and were less likely to display behavioral problems at school and at home. Mischel trailed this clan into their 30s. He found the ones who had staved off temptation as children were thinner and less likely to have had drug problems as adults.

—Wickelgren, Ingrid. September/October 2012. “The Education of Character.” Scientific American Mind.

The egalitarian institutions--and when I'm saying this, I don't mean redistribution all the way down. Basic fairness in terms of opportunity. This has two results. One, it lowers transactions costs, because when people believe that when they have a dispute with somebody with whom they are engaged, the dispute will be resolved fairly. It's not that the nobleman will always win and the villein will always lose. So, it lowers transactions costs. It increases the potential then for profitable exchanges. And it also increases investment in human capital because if I don't fear that the proceeds of my investments in myself are going to be expropriated by somebody else--some powerful nobleman, for example, who is going to force me into servitude, then I am willing to engage in more investment and therefore willing to do the kind of training that leads to this sort of extensive specialization that we were talking about a little bit earlier.

—Ober, Josiah. August 6, 2012. “Ober on the Ancient Greek Economy.” Econtalk podcast. Library of Economics and Liberty. Interviewed by Russell Roberts.

The relations of those who have died give all the goods they have purchased as presents to their friends, thereby reducing themselves to poverty, to show the great spirit that they are humble, so that he will take pity on them.

—Blackhawk. 1955. The Autobiography of Black Hawk.

The crane dance often lasts two or three days. When this is over, we feast again and have our national dance. The large square in the village is swept and prepared for the purpose. The chiefs and old warriors take seats on mats, which have been spread on the upper end of the square, next come the drummers and singers, the braves and women form the sides, leaving a large space in the middle. The drums beat and the singing commences. A warrior enters the square keeping time with the music. He shows the manner he started on a war party, how he approached the enemy, he strikes and shows how he killed him. All join in the applause, and he then leaves the square and another takes his place. Such of our young men have not been out in war parties and killed in enemy stand back ashamed, not being allowed to enter the square. I remember that I was ashamed to look where our young men stood, before I could take my stand in the ring as a warrior.

What pleasure it is to an old warrior, to see his son come forward and relate his exploits. It makes him feel young, induces him to enter the square and fight his battles o'er again.

—Blackhawk. 1955. The Autobiography of Black Hawk.

99 percent of human history was spent on the open savanna in small hunter-gatherer bands.

—Sapolsky, Robert M. September 2012. “Super Humanity.” Scientific American. Sapolsky is quoting what he believes the typical anthropologist says often.

Through the worship or honoring of the dead, the generations were bound together in a stabilizing continuity of obligations, so that the family was not merely a couple and their children, or even a patriarchal assemblage of parents, children, and grandchildren, but a holy union and sequence of blood and fire stretching far into the past and the future, and holding the dead, the living, and the unborn in a sacred unity stronger than any state…In all these ways Greek religion was used as a defense by the community and the race against the natural egoism of the individual man.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 8: The Gods of Greece. Page 201.

Work

Still more fatal is the crime of turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making.

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,—too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production: its goal is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the individual.

—Emma Goldman in Anarchism and Other Essays.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.

…

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

—Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

—Steve Jobs

And yet this may have been the most wholesome form of industrial organization in history. Its productivity was low, its degree of contentment was probably and relatively high. The worker remained near his family; he determined the hours and (in some measure) the price of his work; his pride in his skill gave him character and confidence; he was an artist as well as an artisan; and he had the artist’s satisfaction of seeing an integral product taking form under his hands.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 625. Refers to work in the High Middle Ages, before industrialization.

Music & Art

They say that Alexander [the Great’s] hand jerked toward his sword at the sound of Xenophantus’s flute.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). On Anger. From Anger, Mercy, Revenge. 2010. The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Robert A. Kaster.

Colbert: There’s so many things to talk about it’s hard to choose.

Baptiste: There’s a lot going on in the world.

Colbert: It’s hard to make a decision of what we are going to focus on, on a night-to-night basis.

Baptiste: It’s like a buffet.

Colbert: The world is our buffet, that’s exactly right.

Baptiste: You don’t know what to put on your plate, you’ve only got an hour or so.

…

Colbert: But you gotta make a decision, right? …

Baptiste: It reminds me of how long it takes for me to make decisions sometimes.

Colbert: Oh really? How to you make decisions?

Baptiste: Indecision.

Colbert: You make your decision through indecision?

Baptiste: Yeh. I don’t decide, and then I write a song about it. And then everything is okay after that.

Colbert: So you just distract yourself from the decision you have to make? You say, I’ll write a song instead? And don’t those indecisions just tie a noose in the back of your mind that you eventually have to deal with?

Baptiste: No, that’s art.

—Dialogue between Colbert and Baptiste on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. March 31, 2016.

You must know Beethoven’s music because no one has ever said anything deeper about what it means to be human, to look life and death in the eye, to know beauty at its purest and most intense—if you can take it. Because Beethoven asserts his own mere human self against the whole cosmos and makes it listen; he addressed God face-to-face, like Moses, whether God listens or not. And so people all over the world study and listen to and perform his music with much reverence.

—Gelernter, David. March 21-22, 2015. C5. A response to the question, “Why should we know anything about Beethoven.”

The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state, for styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions…The new style, gradually gaining a lodgment, quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs, and from these it…goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturning everything.

—Plato (424-349 BC). The Republic. Book IV: Wealth, Poverty, and Virtue.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom or philosophy.

—Ludwig van Beethoven

Without music, life would be a mistake.

—Friedrich Nietzsche.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

—Walter Pater.

It is high time to put an end, once and for all, to this unseemly and sacrilegious conception of art as religion and the theatre as a temple. The following argument will readily show the absurdity of such pitiful aesthetics: one cannot imagine a believer adopting a critical attitude towards a religious service. That would be a contradiction in terms; the believer would cease to be a believer.

—Igor Stravinsky, in An Autobiography

For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc...Expression has never been an inherent property of music.

—Igor Stravinsky, in An Autobiography

Music was essential to the whole process, for without music religion would difficult; music generates religion as much as religion generates music.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 8: The Gods of Greece. Page 193.

…listen, play, love, revere—and keep your damn mouth shut.

—Advice from Albert Einstein on loving Bach’s music.

Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.

—Igor Stravinsky, in An Autobiography

...confirm my long-standing conviction that it is impossible for anyone to grasp fully the art of a bygone period, to penetrate beneath the obsolete form and discern the author's meaning in a language no longer spoken, unless he has a comprehensive and lively feeling for the present, and unless he consciously participates in the life around him.

—Igor Stravinsky, in An Autobiography

Fingers are not to be despised: they are great inspirers, and, in contact with a musical instrument, often give birth to subconscious ideas which might otherwise never come to life.

—Igor Stravinsky, in An Autobiography

I’d dreamt of that guitar, [Jake Bugg] says…And I do believe that guitars have souls.

—Bugg, Jake. May 9, 2013. “Best of Rock.” Rolling Stone magazine.

...people will always insist upon looking in music for something that is not in there. The main thing for them is to know what the piece expresses, and what the author had in mind when he composed it. They never seem to understand that music has an entity of its own apart from anything that it may suggest to them.

—Igor Stravinsky, in An Autobiography

When people have learned to love music for itself, when they listen with other ears, their enjoyment will be of a far higher and more potent order, and they will be able to judge it on a higher plane and realize its intrinsic value.

—Igor Stravinsky, in An Autobiography

For me, as a creative musician, composition is a daily function that I feel compelled to discharge. I compose because I am made for that and cannot do otherwise.

—Igor Stravinsky, in An Autobiography

Sometimes we don't know if the stuff we're buying is historically significant, but because the prices are so high, we need to believe they're important.

—Howard Rachofsky, art collector, from The Wall Street Journal (April 1, 2011; D2).

Whereabouts does story, music, and art?

Through what channel do these find the heart?

Only in dreams can these abstract treasures,

deliver such sting, and convey such pleasure.

—F. Bailey Norwood, in Matrona's Four Children

“How shall we find a gentle nature which has also great courage?” Music mixed with athletics will do it.

—Durant, Will. 1917. Philosophy and the Social Problem. The Macmillan Company.

I suggest that we can view art as a kind of cognitive play, the set of activities designed to engage human attention through their appeal to our preference for inferentially rich and therefore patterned information.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 85.

Art as a kind of cognitive play stimulates our brains more than does routine processing of the new environment. It offers what biologists call a supernormal stimulus, an incentive more intense than usual, in this case a rush of the kinds of patterned information that our minds particular crave. Because neural connections establish themselves piecemeal through experience, and because we find art self-rewarding, because we engage in it eagerly and repeatedly, art can over time fine-tune our minds for rapid response in the information modes that matter most to us.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 94.

Animals learn best to attune themselves to one another through the pleasures of play, taking urns, checking to see that their partners still seek the “high” of intense mutual engagement. Humans, more flexible in behavior and dependent for much longer in childhood broaden and lengthen social play, not only in childhood but right throughout adult life. And the extend it, crucially, into the cognitive play of art...Engagement in art, as participant or as spectator, has the same self-rewarding nature as play, and since its very goal is to capture and reward attention, it can succeed to the point of compulsiveness.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 104-105.

Art shows imaginations at their freest, shaping the world on their own terms, at the furthest remove from biological necessity. If evolution can help to account even for art, it can surely contribute to any explanation of human behavior. Of course, evolution alone cannot explain every feature of an art or an artist: not even Shakespeare had genes for writing Hamlet. But without considering fiction’s origins we cannot follow its full story; indeed, we start almost at the end of the story. Without a biocultural perspective we cannot appreciate how deeply surprising fiction is, and how deeply natural.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories.

We can define art as cognitive play with pattern.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 15.

...artists can be strongly driven by the desire for wide, high, or long-lasting attention. As H.G. Wells observed, “A mad millionaire who commissioned masterpieces to burn would find it impossible to buy hem. Scarcely any artists will hesitate in the choice between money and attention.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 111.

Now and then pleasure arises, not from restoring a deficiency or discharging an excess, but from something that affects and excites our senses with a hidden but unmistakable force, and attracts them to itself. Such is the power of music.

—Thomas More in Utopia, 1516.

Music is certainly sound. But sound isn’t necessarily music. Sound, they say, doesn’t exist in the vacuum of outer space. Sound needs a medium to travel through. An exploding sun would be totally silent, therefore, if heard from space. It would follow that music—being sound—also needs a medium to travel through.

That’s exactly where we come in.

—Robert W. Spryszak in the introduction to SK Waller’s With A Dream (2009).

Society and Government

Freedom and Liberty

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
—Bertrand Russell

The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction…The excess of liberty, whether in states or individuals, seems only to pass into slavery…and the most aggravated form of tyranny arises out of the most extreme form of liberty.

—Plato (424-349 BC). The Republic. Book VIII.

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own…No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome, as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty.

—John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) in The History of Freedom in Antiquity.

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion. The State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. Beyond the limits of things necessary for its well-being, it can only give indirect help to fight the battle of life by promoting the influences which prevail against temptation,--religion, education, and the distribution of wealth. In ancient times the State absorbed authorities not its own, and intruded on the domain of personal freedom.

—John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) in The History of Freedom in Antiquity.

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
—Bertrand Russell

I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality.

—American colonist John Randolph.

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
—Bertrand Russell

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
—George Bernard Shaw

The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

—John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) in The History of Freedom in Antiquity.

The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another’s rights. It is a search to which I’ve dedicated my writing and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake.

—Mario Vargas Llosa. November 8, 2011. “Literature and the Search for Liberty.” The Wall Street Journal. A19.

To the imperial epoch belong the better part of Roman literature and nearly the entire Civil Law; and it was the Empire that mitigated slavery, instituted religious toleration, made a beginning of the law of nations, and created a perfect system of the law of property. The Republic which Cæsar overthrew had been anything but a free State. It provided admirable securities for the rights of citizens; it treated with savage disregard the rights of men; and allowed the free Roman to inflict atrocious wrongs on his children, on debtors and dependants, on prisoners and slaves.

—John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) in The History of Freedom in Antiquity.

Machiavelli has not understood the true nature of the sovereign…Far from being the adsolute master of those who are under his rule, he is only the first of their servants, and should be the instrument of their welfare, as they are the instrument of his glory.

—The young Frederick the Great. Source: Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part IX. The Age of Voltaire. Chapter XIII: Frederick and Maria Theresa. Page 446.

in the saying of Aristotle, that the mark of the worst governments is that they leave men free to live as they please.

—John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) in The History of Freedom in Antiquity.

Before long, lands lay abandoned as indebted farmers fled their homes for fear of repossession and joined semi-nomadic bands on the desert fringes of urban civilization. Faced with the potential for complete social breakdown, Sumerian and later Babylonian kings periodically announced general amnesties: “clean slates,” … Such decrees would typically declare all outstanding debt null and void.

In Sumeria, these were called “declarations of freedom”—and it is significant that the Sumerian word amargi, the first recorded word for “freedom” in any known human language, literally means “return to mother”—since this is what freed debt-peons were finally allowed to do.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to pre- vent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body, the individual is sovereign.

—John Stuart Mill. On Liberty. Chapter 1.

…That aim is to secure “the liberty of each, limited alone by the like liberty of all.” Let us see clearly what we mean. Each man and woman are to be free to direct their faculties and their energies, according to their own sense of what is right and wise, in every direction, except one. They are not to use their faculties for the purpose of forcibly restraining their neighbor from the same free use of his faculties. We claim for A and B perfect freedom as regards themselves, but on the one condition that they respect the same freedom as regards C. If A and B are stronger either in virtue of greater physical strength or greater numbers than their neighbor C, they must neither use their superior strength after the simply brutal fashion of those who live by violence, to tie C's hands and take from him what he possesses, or after the less brutal

but equally unjust fashion, to pass laws to direct C as to the manner in which he shall use his faculties and live his life.

—Auberon, Herbert. 1885. The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays.

Under a system of the widest possible liberty, each man thinks and acts according to his own judgment and his own sense of right. He labors as he will, making such free bargains as he chooses respecting the price and all other conditions that affect his labor…

…

He must himself meet and overcome the difficulties of life. Just because he is a free man, he must carry his own burden, such as it is, and not seek to compel others to bear any part of it for him. The really free man will neither submit to restrictions placed on himself, nor desire to

impose them on others.

—Auberon, Herbert. 1885. The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays.

In presence of unlimited power lodged in the hands of those who govern, in the absence of any universal acknowledgment of individual rights, the stakes for which men played would be so terribly great that they would shrink from no means to keep power out of the hands of their opponents. Not only would the scrupulous man become unscrupulous, and the pitiful man cruel, but the parties into which society divided itself would begin to perceive that to destroy or be destroyed was the one choice lying in front of them. How true it is that the great evils under which men have suffered have always been those of their own invention; that man has been and still continues to be his own tormentor!

—Auberon, Herbert. 1885. The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays.

When men understand that their greatest gift is their intelligence, that their glory is to use it, that their own will is their trusted guide to chart their course, that their labors are theirs to choose, that the fruits of them are theirs are theirs to keep, and that the surrendering this immense power to the rule of others is beneath the dignity of man—that’s when the new age will soar to heights unimaginable.

—Gen LaGreca in A Dream of Daring.

“Freedom,” in the Bible, as in Mesopotamia, came to refer above all to release from the effects of debt.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

‘Freedom’ is a grand work, but under the banner of freedom for industry the most predatory wars were waged, under the banner of freedom for labour, the working people were robbed.

—Vladimir Lenin in What Is To Be Done?. From: Figes, Orlando. 1996. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (1892-1924). Penguin Books: NY, NY.

Deep down we both know that the salvation of Russia is to be found in the restoration of the monarchy, and that what has happened during the past two months has clearly shown that the people were incapable of exercising freedom.

—Miliukov in 1917. Figes, Orlando. 1996. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (1892-1924). Penguin Books: NY, NY.

For [classical] liberals, however, it is a great incentive to know that we are working toward an attainable goal. The idea of a world united around a culture of liberty is not a utopia but a beautiful and achievable reality that justifies our efforts.

—Llosa, Mario Vargas. 2000. Global Fortune. Cato Institute.

Lao Tzu

Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.

—unknown. From The Art of Ancient Wisdom facebook page.

Managing a big country

Is like cooking a small fish.

The more you stir them,

the less their shape can be maintained

—Lao Tzu. Tao Teh Ching. 60. Translated by Hua-Ching Ni. Seven Star Communications: Los Angeles, California. 1979.

When the government does not interfere

the people are simple and happy.

When the government does interfere,

The people are tense and cunning.

—Lao Tzu. Tao Teh Ching. 58. Translated by Hua-Ching Ni. Seven Star Communications: Los Angeles, California. 1979.

When serving the public, use upright means

When commanding troops in war,

employ the principle of surprise.

To win the world, do nothing to interfere with it.

Why? Because the more prohibitions and inhibitions

That are imposed on people,

the more difficult their lives become

…

Therefore, the ancient sages of natural virtue said:

“I do nothing, and people’s contention

Dissolves by itself.

I enjoy serenity; and people rectify themselves.

I make no effort, and people enrich themselves.

I have no desire, and people return to simplicity.

—Lao Tzu. Tao Teh Ching. 57. Translated by Hua-Ching Ni. Seven Star Communications: Los Angeles, California. 1979.

Why are people starving and leading a difficult life?

Is it not because their rulers

consume too much tax grain?

Is that why they are starving and leading a difficult life?

—Lao Tzu. Tao Teh Ching. 75. Translated by Hua-Ching Ni. Seven Star Communications: Los Angeles, California. 1979.

Only by cultivating the virtue of wholeness

And by returning injury with kindness

can there be true harmony.

Therefore, one of deep virtue always gives

Without expecting gratitude.

…

Although the subtle Way of the universe

Holds no favoritism or partiality,

It always supports those who are naturally virtuous.

—Lao Tzu. Tao Teh Ching. 59. Translated by Hua-Ching Ni. Seven Star Communications: Los Angeles, California. 1979.

In managing people and serving Heaven,

there is nothing better

than sparing unnecessary activities and expense.

—Lao Tzu. Tao Teh Ching. 59. Translated by Hua-Ching Ni. Seven Star Communications: Los Angeles, California. 1979.

Democracy

Democracy, Mann continues, is the only system built on respect for the infinite dignity of each individual man and woman, on each person’s moral striving for freedom, justice and truth. It would be a great error to think of and teach democracy as a procedural or political system, or as the principle of majority rule.

—Brooks, David. December 14, 2017. “The Glory of Democracy.” The New York Times. Editorial.

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
—H.L. Mencken

Voting may be one of the sloppiest feedback loops around, but it is feedback nonetheless.

—Steven D. Levitt and Stephan J. Dubner. 2014. Think Like a Freak. William Morrow: NY, NY. Page 20.

My wish? That Tunisia would stop and go back to the way we lived before. Life has gotten more expensive—too expensive. This population can’t handle freedom. It’s true, I swear to God, look what freedom has done. Where it has taken us.

—An unemployed seamstress remarking on Tunisia after the revolution replacing a military dictatorship with democracy. PBS Newshour Podcast. November 26, 2013. “Tunisia, birthplace of the Arab…”

Though the [communes, or city governments] soon narrowed their membership to a mercantile aristocracy, the municipal assemblies were the first representative government since Tiberius; they, rather than Magna Carta, were the chief parent of modern democracy.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 641.

Look, politicians respond. If the people are asleep and not involved, they respond to the lobbyists and donors. But when people speak up and fight, if you want to survive [as a politician], you have to respond. My job is to activate people to fight for their rights and force Congress to respond to the needs of working families.

—Bernie Sanders in 2015. Quoted in: Dickinson, Tim. December 3, 2015. “The Rolling Stone Interview: Bernie Sanders.”

It was a momentous step in the progress of nations when the principle that every interest should have the right and the means of asserting itself was adopted by the Athenian Constitution. But for those who were beaten in the vote there was no redress. The law did not check the triumph of majorities or rescue the minority from the dire penalty of having been outnumbered. When the overwhelming influence of Pericles was removed, the conflict between classes raged without restraint, and the slaughter that befell the higher ranks in the Peloponnesian war gave an irresistible preponderance to the lower. The restless and inquiring spirit of the Athenians was prompt to unfold the reason of every institution and the consequences of every principle, and their Constitution ran its course from infancy to decrepitude with unexampled speed.

—John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) in The History of Freedom in Antiquity.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
—George Bernard Shaw

The basic principle of democracy is freedom inviting chaos; the basic principle of monarchy is power inviting tyranny, revolution, and war.

—Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part II. The Life of Greece. Chapter XXIII: Greece and Macedon. Page 558.

A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece.
—Ludwig Erhard

It is the essence of Democracy, he said, to obey no master but the law.

—John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) in The History of Freedom in Antiquity.

…indirect elections are a safeguard of conservation…A restricted suffrage is another reputed security for monarchy.

—John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) in The History of Freedom in Antiquity.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White

Tell a thousand people to draft a letter, let them debate every phrase, and see how long it takes and what you get.

—Catherine the Great

But if the authority resides in the collective whole, it is evident that with the disagreement of even one person, the whole is no longer existent or operative; in which case no general action whatever could be legitimately undertaken. The prime presumption has vanished. In practice then democracy must abandon its own pretended entity of the collective whole, and rely upon majority. But majority is only a part; thus majority rule implies inconceivably that the part is greater than the whole.
—Isabel Paterson in The God of the Machine

Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
—Laurence J. Peter

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

—Adam Smith quoted on page 232 of Adam Smith, by Nicholas Phillipson

A perfect democracy can come close to looking like a dictatorship, a democracy in which the people are so satisfied they have no complaint.

—Huey Long, 1933 (Williams, Huey Long, p. 762)

The “tyranny” of Peisistratus was part of a general movement in the commercially active cities of sixth-century Greece, to replace the feudal rule of a landowning aristocracy with the political dominance of the middle class in temporary alliance with the poor. Such dictatorships were brought on by the pathological concentration of wealth, and the inability of the wealthy to agree on a compromise. Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability of subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 122.

Thus, after centuries of tsarist rule, and after its February and October revolutions, Russia enjoyed its one and only day of democracy.

—Edward Rutherfurd in Russka: A Novel of Russia (note: Russka was written before 1991)

Liberal democracy is more than majority voting in elections; it is a complex set of institutions that restrain and regularize the exercise of power through law and a system of checks and balances.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY.

The mere fact that a country has democratic institutions tells us very little about whether it is well or badly governed. This failure to deliver on the promise of democracy poses what is perhaps the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of such political systems.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY.

…gossip and slander seem essential to democracy.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 117. Stated in the context of Solon’s leadership in Greece where he was unable to prevent people from speaking ill of the dead or evil of the living while in temples, courts, public offices, or games.

Some observers, awed by Hitler’s decisive march to power in Berlin, or by the enviable efficiency of Benito Mussolini’s regime in Rome or Joseph Stalin’s in Moscow, urged that the dictators be imitated in America...The Republical governor of Kansas declared that “even the iron hand of a national dictator is in preference to a paralytic stroke.”

—David M. Kennedy describing the Great Depression in Freedom From Fear.

...in a recent poll by the Pew Foundation, Russians, by a margin of 57% to 32%, preferred to rely on strong leadership rather than democracy to deliver good government.

—The Economist magazine. December 10, 2011. “The Cracks Appear.” Leaders. Page 13.

A YEAR and a half after the optimism of the Arab spring, the Middle East is in frightening turmoil. Syria is close to sliding into a full-scale civil war whose outcome is unknowable, though its bloodstained president, Bashar Assad, looks likely sooner or later to fall. Libya, mercifully shorn of its crazy tyrant, is being periodically rocked by the still-untamed militias that ousted him; its general election, scheduled for this month, has been pushed back until next. Yemen, having shed its ruling bully of 33 years, has become al-Qaeda’s favourite haunt. Tunisia, which had been gliding most smoothly from despotism to democracy, has seen riots by religious extremists (see article). Sudan’s vile government and Oman’s more amiable one have also both been rattled by protests. And in Saudi Arabia a long-lingering succession crisis is back starkly in the spotlight with the death of its crown prince (see article).

—The Economist magazine. June 23, 2012. “Egypt in Peril.” Page 13.

Perhaps this is a victory from beyond the grave for classical Western political theory. Republics, after all, were regarded by most ancient political philosophers as condemned to decadence, or to imperial corruption. This was the lesson of Rome. Democracy was always likely to give way to oligarchy or tyranny. This was the lesson of the French Revolution. The late Mancur Olson had a modern version of such cyclical models, arguing that all political systems were bound to become the captives, over time, of special interests. The advantage enjoyed by West Germany and Japan after World War II, he suggested, was that all the rent-seeking elites of the pre-1945 period had been swept away by defeat. This was why Britain won the war but lost the peace.

—Ferguson, Niall. June 8-9, 2013. “The Real Drag on the Economy.” The Wall Street Journal. C1.

The discussions in St. Petersburg were providing even more unproductive and divisive than those in Moscow. The commission continued to stumble along, burdened by procedure, by conflicts of class, and by the generally impossible nature of the task...Many peasant delegates simply transferred their limited rights to speak to nobleman from their districts. The few free peasants who did speak concentrated on grasping their chance to lay their complaints before the empress herself. Catherine, listening as they jumbled together every abuse, burden, and future fear, realized how far they were—and how far she was not—from Montesquieu. By the autumn of 1768, still without seeing any concrete results, the empress was tired. The commission had dragged on for eighteen months through more than two hundred sessions and not one new law had been written.

—Robert K. Massie. 2011. Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Women. Page 360. Random House, NY, NY.

Thus every small holder had learned by personal experience how little heed was given to the rights of individuals when it was in the public interest to ride roughshod over them – a lesson he took care to keep in mind when it was a question of applying it to others for his own benefit.

—Alexis de Tocqueville. 1856. The Old Regime and the French Revolution.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of

expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

—Henry David Thoreau in Civil Disobedience.

In other words, the Greeks gave a solid 46% of their vote to parties that are evil, crazy or both, even while erring on the side of “sanity” with parties that are merely foolish and discredited.

—Stephens, Bret. June 19, 2012. “The Decline of Democracy.” Global View column. The Wall Street Journal. A11.

Greek religion itself had paved the way by talking of Moira, or Fate, as ruler of both gods and men: here was that idea of law, as superior to incalculable personal decree, which would market the essential difference between science and mythology, as well as between despotism and democracy. Man became free when he recognize that he was subject to law.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 3: The Heroic Age. Page 135-6.

Not only in Egypt, but in Tunisia, Turkey and Gaza, popular majorities have made a democratic choice for parties that put faith before freedom and substituted the word of God for the rule of law.

—Stephens, Bret. June 19, 2012. “The Decline of Democracy.” Global View column. The Wall Street Journal. A11.

ALMOST half the world’s population now lives in a democracy, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister organisation of this newspaper. And the number of democracies has increased pretty steadily since the second world war. But it is easy to forget that most nations have not been democratic for much of their history and that, for a long time, democracy was a dirty word among political philosophers.

One reason was the fear that democratic rule would lead to ruin. Plato warned that democratic leaders would “rob the rich, keep as much of the proceeds as they can for themselves and distribute the rest to the people”. James Madison, one of America’s founding fathers, feared that democracy would lead to “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property and for any other improper or wicked projects”. Similarly John Adams, the country’s second president, worried that rule by the masses would lead to heavy taxes on the rich in the name of equality. As a consequence, “the idle, the vicious, the intemperate would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them.”

Democracy may have its faults but alternative systems have proved no more fiscally prudent. Dictatorships may still feel the need to bribe their citizens (eg, via subsidised fuel prices) to ensure their acquiescence while simultaneously spending large amounts on the police and the military to shore up their power. The absolute monarchies of Spain and France suffered fiscal crises in the 17th and 18th centuries, and were challenged by Britain and the Netherlands which, though not yet democracies, had dispersed power more widely. Financial problems contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, with much of the democratic world now in the throes of a debt crisis, it is tempting to ask whether the fears of Madison and Adams have come to pass. Given the rise in inequality in America and Britain over the past 30 years, it is hard to argue that democracies have led to the confiscation of private wealth. Quite the reverse: modern American politicians either need to be wealthy, or need the financial backing of the rich.

But there is a broader problem. Modern governments play a much larger role in the economy than the ancient Greeks or the founding fathers could have imagined. This makes political leaders a huge source of patronage, in the form of business contracts, social benefits, jobs and tax breaks. As the late political scientist, Mancur Olson, pointed out, these goodies are highly valuable to the recipients but the cost to the average voter of any single perk will be small. So beneficiaries will have every incentive to lobby for the retention of their perks and taxpayers will have little reason to campaign against them. Over time the economy will be weighed down by all these costs, like a barnacle-encrusted ship. The Greek economy could be seen as a textbook example of these problems.

One answer could be to take fiscal policy out of the hands of elected leaders, just as responsibility for monetary policy has been handed to independent central bankers. To some extent, that has been happening. Greece was briefly run by Lucas Papademos, an unelected former central banker, and Italy is still ruled by Mario Monti, a former EU commissioner. These technocrats are, it is assumed, more willing to take unpopular decisions.

Another approach, with which America has occasionally flirted, is to pass decisions to a bipartisan commission. (This may be the best answer to the “fiscal cliff” that looms in 2013.) Since the decisions of such a commission, and indeed of technocrats in Greece and Italy, are still subject to a parliamentary vote, democracy is not completely abandoned.

For a long time, there did not seem to be any limit to the amount democracies could borrow. Creditors have been more patient with democratic governments than with other regimes, probably because the risk of abrupt changes of policy (like the repudiation of Tsarist debts by Russia in 1917) are reduced. But this has postponed the crunch point, rather than eliminated it—and allowed stable democracies to accumulate higher debt, relative to their GDP, than many, more volatile countries ever achieved. Governments can, as Madison suggested, confiscate the wealth of domestic creditors via inflation, taxes or default. But however often they vote, democracies cannot make foreign lenders extend credit. That harsh truth is now being discovered.

—The Economist. September 1, 2012. “Democracies and debt.” Page 71.

In all of American history, a single vote has never determined the outcome of a presidential election. And there are precious few examples of any other elections decided by a single vote.

…

Economist Aaron Edlin use poll results from the 2008 election cycle to calculate that the chance of a randomly selected vote determining the outcome of a presidential elect6ion is about one in 60 million.

…

…people do not typically vote in ways that align with their personal material interests. The old, for instance, don’t support Social Security in higher numbers than the young.

…the expected value of casting a ballot for that candidate is $4.77x 10 to the -2,650 power. That’s 2,648 orders of magnitude less than a penny.

…Simply not driving to the polls slightly reduces the chance that you or someone else will die in a car accident on Election Day, which is worth more than your vote can ever hope to be.

…

…Education is one of the two best predictors of voter turnout (the other is age).

…

What is the arguments against voting were so persuasive that everyone stopped voting? This worry, which channels the categorical imperative of 18^th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, posits that if everyone behaved as the nonvoters do, the whole system would fall apart. A certain minimum level of participation is necessary for elections to appear legitimate.

…

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Maybe people vote not because of what voting can accomplish, but because they like to vote. They like the message that voting sends about who they are (e.g., the kind of person who cares about poverty, or fiscal responsibility, or what his neighbors think).

Many people like to be perceived as altruistic, for example. Voting is one of the cheapest forms of altruism… “Voting sociotropically,” Jason Brennan writes, “is cheaper and easier than volunteering at a soup kitchen or giving money to Oxfam.

A 2009 survey of 569 professors…reinforces this view: 88 percent said they considered voting in public elections to be morally good. In fact, when asked to rank different acts, the professors reported that they considered voting to be on par with regularly donating blood and giving 10 percent of one’s income to charity.

…Communicating preferences at the ballot box is something people do for its own sake, not a duty they perform or a selfish bid for material gain.

So maybe voting is like going to a football game decked out in team colors and cheering as loudly as you can.

—Katherine Mangu-Ward. November 2012. “Your Vote Doesn’t Count: Why (almost) everyone should stay home on Election Day.” Reason magazine.

“Voters are basically interested in making an effort to understand what we’re talking about,” the Clinton advisor William Gavin wrote in a memo. “Reason requires a higher degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier,” he wrote in another memo. “Reason pushes the viewer back, assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…When we argue with him we demand that he make the effort of replying. We seek to engage his intellect, and for most people this is the most difficult work of all. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

—Lepore, Jill. September 24, 2012. “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business.” The New Yorker.

Activism

Activism is the art of forcing people to behave in ways they will later thank you for.

—F. Bailey Norwood

Activists gonna activate — and often that involves hyperbole, or outright distortion. Also, it’s risky for a journalist to spend time fact-checking activists, because it looks like you are shooting at the ambulance. A journalist is supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, as Finley Peter Dunne put it.

—Johnson, Nathanael. July 15, 2015. “Slate: Anti-GMO activists say the darnedst things.” Grist.org. Accessed July 16, 2015 http://grist.org/food/slate-anti-gmo-activists-say-the-darnedest-things/.

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

—Frederick Douglass. 1857. If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress.

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

—Gandhi, Mahatma. Quoted in: Effendi, Rena and Tom O’Neill. July 2015. “In the Footsteps of Gandhi.” National Geographic.

We are here to show you things you really don’t want to see.

—Matthews, Dan [guest and senior vice president of PETA]. August 18, 2013. Here’s the Thing [podcast]. Baldwin, Alec [host]. National Public Radio.

It goes back to my history degree…I’ve studied other movements in history and I’ve studied what made the women’s movement finally click, the civil rights movement, and it was always, without exception, agitation. There always had to be a cutting-edge group that may not have been popular in its day but historically was deemed the breakthrough organization to put this issue into the public discourse and finally get some change.

—Matthews, Dan [guest and senior vice president of PETA], responding to the question of why he has devoted so much of his life to PETA. August 18, 2013. Here’s the Thing [podcast]. Baldwin, Alec [host]. National Public Radio.

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part … And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

—Mario Savio of the Free Speech Movement in Queens, New York in the 1960s. Quoted in: Stern, Sol. September 24, 2014. The Wall Street Journal. A15.

Big Business Versus Big Government

Populists describe a moment with loud historical echoes. In their telling, Americans may be a business-friendly bunch most of the time, but still they rise up when a crisis exposes a capitalist game rigged by a wealthy few. That theory is largely right.

—The Economist. June 27, 2015. “Lexington: Capitalism in America.” Page 26.

But we really resent a bullying alpha male. And you see this, boy, do you see this in the Tea Party, where the bullying alpha male is the government. And it harkens back to the American Revolution and liberty, liberty, liberty. You see on the Left, too, where the bully is the corporations and the rich, and we need the government to protect us.
—Haidt, Jonathan [interviewee]. January 20, 2014. "Jonathan Haidt on the Righteous Mind." EconTalk [podcast]. Russell Roberts [interviewer]. Library of Economics and Liberty. Econlib.org.

Hawaii: TPP Negotiators Push for Deal by End of Day amid Protests

In Hawaii, negotiators from 12 countries are attempting to reach an agreement over the terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership by the end of the day. The sweeping trade deal, known as the TPP, would encompass 40 percent of the world’s global trade. This week, disagreements over farm exports and intellectual property rights for new drugs have kept the more than 600 negotiators from reaching a final deal. Meanwhile, outside the talks, hundreds of demonstrators gathered on the beach in Maui Wednesday to protest the ongoing talks. Marti Townsend, the director for the Sierra Club of Hawaii, spoke out against the trade pact as protesters blew shell horns in the background.

The harm government does when it screws up — wars, depressions — is larger than the benefits government produces when it does well. Therefore the moderate operates from a politics of skepticism, not a politics of faith.

—Brooks, David. August 22, 2017. “What Moderates Believe.” The New York Times. Editorial.

Marti Townsend: "I guess I don’t like bullying, and I feel that corporations right now are using their power to bully people around. The corporations are not elected, and they are not decision makers. People are elected, and people are the decision makers. And people need to feel their own power and recognize that they can stand up to this kind of bullying."

—Democracy Now! July 31, 2015. “Headlines.” Accessed August 3, 2015 at http://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/31/headlines

So government must somehow armor itself against the blandishes of interest groups, so the problem that we have is precisely that government is too susceptible, and this, I sound like a Marxist at this point, but this is actually, I think Marx was the first public choice theorist.

…

Marx is a different conclusion. Marx is: get rid of the corporations. I say, find a way to prevent government being bought and paid for by corporations.

—Munger, Mike. September 4, 2013. “Capitalism, Government, and the Good Society.” EconTalk.org. Accessed September 12, 2013 at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/capitalism_gove.html.

Mr. Krugman’s second, related error is his claim that “money brings power.” In fact, only government brings power. While it’s true that people with lots of money are disproportionately able to use whatever government power exists, a government of few and strictly limited powers would be unable to grant special privileges even to the wealthiest of people. The core problem, therefore, isn’t “money” or “the rich”; it is, instead, the existence of the expansive and vigorous government power that Mr. Krugman famously, if illogically, believes is key to freedom, prosperity, and greater equality.

—Boudreaux, Donald J. September 27, 2013. “Paul Krugman on Plutocracy.” Café Hayek [blog]. Accessed October 1, 2013 at http://cafehayek.com/2013/09/paul-krugman-on-plutocracy.html.

Property

Whoever would establish a government upon communal property ought to consult the experience of many years, which would plainly enough inform him whether such a scheme is useful; for almost all things have already been found out…What is common to many is taken least care of; for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others.

—Aristotle in Politics.

[In Tanzania] Most people are buried on family land to ensure their children’s right of occupancy. This makes borrowing money difficult. Banks will not accept grave land as collateral since they cannot repossess it.

—The Economist. December 21, 2013. “Upwardly Mobile Africa: The road to the top.” Pages 73-75.

All riches come from theft; every rich man is a thief or the heir of a thief.

—Remark of a 13^th century Bishop. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 648.

“My own,” say you? What is your own? When you came from your mother’s womb, what wealth did you bring with you? That which is taken by you, beyond what suffices you, is taken by violence. Is it that God is unjust in not distributing the means of life to us equally, so that you should have abundance while others are in want? Or is it not rather that He wished to confer upon you marks of His kindness, while He crowned your fellow man with the virtue of patience? You, then, who have received the gift of God, think you that you commit no injustice by keeping to yourself alone what would be the means of life to many? Is it the bread of the hungry you cling to, is it the clothing of the naked you lock up; the money you bury is the redemption of the poor.

—Ambrose., of the High Middle Ages Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 630.

The regime of property, so fundamental to the building of cities and the settlement of the land, arises then as a religious imperative.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 118.

Food and Agriculture

Industrialization of Ag

It’s fine to criticize industrial agriculture. But to reject scientific breakthroughs simply because they also happen to have helped foster industrialism is to allow ideology to cloud common sense. It would be like blaming cells for melanoma.

—McWilliams, James. March 26, 2015. “Proponents of Raw Milk Are No Better Than Anti-Vaccine Advocates.” Pacific Standard. Accessed March 27, 2015 at http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/raw-milk-is-a-raw-deal.

I can see that Gandhi would have seen the computer as a tool to empower the individual, but what about the industrial process and the hidden costs that it took to produce?

—Iyengar, Sudarshan, an economist who works at a university called Gujarat Vidyapith, which trains students in living like Mahatma Gandhi. Quoted in: Effendi, Rena and Tom O’Neill. July 2015. “In the Footsteps of Gandhi.” National Geographic.

His article “Farms” ascribed [the desertion of farms] to high taxes and conscription. The article “Grains” (1757) noted that small farms were incapable of profitably using the most productive methods, and favored large plantations managed by “entrepreneurs”—an anticipation of the agricultural mammoths of our time.

—Durant, Will. 1967. Rousseau and Revolution. The Story of Civilization: Part X. Simon and Schuster: NY, NY. Page 73.

The environmental damage is the cost of doing business, which is so abundantly successful that it allows for the presence of maybe as many as two billion people everywhere in the world who might not otherwise have been fed.

—Lewis H. Lapham. Lapham’s Quarterly. Food. Summer 2011. “The Midas Touch.” Page 17.

Together with every American housewife during the century denominated as America’s own, I welcomed the glut of packaged foods, was glad of the escape from having to cook, grateful for the kitchen conveniences, for the year-round strawberries, and the prompt home deliveries of saturated fat. In the company of travelers recently arrived from the Soviet Union and never before having seen a Stop & Shop, I shared their astonishment at the sight of what they perceived as a miracle.

—Lewis H. Lapham. Lapham’s Quarterly. Food. Summer 2011. “The Midas Touch.” Page 18.

When consumers in rich Western nations turn their attention to the failings in the food system, blame is generally divided between food companies, which, we’re certain, put profits before all else, and government regulators, who are outmaneuvered or corrupted by profit-driven power.

—Paul Roberts. 2008. Lapham’s Quarterly. Food. Summer 2011. “Feast or Famine.” Page 23. From his book The End of Food.

Physically, food is so unsuited to mass production that we’ve had to reengineer our plants and livestock to make them more readily harvested and processed.

—Paul Roberts. 2008. Lapham’s Quarterly. Food. Summer 2011. “Feast or Famine.” Page 23. From his book The End of Food.

The majority of the peasant proprietors who tilled forty-five per cent of the soil were condemned to poverty by the small size of their holdings, which limited the profitable use of machinery.

—Durant, Will. 1967. Rousseau and Revolution. The Story of Civilization: Part X. Simon and Schuster: NY, NY. Page 930.

Animal Welfare

“Caesar once, seeing some wealthy strangers at Rome carrying up and down with them in their arms and bosoms young puppy-dogs and monkeys, embracing and making much of them, took occasion not unnaturally to ask whether the women in their country were not used to bear children; by that princelike reprimand gravely reflecting upon persons who spend and lavish upon brute beasts that affection and kindness which nature has implanted in us to be bestowed on those of our own kind.”

—Plutarch in Plutarch’s Lives. The Complete Works of Plutarch. Parallel Lives: Volume 1. Thomas Y Crowell & Co. publishers: NY, NY.

[Many Native Americans] lived by hunting. And they believed that if they hunted and killed an animal it was because the animal had consented to be killed. The spirit of the animal had agreed. They knew they had to chase the animal and it would do everything it could to get away, but in the end, if it died, it was because a spiritual contract had been made. And there was an implicit reciprocity in the contract. The animal is saying, "I'll permit you to kill me and eat me, but in return I expect that my remains will be treated with the appropriate rituals of respect." ...

—Allitt, Patrick N. "Lecture 3: Natives and Newcomers." American Religious History. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

Man cares for all: to birds he gives his woods,

To beasts his pastures, and to fish his floods;

For some his interest prompts him to provide,

For more his pleasure, yet for more his pride:

All feed on one vain patron, and enjoy

The extensive blessing of his luxury.

That very life his learned hunger craves.

He saves from famine, from the savage saves:

Nay, feasts the animal he dooms his feast,

And, till he ends the being, makes it bless’d;

Which ses no more the stroke, or feels the pain.

Than favor’d man by touch ethereal slain.

The creature had his feast of life before;

Though too must perish when they feast is o’er!

To each unthinking being, Heaven, a friend,

Gives not the useless knowledge of its end:

To man imparts it; but with such a view

As, while he dreads it, makes him hope it too:

The hour conceal’d, and so remote the fear,

Death still draws nearer, never seeming near.

Great standing miracle! That heaven assign’d

Its only thinking thing this turn of mind.

—Alexander Pope. Essays on Man. Epistle III.

The peasant’s cottage was of fragile wood, usually thatched with straw and turf … As often as not the house had only one room, at most two … Pigs and fowl had the run of the house. The women kept the place as clean as circumstances would permit, but the busy peasants found cleanliness a nuisance, and stories told how Satan excluded serfs from hell because he could not bear their smell. Near the cottage was a barn with horse and cows, perhaps a beehive and a hennery. Near the barn was a dunghill to which all animal or human members of the household contributed. Roundabout were the tools of agriculture and domestic industry. A cat controlled the mice, and a dog watched over all.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 557. Refers to peasant villages in the High Middle Ages.

"Sometimes I wish there was an iPhone app that would help me forget where my iPhone was made."
—The late night show with Stephen Colbert 1/8/16

Most vegetarians I ever saw looked enough like their food to be classified as cannibals.

—Finley Peter Dunne. 1900. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. Summer 2011. Page 101.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

—Henry David Thoreau in Walden, 1854. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. Summer 2011. Page 155.

Gina: No, I don’t want to watch a living animal die and then consume its flesh.

Charles: How is this different than eating a turkey that’s been killed in a factory?

Gina: Because I don’t have to see that. It’s called living in denial, you moron.

—From Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Season 4. Episode 7. Aired November 22, 2016.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races, — race living at the expense of race.

—Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Fate.

—Brown, Joseph Epes (with Emily Cousins). 2001. Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Tradiations. Oxford University Press. Pages 13.

In the long nights of the winter the family welcomed the cattle into the cottage, thankful for the heat.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 559.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

—Samuel Butler. 1912. Quoted in: Lapham’s Quarterly. “Food.” Summer 2011. Page 32.

You believe me to be a holy man, but I confess to God and you that I have in this my infirmity eaten meat and broth made with meat.

—Saint Francis of Assise. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 793.

[The Cathari] had a black-robed clergy of priests and bishops called perfecti, who at their ordination vowed to leave parents, mate, and children, to devote themselves ‘to God and the Gospel … never to touch a woman, never to kill an animal, never to eat meat, eggs, or dairy food, nor anything but fish and vegetables.’

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 771.

What is chicken enrichment anyway? It could be yoga, that might be difficult. Video games? They do that for various animals. Sports? A gourmet meal? I think probably music is the best thing we can do to entice the chickens to come out and be happier, you know free range, roaming around. I think probably Ray Price would be the best person. Certainly not Prince. At any rate, something soothing.

—Pat Roberts. April 27, 2016. Speaking to the North Agricultural Journalists. Quoted in: Nosowitz, Dan. April 27, 2016. “Senator Pat Roberts Thinks Chicken Welfare is ‘Absolutely Ridiculous.’” Modern Farmer.

Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust,(9)
Yet cry, If Man's unhappy, God's unjust;

Alexander Pope

Eat vegetarian. A visit to a slaughter house will provide motivation. Eat only when hungry, and befriend yogurt.

—Moses Bailey’s lifetime wellness plan in his tenth decade. Quoted in: Cargill, Larry. 1986. Page 25. Daily Readings from Quaker Writings Ancient & Modern.

Poultry that are being reared for the table are cooped up in the dark so as to prevent them moving about and make them fatten easily; there they languish, getting no exercise, with the swelling taking possession of their sluggish bodies and the inert fat creeping over them in their magnificent seclusion.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter CXXII. Penguin Classics. Page 221.

“Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve better of Mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

— The King of Brobdingnag, Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, 1727.

Mid-morning on the third day of the [Olympic] games, priests began the sacrifice in the temple of Zeus, … a hundred oxen, draped with garlands, raised especially for the event and without marks of the plow, were led to the altar. The priests washed his hands in clear water in special metal vessels, poured out libations of wine, and sprinkled the animals with cold water or with grain to make them shake their heads as if consenting to their death. … Then the priest stunned the lead ox with a low to the base of the neck, thrust in the knife, and let the blood spill into a bowl held by a second priest. The killing would have gone on all day, even if each act took only five minutes.

—Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 64.

Symbolically, however, the meat was crucial. Few dared express doubts about the important civic act of eating meat. When they did, the reasons had nothing to do with animal cruelty.

—Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 65.

Many animals were sacrificed and eaten ... the animal was to be washed, soothed (since it was supposed to go willingly), anointed with sacred ghee, and strangled with a cord.

—Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 73.

The Garden of Eden was such a state of soul, not a place on the earth. All things are immortal: animals too, like men, have souls that pass back, after death, into the God or creative spirit from whom they emanated. All history is a vast outward flow of creation by emanation, and an irresistible inward tide that finally draws all things back.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 478.

Sacrifice, here, can be seen … as the transition of pre-civilization to civilization, or pre-culture to culture. [He] thinks that sacrifice is to displace the guilt humans felt in the early stages of culture over hunting and killing animals.

—Elizabeth Vandiver in Classical Mythology, lectures by The Teaching Company. Chapter 7.

I need to hunt and fish. My body doesn’t want to eat just these plants.

—Felipe [interviewee], a member of the primitive / isolated people of the Tsimane Indian tribe. Quoted in: Gibbons, Ann. September 2014. “The Evolution of Diet.” National Geographic. Page 40.

Bread

White bread was considered by many to be the best bread, because it was considered by many to be made of finer flour, which took much longer to produce since the grains needed to be sifted through an item called a bolting cloth, and usually more than once, in order to get rid of the bran and the germ of the bread and leave behind only the finest white grains. Because it was more labor intensive white bread certainly cost more, and was most often seen on the tables of nobles or very rich merchants. At a feast there would be a few communal loaves at the table and the highest ranking person at the table or guest of honor would get the first crack at the loaf, usually taking the best portion for himself, from whence most likely comes the association of the phrase “upper crust” of those within the upper echelons of society.

—Dorsey Armstrong in Medieval World. Lecture 25: Food and Drink. Around 9:10.

The modern English word “lord” still carries this political history in its bones. Lord derives from the Old English title “hláford”— “keeper of the bread”— a privileged status, but also a perpetually anxious one. Ruling has always meant a tense dance between the power of bread keepers and the demands of bread eaters.

—Bobrow-Strain, Aaron. White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf (p. 5). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

The bread I eat in London is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.

—British naval soldier Tobias Smollett in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. 1771/

The only reason [vitamins] needed to be added to the food, however, was that the basic American diet was so depleted. Take bread. Most of the vitamins and minerals in flour are in the outer layers of the wheat—the bran. The old method of milling white flour was to sift the crushed wheat through fine sieves or “bolting cloths”; this method retained many of the nutrients in the wheat. From the 1870s, however, a new efficient system of roller-milling came in, which passed the flour between steel cylinders, stripping it of most of its vitamins on the way. Standard, “70% extraction” white flour will have lost 60 percent of its calcium, 77 percent of its thiamine, 76 percent of its iron, and 80 percent of its riboflavin … Nutrition experts were terrified that America was suffering from “hungerless vitamin famine” as a result. The government did not like to tell people to return to more nutrient-dense whole wheat bread; it wouldn’t be popular. But during the 1930s, it had become commercially viable to produce vitamins on a large scale. So from 1940 onwards, inferior white flour was required to be enriched with thiamine, iron, and niacin …

…

In 1957, the Ministry of Health in Scotland reported adverse symptoms in a number of infants and young children: a failure to thrive, vomiting, weakness, and, in several cases, death. The problem was traced to excess levels of vitamin D in the food supply, because so many children were being fed up on vitamin D-enriched dried milk, plus cod liver oil.

—Bee Wilson in Swindled.

… a quiet, little, white-bread, redneck mountain town.

—Mountain Town Song. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut.

A message to the mother@#$%^& that owns the Clippers. You bitch ass, redneck, white bread, chicken shit mother@#$%^&. F#$% you, your mama and everything connected to you, you racist piece of shit. F#$% you!

—Snoop Dogg, in a YouTube reaction to Donald Sterling’s racist remarks.

Healthy Eating

… as John Adams attested: “How beneficial it would be,” he noted, “if more of our countrymen thought as freely as does Mr. Thomas Jefferson about fruits and vegetables.” The second president admired his friend ad successor’s appreciation for what a well-cultivated garden could produce, and he lamented that the broader American public failed to share this perspective.

—Carroll, Abigail. 2013. Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. Page 39. Basic Books: NY, NY.

The food of the peasant was substantial and wholesome—dairy products, eggs, vegetables, and meat; but genteel historians mourn that he had to eat black—i.e., whole grain---bread.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 557. Refers to peasant villages in the High Middle Ages.

You are what you eat. Sleep with one eye open. Follow your dreams. There’s a lot of them. Also, people today are dying slowly. They’re eitheron the Internet too much and they lose their job, or they’re fucking eating too much. All that stuff is going to take you down. It’s as obvious as balls on a tall dog.

—Steven Tyler in The Rolling Stone Magazine. April 7, 2016. Page 62.

... salad greens (which many Russians, still of the traditional opinion that raw greens were food for animals, not humans, dismissed as little better than grass) ...

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 220.

Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860. Quoted in: Lapham’s Quarterly. “Food.” Summer 2011. Page 14.

One shouldn’t, accordingly, eat until hunger demands.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC–65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter CXXIII. Penguin Classics. Page 226.

Poor diet and exercise may account for up to a third of the cancer risk.

—Anding, Roberta A. Professor, Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. “Lecture 21: Obesity—Public Health Enemy Number One.” Nutrition Made Clear [lectures]. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

Cling, therefore, to this sound and wholesome plan of life: indulge the body just so far as suffices for good health. It needs to be treated somewhat strictly to prevent it from being disobedient. Your food should appease your hunger, your drink should quench your thirst, your clothing should keep out the cold, your house should be a protection against inclement weather.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics. Page 45.

The rabbis, like all of us, were experts on diet. Dietary wisdom begins with the teeth … Vegetables and fruits, except the date, are highly recommended. Meat is a luxury, which only the well washed should have. The animal is to be killed in such a way as to minimize its pain, and draw the blood out of the meat; to eat flesh with blood is an abomination … Eat at stated hours only; “don’t peck all day like hens.” “More people die from overeating than undernourishment.” “Moderation in drinking is better than total abstinence.”

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 357.

… set aside now and then a number of days during which you will be content with the plainest of food, and very little of it, and with rough, coarse clothing, and will ask yourself, “Is this what one used to dread?” It is in times of security that the spirit should be preparing itself to deal with difficult times; while fortune is bestowing favours on it then is the time for it to be strengthened against her rebuffs.”

…

… your bread must be hard and grimy, so that it is a genuine trial and not an amusement.

… Barley porridge, or a crust of barley bread, and water do not make a very cheerful diet, but nothing gives one keener pleasure than the ability to derive pleasure even from that—and the feeling of having arrived at something which one cannot be deprived of by any unjust stroke of fortune.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter XVIII. Penguin Classics. Page 67.

Consumer preferences for food

It's not enough just to make and sell cereal. After that you get it halfway down the customer's throat through the use of advertising. Then they’ve got to swallow it.

—Carroll, Abigail. Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. Page 146. Basic Books: NY, NY.

All that matters is a full stomach.

--Japanese adage, regarding what to look for in food. Quoted in: Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 40.

One cannot begin to speak of poetry if one has not learned to tell taste.

--Lauden, Rachel, quoting the ancient Chinaman Ts-kung Tu. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 124.

Is there anything more beautiful than crystallized sugar?

--Lauden, Rachel, quoting the ancient Chinese poet Su Shi in 1074.. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 104.

An individual's temperament could be changed by eating foods that corrected imbalance.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 50. Regarding food in the ancient world.

For a brief period, this new theory of culinary cosmos based on fermentation replaced the ancient culinary cosmos. Then Descartes, Newton, and Laplace proposed physical cosmogonies in which vortices or gravity, not heat or water, were the driving forces. In the infinte universe, there were no correspondences between location, rank, age, gender, humors, and colors delimiting what people should eat. Over the next couple of centuries, the idea that a person's place in the cosmos determined what he or she should eat gradually vanished.

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 215.

Most individuals were culinary determinists, believing that what you ate made you what you were in strength, temperament, intelligence, and social rank.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 50. Regarding food in the ancient world.

All that matters is a full stomach.

--Japanese adage, regarding what to look for in food. Quoted in: Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 40.

This vision of the world underlay ancient culinary philosophy, which was based on three principles: the principle of hierarchy, which posited that every rank of living being had appropriate foods and ways of consuming them: the sacrificial bargain, which specified that humans should offer foods to the gods and consume the leftovers as the emblematic meal in return for the gods' original provision of food; and the theory of the culinary cosmos, which asserted that cooking was a basic cosmic process and that foods were part of an elaborate system of correspondences with ages, seasons, compass directions, colors, bodily parts, and other features of the world.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 43.

Food and society

As more nations followed the Dutch and British in locating the source of rulers’ legitimacy not in hereditary or divine rights, but in some form of consent or expression of the will of the people, it became increasingly difficult to deny to all citizens the right to eat the same kind of food … And the improved social, political, and economic status of the humble, inextricably linked to the increased choice and tastiness of middling cuisine, is a welcome end to millennia of inequality forcibly expressed by culinary distinctions. Nothing proclaims your equality more than eating the same as other people. Nothing shows your independence more than being able to choose what you eat.

—Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 208.

He who eats alone chokes alone.

—Arab proverb.

I hate when people take pictures of their food. It is the worst. Unless you cooked it, or you’re a chef, I don’t understand. Like, everyone eats—who’s impressed? Maybe kids in third-world countries that are like, “Oh, meals!”

—Kerry Coddett on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore. September 24, 2015.

We often joke that for most people the CSA is more about having a farm to visit than the vegetables.

—Hauter, Wenonah. 2012. Foodopoly. The New Press. Page 2.

Yet Mr. Bourdain thinks "foodie-ism" in general has gotten "absurd and silly and pompous." He sees one silver lining. "We continue to grope toward a different relationship with food that others have been enjoying as a birthright for centuries," he says, adding that Americans are starting to eat more like Italians. "We actually care where food comes from now." But as opposed to Italians, American foodies like to publicize their appreciation, he says. "Italians don't walk around with a T-shirt that says 'I love prosciutto,' but we get bacon tattoos," he adds with a laugh.

—Wolfe, Alexandria. September 20-21, 2014. “Anthony Bourdain.” The Wall Streeet Journal. C11.

Man is the tenant of nature, food the measure of both his wealth and well-being. The earliest metal currencies (the shekel, the talent, the mina) represent weights and units of grain.

—Lewis H. Lapham. Lapham’s Quarterly. Summer 2011. “Food”. Page 14.

What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini... in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind.

—Lin Yutang. 1937. The Importance of Living.

For a brief period, this new theory of the culinary cosmos based on fermentation replaced the ancient culinary cosmos. Then Descartes, Newton, and LaPlace proposed physical cosmogonies in which vortices or gravity, not heat or water, were the driving forces. In the infinite universe, there were no correspondences between location, rank, age, gender, humors, and colors delimiting what people should eat. Over the next couple of centuries, the idea that a person’s place in the cosmos determined what he or she should eat gradually vanished.

—Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 215.

Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.

—Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in The Physiology of Taste. 1825. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. Summer 2011. Page 122.

A hungry man is not a free man.

—Adlai Stevenson, 1952. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. Summer 2011. Page 132.

In particular, republicans, like Protestants, believed the family meal, where children imbibed both physical and moral nourishment, not the aristocratic banquet, was the foundation of the state.

—Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 210.

Splendour then moves on to the table, where praise is courted through the medium of novelty and variations in the accustomed order of the dishes…

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). Letters from a Stoic. Letter CXIV. Penguin Classics. Page 215.

Why was there corruption? Poverty. If America didn’t have enough food and clothing, corruption would exist there too. As the Chinese saying goes, Only when one has food and clothing do they know ethics.

—Interviewee. China: A Century of Revolution. Disc 1: 1:21.

Furthermore, outsiders have always wanted to emulate states and empires perceived as successful. Since most people have been culinary determinists, believing literaly that you are what you eat, they regularly attributed that success to the cuisine of the polity in question.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 4.

In other words, the old rule "If you are a king, eat like a king, and if you are a peasant, eat like a peasant" mas modified to include "if you are a holy man, eat like a holy man."

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 104.

They ate their meals from the communal bowl with fingers or spoons …

— Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 174.

… fearful that peoples who still outnumbered the Spanish almost twenty to one .. would become too strong if they ate wheat and European wheats.

—Lauden, Rachel, remarking on the Spaniards deliberations about what the indigenous peoples of the Americas they conquered should eat. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 200.

Not even high-ranking warrior-nobles regularly indulged in such quantities of meat, but it was so important symbolically that they were referred to as meat eaters.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 19

[Peter the Great] ordered his nobles to follow the new manners he had observed among the upper classes on his tour, such as using individual bowls or plates instead of dipping into the communal bowl, drinking from shot glasses or goblets rather than drinking horns, and using napkins, not the edges of the tablecloth, to wipe their mouths.

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 230.

Dutch engravings of the period depict the family sitting around a cloth-covered table set with individual plates. It is a scene so familiar to us that it takes a moment to remember that, although representations of humble kitchens and meals common in the Middle Ages, say, the bourgeois family meal has appeared only once (if at all) before in our story, in the early days of the Christian church. The contemporary belief that the family meal is a place where children learn to become members of a moral society owes much to the Dutch.

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 227.

The seven provinces of the [Dutch] republic became Europe's wealthiest and most urbanized area in the sevententh century, the Dutch Golden Age. ... Although the Dutch worried that the stadtholder (head of state) might have monarchial leanings, cities were governed by leaders of commerce and industry, not landed aristocrats.

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 224.

Those who dined together were theoretically equalas, though hosts often gave the lesser guests smaller portions, less choice pieces, and less desirable places at the table, or simply ignored them.

--Rachel Lauden (remarking on the ancient Greco-Roman culture. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 78.

[Roman] Republicans believed that the state's success or failure depended on the civic virtue of all citizens--courage, simplicity, dignity, duty, honesty, civility, reason, and temperance, including in eating--not just on the personal virtue of a monarch, such as Cyrus or Alexander.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 74.

The Achaemenid Empire Cyrus established ... Many aspects--establishing legitimacy, dealing with the conquered and minority peoples, improving the food supply with agricultural, research, and infrastructure innovations, provisioning the capital and armies, and dramatizing benevolence by way of the king's feast--were connected with the state.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 59.

According to Zoroastrian myth, Ahura Mazda created the sky, then the earth, then humans, and finally happiness for humans: truth, peace, and abundant food … The earth was blessed with clear fresh water, flourishing green plants, beneficent animals, and sweet fruits unprotected by skins, shells, or thorns on which humans, unburdened with physical bodies, dine without needing to kill. Then evil entered the cosmos, turning it into a battleground: ... Fruits became armoured with thorns, skins, and shells and tasted acid and bitter. Humans became weighted down with flesh and blood and had to eat leaves, roots, and grains and to kill animals for their meat.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 59.

France was declared a republic. Frugal republican fare was served at fraternal meals, where rich and poor assembled in public places to eat the same food at the same time.

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 224.

Bad men were those who gorged themselves, were slaves to the demon of uncontrolled appetite, ate raw foods and insects, and stank and shat to excess.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 62.

An individual's temperament could be changed by eating foods that corrected imbalance.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 50. Regarding food in the ancient world.

Most individuals were culinary determinists, believing that what you ate made you what you were in strength, temperamet, intelligence, and social rank.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 50. Regarding food in the ancient world.

... it's hard not to be horrified by the inequitable social system that produced a gulf between high and humble cuisines and reinforced it with rules.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 53. Regarding food in the ancient world.

Poverty is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation ... It is the lot of man--it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour therer could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.

--Scottish merchant and statistician Patrick Colquhoun. Stated in 1806. Quoted in: Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 54.

Gluttony and rampant sexuality encouraged highly undesirable luxury, a term that comes from the Latin word for the floppy, overabundant growth of plants given too much water and fertilizer. Just as soft, floppy plants were seless, so flabby soldiers and citizens (one and the same in the republic) could not be made fit for military service...For republican officers, glowing good health was a virtue, achievable only by temperance and moderation, particularly in food and sex.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 75.

Whoever does not provide for provisions and other necessities is conquered without fighting.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 75-76.

We have water, we have porridge, let us compete in happiness with Jupiter himself.

--Rachel Lauden citing Cicero. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 78.

Hunger is the best sauce

--Rachel Lauden citing Cicero. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 78.

There's no sauce in the world like hunger.

--Rachel Lauden citing Cervantes. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 78.

Hunger is the best pickle.

--Rachel Lauden citing Benjamin Franklin. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 78.

When Romans "began to seek dishes not for the sake of removing, but of rousing the appetite," the republic began to decline, according to Seneca.

--Rachel Lauden citing Cicero. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page ???

He with whom I do not dine is a barbarian to me.

--Graffiti in ancient Pompeii. Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 78.

Gluttony should be avoided, said Plato in the Timaeus, particularly by those who wished to be philosophers; otherwise, they would be, "incapable of philosophy and music, deaf to the voice of our divines part."

--Rachel Lauden quoting Plato. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 70

How admirable is he! Living ... on a bowlful of grain and a ladleful of water is a hardship most men would find intolerable, but Hui does not allow this to affect his joy.

--Rachel Lauden quoting Confucius. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 87.

They viewed the stomach as the seat of intuitive wisdom, the mind of thinking and judging,, and the heart of willing and loving ... Food and medicines merged into one another, the word "fang" standing for both recipe and prescription.

--Rachel Lauden remarking on The Taoist culture in ancient China. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 89.

When the granaries are full, [the people] will know propriety and moderation ... but [if] the people lack sufficiency, [the prince's] orders will be scorned.

If the people suffer hardships, his orders will not be carried out.

--Rachel Lauden remarking ancient Chinese texts. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 93.

Humans had to behave so as to maintain the cosmic equilibrium, avoiding excess, gluttony, drunkeness, and unwonted sex, whether with one's spourse at a proscribed time, outside marriage, or with someone of the same sex. Old women who had fulfilled their duty to the state and the gods could get drunk with impunity. For others, doing so was punisheable by death.

--Rachel Lauden remarking on ancient Mayan culture. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 97.

Eve the humblest household, acknowledging a debt to the gods, offered a sprinkle of pulque, a pinch of food, or a few drops of blood when making a fire with a few twigs and arranging the three hearthstones that supported the cooking utensils. Inhabited by the fire god Huehueteotl , the hearth was the most sacred spot in the house.

--Rachel Lauden remarking on ancient Mayan culture. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 97.

Said Khosru, Anushirvan,, according to the Ibn Khaldun, "without army, no king; without revenues, no army; without taxes, no revenue; without agriculture, no taxes; without just government, no agriculture."

--Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 141. On Persian culture in antiquity.

... it's hard not to be horrified by the inequitable social system that produced a gulf between high and humble cuisines and reinforced it with rules.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 53. Regarding food in the ancient world.

He does not know grain, he roots for truffles like a pig ... He is an eater of raw meat.

--What farmer parents of a young girl said when she says she intends to mary a shepherd, as told in a popular Mesopotamian story. Quoted in: Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 43

... [barley meal and wheat flour are] marrow of men ...

--Homer. Quoted in: Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 43.

Since rank and cuisine were believed to be causally connected, it followed that eating the cuisine of a person of lower rank or of animals would turn the diner into a lesser person, or even a beast. All ancient kitchens and ancient feasts were organized so that those of a like rank had like food.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 44.

Willful Ignorance

"Sometimes I wish there was an iPhone app that would help me forget where my iPhone was made."
—The late night show with Stephen Colbert 1/8/16

Here’s something I never tell people. I still take phentermine … I was on it to lose weight for my wedding, and now I’m still on it because I’m about to pitch a TV show in LA and I need to lose even more weight. Phentermine turns off the part of my brain that thinks about food … I’ve thought before that it may be affecting my health. It feels that way. I’ve intentionally never googled the side effects.

—Elna Baker. June 17, 2016. Episode 589: Tell Me I’m Fat. This American Life. About 43:00.

Engel’s Curve

In Basra, in southern Iraq, a young man could buy enough bread and salt fish to survive for two dirhams a month, about a fifteenth of a rubish collector's earnings.

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 142.

Food and religion

Spiritual progress was like cooking, as Augustine explained in a much-quoted sermon in the fourth century, using symbolish similar to that found in Buddhism and Islam. "When you received exorcism you were 'ground'. When you were baptized you ere 'leavened'. When you received the fire of the Holy Spirit, you were 'baked'?

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 168.

I think the solution is to take all the actual religious stuff out of religion but keep the rest – the clothing, the dietary laws, the songs – the harmless stuff. You can still belong to a fun club with your own secret handshake, but there’s no reason to hate your neighbor’s club.

When you go to Whole Foods you don’t see the vegans and the meat-eaters getting into pitched battles in the condiment aisle. That’s because their dietary laws are divorced from religion.

—Maher, Bill. September 19, 2014. “I Thought Buddhism Was About Being Chill.” Real Time With Bill Maher Blog.

Eating meat was manly. Abstainers were suspected of heresy, guilty of the arrogant sin of "forbidding what God has made licit."

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 136.

In ahawaii, Mary Sia, a Christian, in the cookbook she wrote in 1956 that introduced many Americans to Chinese cuisine, had to explain Buddhist culinary philosophy. "The Chinese connect the eating of meat with man's animal nature and think of a vegetable diet as more spiritual," she said. "It is customary that the first meal of the new year be completely vegetarian"--the dish called jai, or monk's delight, Buddha's delight, or Buddha's feast.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 131.

Engligh cookbook author Eliza Smith repeated a Protestant commonplace when she turned to biblical history to attach luxury and ragouts. In the Garden of Eden, she said, "apples, nuts, and herbs, were both meat and sauce, and mankind stood no need of additional sauces, ragoos, &c. to procure a good appetitie."

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 223.

The Manicheans, headed by a Persian prophet, Mani (216-76), took elements from Christianity and Buddhism, attraccting flocks of converts from North Africa to China. The Elect, his elite followers, ate only fragrant fruits and brightly colored vegetables. They abstained from meat, wine, and cooked foods (as well as sex), because Mani had explained that food and bodies, part of the dark material world, trapped the Divine Light that the sun and the moon rained down on the earth.

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 167.

Sufis described the passage from a raw mortal to oe who achieved mystic union with the divine as cooking: "No more than three words. I was raw, I roasted, and I burnt," said the Persian poet and philosopher Rumi, founding of an important Sufi order, who lived in Konya in central Turkey in the thirteenth century.

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 153.

Food Processing

Unlike our contemporary understanding of natural food as having received only minimal processing, this earlier understanding was that processing and cooking were essential to reveal what was natural.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 104.

Food, agriculture, and politics

[On the Tea Party in Texas.] American patriots like Wolf, excited by concerns both real and obviously paranoid—revolving around gun rights, land rights, the surveillance state, genetically modified food and other assorted "liberty issues"—have come to this field to make their voices heard.

—Binelli, Mark. July 3-17, 2014. "Lone Star Crazy." The Rolling Stone. Page 53.

GMOs

It frankly sounds scary that corn can be engineered to produce its own pesticide—until you know that a regular head of cabbage produces 49 different pesticides of its own … Consistency seems amusingly rare among the anti-GMO contingency. A pro-labeling friend who admirably admits to having no scientific knowledge on the subject recently lectured me about the perils of tinkering with nature all the while eating a muffin made of enriched wheat. That is wheat that has been stripped of its germ and bran, had synthetic vitamins added it to, and even in its "natural" state bore little resemblance to its botanical ancestors due to human-controlled breeding … GMO Free CT, a GMO-labeling advocacy group with more conviction than education, is a notable source of misinformation and represents a case study in how an Internet education can be a dangerous thing. I often wonder what these pseudo-naturalists would say if they learned the vast majority of insulin used globally for diabetics is biosynthetic, and yet these individuals are fine despite injecting themselves multiple times per day.

—Greer, Beau Kjerulf. August 8, 2014. “GMO Opponents Haven’t a Scientific Leg To Stand On.” The Courant. Opinion section.

A "right to know" argument is a common tenet of pro-GMO labeling arguments, but it is often in the interest of public health that people are protected from their own acquired misinformation. Fat grams are not listed on baby foods because parents may restrict their infant's fat intake for perceived health effects, not understanding the necessity of high amounts of fat in the infant diet. And if the rationale for labeling is transparency for transparency's sake, why not direct our limited resources to labeling arsenic levels in rice, mercury levels in fish or other contamination that actually has documented potential for harm? And do we really want to increase food costs for the poor via labeling because the upper middle class currently enjoys playing the role of armchair nutritionist?

—Greer, Beau Kjerulf. August 8, 2014. “GMO Opponents Haven’t a Scientific Leg To Stand On.” The Courant. Opinion section.

Enter Mr. Friedberg, whose Silicon Valley pedigree helps him advocate for Monsanto in a region that helped to cultivate the organic food movement and to launch California's 2012 ballot initiative to require GMO food labeling—an effort that failed, but generated the "March Against Monsanto" crusade.

Genetically modified seeds, in Mr. Friedberg's view, enable farmers to grow larger crops with less resources and represent a way to help sustain the growing world population. Some of Monsanto's critics "want to live in a natural world where we're all living in treehouses in the rainforest and picking coconuts out of the tree," Mr. Friedberg said. "Maybe it would be possible if we had 100,000 people living on earth, but that's not the reality that we're living in today."

—Bunge, Jacob. September 4, 2014. “GMOs, Under Assault, Have a New Defender.” The Wall Street Journal. B1.

—December 3, 2014. “Genetically Modified Food.” Intelligence Squared Debates.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Krimsky, can you explain what "the funding effect" is, a term you’ve coined with your colleagues?

SHELDON KRIMSKY: Many years ago, we began looking at what happens to scientific research when it’s heavily funded by corporate interests. And we started by looking at drug research. And as a result of publishing a few papers, other people started doing these studies, and there is now a body of research in the drug industry which shows that corporate funding of research tends to produce the outcomes favorable to the financial interests of the corporation. That’s what we mean by "the funding effect." You have to show that the effect exists for any particular area. You can’t just assume it exists. So there are methods for showing that there is a funding effect. We’ve shown it in tobacco, we’ve shown it for drug research, in the best journals that we have, that have accepted these studies. And now people are beginning to look at it in other fields, like chemical toxins and GMOs.

—DemocracyNow.org. October 31, 2014. "The GMO Deception": Sheldon Krimsky on How BigAg & the Government Is Putting Your Food at Risk.”

Organic

I often ask audiences: how would you feel if McDonald’s decided to go all organic, and switch to grass-fed beef, pastured chicken, and all the rest? That would be an incredible victory. Think of all the acres of cornfields that would no longer be sprayed with atrazine, all the cattle that would get to graze on grass. But a certain portion of the audience will always moan at that fantasy. The food movement is a communitarian movement, made up of people who are interested in building new structures for the sake of having new structures—and in withdrawing from the mainstream economy in some sense. There are certain people who will be depressed when aspects of the movement become mainstream. Then there are others who will realize—well, this is how change comes in America. Perhaps this is the best we can hope for.

—Pollan, Michael. Quoted in: Fassler, Joe. June 7, 2016. “Michael Pollan’s New Dilemma.” The New Food Economy.

Now [Michelle Obama] also planted an amazing vegetable garden at the White House. And I can promise you if I win, I will take good care of it.

—Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail in 2016. Quoted in The Economist, November 5, 2016, page 22.

Corporations

We are at an interesting moment where the power of corporations is so complete that government has a lot of trouble bringing them to heel unless there is a scandal. And yet, the weakness—the Achilles heel—of these corporations is their brand. That’s where you see interesting political activity on the part of groups like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Oxfam America, the Humane Society. They’ve really gone after these brands, who have actually felt compelled to change their behavior because they’re so terrified of being held up to shame or ridicule. So we have this interesting politics developing around attacking the brands of corporations.

—Pollan, Michael. Quoted in: Fassler, Joe. June 7, 2016. “Michael Pollan’s New Dilemma.” The New Food Economy.

Pork / Hogs

The race of pigs is expressly given by nature to set forth a banquet.

--A saying in the ancient Greco-Roman culture. Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 78.

… he who will nourish a pig, let him keep it in his house.

—A London decree during the Middle Ages. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 642. Durant follows this quote by saying, “elsewhere the swine rooted freely among the open garbage piles.”

Cattle

Fief, Latin feudum, is from the old German or Gothic faihu, cattle; it is kin to the Latin pecus, and, like it, acquired the secondary meaning of goods of money.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 563 in a footnote. Refers to feudalism in the High Middle Ages.

Eggs

We are egg producers and produce local cage-free, free-range eggs. Cage-free, and free-range local eggs have been bringing us $3.50 a dozen for years and we sell all we produce.

—Listener comment from Breezy Acres Farm. January 29, 2015. “The Debate Over State Laws Requiring Bigger Cages for Hens and Livestock.” The Diane Rehm Show. About 36:00.

Soil

The truth is that we don’t know the first thing about dirt … We don’t even know the real etymology of the word.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 7.

A healthy soil is a fundamental part of a healthy grapevine. And of course that’s the principle of organic farming: healthy soils produces a healthy plant, a healthy plant naturally resists disease, and so organic, I don’t think about as not using chemicals, I think about as not needing chemicals.

—Williams, John. Owner and winemaker of Frog’s Leap Winery in Rutherford, CA. Quoted in Sonatas of the Soil. Portrait of a Winemaker.

To try to understand the soil by taking a few trowelsful and submitting them to chemical tests is like trying to understand the human body by cutting off the finger, grinding it to paste, and performing the same tests. You may learn a lot about the chemistry of pastes, but about the intricate anatomical linkage of systems—and about the body’s functions as a whole—you will learn nothing at all.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 177.

Protect the wild, tomorrow’s child

Protect the land from the greed of man

Take down the dams, stand up to oil

Protect the plants, and renew the soil

—Neil Young’s Who’s Gonna Stand Up or Who’s Gonna Save the Earth (I’ve seen two different titles given to the song)

[Thomas] Jefferson was among the first in the United States to recommend full crop rotations, with periods of planting in legumes and periods of grazing, to renew the soil … His recommendations were virtually the same as those adopted by the Soil Conservation Service 150 years later.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 200.

We would sooner buy a new acre of land, than manure an old one.

—Jefferson, Thomas. Quoted in: Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 200.

… twelve million tons of Sahara dust drop on Amazonia every year, bringing to the nutrient-poor soils a shot of fertility. Particularly important is the available phosphate, about a pound per acre, that the storms bring; there is virtually no other available phosphate in the old, deeply leached Amazon soils.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 184.

Hiss and crags and mountains were carved and terraced to hold grapevines, fruit and nut orchards, and olive trees; gardens were laboriously walled to check erosion and hold the precious rain.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 731.

Building soil structure and fertility that lasts for ages results only once we comprehend the nondisturbance principle.

—Phillips, Michael. 2017. Mycorrhizal Planet.

Pick up a handful of old-growth forest soil and you are holding 26 miles of linear mycelium, most of it mycorrhizal.

—Phillips, Michael. 2017. Mycorrhizal Planet.

“Orkney’s farmers were among the first in Europe to have deliberately manured their fields to improve their crops,” says Jane Downes, director of the Archaeology Institute at the University of the Highlands and Islands. “Thousands of years later medieval peasants were still benefitting from the work those Neolithic farmers put into the soil.”

—Smith, Roff. August 2014. “Before Stonehenge.” National Geographic.

Monocultures don’t produce more, they produce less. Monocultures produce nothing for the soil. The idea that we are increasing soil fertility and agricultural productivity through industrial monocultures is one of the biggest lies.

—Shiva, Vandana [interviewee]. Dirt! The Movie. About 31:00.

It is very possible that no two humus molecules are or have ever been alike.

—Dr. James Rice, soil scientist. Quoted in: Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 15.

It used to be that a good farmer could tell a lot about his soil by rolling a lump of it around in his mouth … Bill could tell acid from alkaline by the fizz of the soil in his mouth.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 15.

It takes dirt to grow an oak from an acorn. It takes the rot and the shit that is the root meaning of “dirt” —dritten means “shit” in Old Norse … Even into this century, when a country girl was going to be married in France, they fixed the amount of her dowry according to the weight of the manure produced on her father’s farm. And until recently, if you sold a farm, you always got a credit for the amount of compost that you’d saved.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Pages 38 and 39.

The Egyptians worshiped the dung beetle … It buries shit and thus becomes the mother of fertility.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 59.

Virgil and Columella, both of whom recorded their observations of Roman rural matters, insisted that the farmer taste the soil; distill it through a wine strainer with water, and drink the liquor. The best soils had neither salinity nor bitterness, but a sweet and open taste like the smell of fertile soil when it opens in the spring.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 64.

In the days before synthetic fertilizers, the dynamic potential of humus was so important that there existed a complex formula for calculating its value when property was sold.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 64.

Medieval Europeans became so desperate to feed their booming cities that they took the leaf mould from the forests to use as compost on the fields, improving the latter briefly at the cost of the destruction of the former.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 160.

If human beings are going to remain on this planet we have to stop destroying it. So if we wanna stick around, we better pay attention and shift to this. It is completely sustainable. It doesn’t cost the grower anything more than planting seeds in the springtime and then going out at harvest and harvesting the yield. Pests, diseases, lack of fertility: doesn’t exist if you get the biology correct in your soil.

—Elaine Ingham. May 7, 2015. Secrets to Soil Fertility Exposed! Accessed November 20, 2015 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDtGxOdDj1A.

Near the barn was a dunghill to which all animal or human members of the household contributed.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 557. Refers to peasant villages in the High Middle Ages.

The Mohawks threw a fish into the hole with the seeds of corn. An ancient Scottish farmer would plant a loaf of bread soaked in milk and holy water in the first furrow he plowed. An old black man in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn will only plant out his sweet potato eyes in a small packing box. Some Chinese farmers moved soil from their mulberry plots into their rice fields and vice-versa. And in archaic Yamato, the emperor would engage in intercourse with a virgin in the newly opened furrow.

All these preparations are not merely symbolic. They express the fundamentally sexual nature of agriculture far more directly than does the arcane numerology by which we, each spring, add to our plot three pounds of lime per hundred square feet, five pounds of 5-10-5 fertilizer, half a bale of peat moss, and a sprinkling of bone meal, just for good measure.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 80.

The basic tool of agriculture is not so much the plow as the calendar. And the calendar, though men have kept it, belongs to women. The calendar ruled agricultural civilizations as much as the clock rules ours. The meaning of time is different for them. When the sage of Ecclesiastes recites his poem on time, “To everything there is a season,” he refers to seasons, not to hours.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 80.

But the soil is all of the Earth that is really ours.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 96.

The mouth of the Mississippi River spews fifteen tons of sediment per second into the Gulf of Mexico; every American acre gives up an average of more than ten tons of soil each year. Fully seventy-five percent of the Earth’s surface is made of such moving or cemented sediment.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 96.

An ancient soil may be no more than half a million years old … new soil may form at a rate of better than one half inch per year, while on dry lands, it may take better than a quarter of a century to do the same … Soil appears where life does, and its characteristic is to build where erosion destroys.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 96.

Clay settles, sand hops, and silt slides. If you drop a particle of coarse sand in water, it will fall about four inches in one second. A particle of very fine clay, on the other hand, will take about 860 years to fall the same four inches. Silt will fall the same distance in five minutes.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 116.

What if clay is alive? Biologist Hayman Hartman thinks it is. If he is right, then perhaps our ultimate ancestor really was adam, the Hebrew word for “red clay.”

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 123.

The word “organic” comes from the Greek organon, meaning “tool” or “instrument,” the latter itself derived from words that mean “to do work” or “to perform a sacrifice.”

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 123.

… William Cronon reports in Changes in the Land, there was a weekly lottery for the right to have the town sheep spend the night on one’s land …

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 41.

… every tomb is empty in the long run.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 54.

Dead muscle contracts; it is an effort for living muscle to relax.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 56.

A dead body, messy as it becomes, is not toxic in itself, but formaldehyde is. It coagulates proteins in the corpse and in any creature that tries to consume it. Densely packed churchyards are now so full of formaldehyde that they pollute the surrounding waters. Ignoring the soil’s own work, we destroy it and harm ourselves.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 58.

Imust also bring in 20 Loads of Sea Weed, i.e., Eel Grass, and 20 Loads of Marsh Mud, and what dead ashes I can get from the Potash Works and what Dung I can get from Boston and what Rock Weed from Nat. All this together with what will be made in the Barn and Yard, by my Horses, Oxen, Cows, Hogs … and by the Weeds, that will be carried in from the Gardens, and the Wash and Trash from the House, in the Course of a Year would make a great Quantity of Choice manure.

—Excerpt from John Adam’s journal from June 25, 1771. Quoted in: Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 43.

Because they are porous and because water carries away their nutrients, soils eventually deteriorate … But we can make them run longer. One motive for protecting soil is the certainty that it is fragile. It does not have the same unchanging character as a mountain or a river; it is a recent and ephemeral product. We owe it our lives and our energy, and the bodies we give back to it are not payment enough.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 37.

The shore is a laboratory of salts. The kelps of the littoral zone have been known to be good fertilizer since the fourth century at least. In Elizabethan times, they were called “the poor man’s manure”.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 26.

In the 1930s, Hans Jenny studied virgin prairie soils side by side with cultivated soils in Missouri. He found that after only sixty years of cultivation, with zero erosion, the farm soils had lost one third of their organic matter. … Only by replacing what you take can you keep a soil fertile. As geneticist Wes Jackson suggests, nature must be the standard. To be responsible to the soil is to respond to its gifts with our own.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 29.

In Loncolnshire, British farmers fertilized their fields by “warping,” that is, by allowing the seawater to cover them at high tide, giving them a coat of rich slime derived from the sediments of river deltas.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 25.

Wherever there are decay and repose, there begins to be soil. It would be hard to imagine a more improbable set of ingredients, but even a truck can become dirt.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995.

All that is living burns.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995.

You are about to read a lot about dirt, which no one knows very much about. We don’t even know the real etymology of the word.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995.

Islamic rulers and their agronomists, according to historian Andrew Watson, pulled off an agricultural revolution in the arid and often exhausted landscapes of the Islamic empires. They encouraged the westward transfer of "Indian" crops as they were called--sorghum, rice, sugarcane, citrus (Seville oranges, lemons, limes, pomelos),, banana, plantain, watermelon (from Africa via India), spinach, and eggplant. In many areas, the imported crops ripened in the hot summers, adding a second crop to the one previously harvested in the winter. By 1400, sugar was being grown in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, North Africa, Spain, ad probably Ethiopia and Zanzibar. Irrigation systems were mended or created for sugarcane and fruit trees; land was made de facto private property that could be worked as the owner wished ad sold or mortgated if he wanted; gardens were established for naturalizing and improving plants; fields were fertilized with dung, compost, and ash; farming manuals were written and distributed.

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 143.

History of agriculture and food

Fast-forward a couple of million years to when the human diet took another major turn with the invention of agriculture. The domestication of grains such as sorghum, barley, wheat, corn, and rice created a plentiful and predictable food supply, allowing farmers’ wives to bear babies in rapid succession—one every 2.5 years instead of one every 3.5 years for hunter-gatherers. A population explosion followed; before long, farmers outnumbered foragers.

…

Despite boosting population numbers, the lifestyle and diet of farmers were clearly not as healthy as the lifestyle and diet of hunter-gatherers. That farmers produced more babies, Larsen says, is simply evidence that “you don’t have to be disease free to have children.”

—Gibbons, Ann. September 2014. “The Evolution of Diet.” National Geographic. Pages 50-51.

“[Apicius] lecturedon cookery in the very city from which philosophers were once expelled on the grounds of corrupting youth, and who defiled his age by his teaching.” It’s worth knowing Apicius’s end. After he’d poured a hundred million sesterces into his kitchen, and after he’d swallowed up at every one of his revels the equivalent of so many imperial gratuities and the enormous state revenue of the Capital, he was overwhelmed by debt and then forced for the first time to look carefully into his accounts. He calculated that he would have ten million sesterces left over; and as if doomed to live in extreme starvation if he existed on ten million sesterces, he took his life by poison … he escaped by poison what others pray for!

—Seneca in Consolation to Helvia in Hardship and Happiness. Page 60.

Religion normally thrives in an agricultural regime, science in an industrial economy. Every harvest is a miracle of the earth and a whim of the sky; the humble peasant, subject to weather and consumed with toil, sees supernatural forces everywhere, prays for a propitious heaven, and accepts a feudal-religious system of graduated loyalties mounting through vassal, liege lord, and king to God. The city worker, the merchant, the manufacturer, the financier, live in a mathematical world of calculated quantities and processes, of material causes and regular effects; the machine and the counting table dispose them to see, over widening areas, the reign of “natural law.” The growth of industry, commerce, and finance in the fifteenth century, the passage of labor from the countryside to the town, the rise of the mercantile class, the expansion of local to national to international economy—all were of evil omen for a faith that had fitted in so well with feudalism and the somber vicissitudes of the fields.

—Durant, Will. 1957. The Reformation. The Story of Civilization. Page 14-15.

The first cities of the Western world rose around 4000 B.C. in the fertile triangle between the Tigris and Euphrates (which, by the way, are two of the four rivers mentioned as running through the Garden of Eden). Their wealth was based on the first state-organized farming. The Mesopotamian cultures were the first to introduce the plow, the yoke, the potter’s wheel, and, above all, large-scale irrigation. Growing primitive wheats and barleys, the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians cultivated thousands of acres adjacent to the rivers. On the basis of these, grew their ziggurats and warring city-states.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 159.

[Frederick II (1194-1250), king of Sicily] kept a zoological garden for study rather than for amusement, and organized experiments in the breeding of poultry, pigeons, horses, camels, and dogs …

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 720.

He, too, attacked the faults of the clergy; but he trembled at the heresies of the Lollards, and marveled at the insolence of peasants who, once content with beer and corn, now demanded meat and milk and cheese.

—Durant, Will. 1957. The Reformation. The Story of Civilization. Page 47. Refers to England in the 14^th century.

Agricultural technique slowly improved. The Christians learned from the Arabs in Spain, Sicily, and the East; and the Benedictine and Cistercian monks brought old Roman and new Italian tricks of farming, breeding, and soil preservation to the countries north of the Alps. The strip system was abandoned in laying out new farms, and each farmer was left to his own initiative and enterprise. In Flanders fields reclaimed from swamps the peasants of the thirteenth century practices a three-field rotation of crops, in which the soil was used each year, but was triennially replenished by fodder or leguminous plants. Powerful teams of oxen drew iron plowshares more deeply into the soil than before. Most plows, however, were still (1300) of wood; only a few regions knew the use of manure; and wagon wheels were seldom shod with iron tires. Cattle raising was difficult because of prolonged droughts; but the thirteenth century saw the first experiments in the crossing and acclimatization of breeds. Dairy farming was unprogressive; the average cow in the thirteenth century gave little milk, and hardly a pound of butter per week (A well-bred cow now yields ten to thirty pounds of butter per week.)

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 645.

Peasants pooled their pence to buy a plow or harrow for their common use. Till the eleventh century the ox was the draft animal; he ate less expensively, and in old age could be eaten more profitably than the horse. But around 1000 the harness makers invented the stiff colar that would allow a horse to draw a load without choking; so dressed, the horse could plot three or four times as much in a day as the ox ….

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 559.

“There’s been a consistent story about hunting defining us and that meat made us human,” says Amanda Henry, a paleobiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “Frankly, I think that misses half of the story. They want meat, sure. But what they actually live on is plant foods.” What’s more, she found starch granules from plants on fossil teeth and stone tools, which suggests humans may have been eating grains, as well as tubers, for at least 100,000 years—long enough to have evolved the ability to tolerate them.

—Gibbons, Ann. September 2014. “The Evolution of Diet.” National Geographic. Pages 50-51.

Corn was the cash crop, the colonists perceived, so they grew it to the exclusion of beans and squash, which were relegated to separate, smaller monocultures. Nevertheless, they had observed that native success with corn was owed to the habit of applying a fish. In grotesque imitation of this practice, they fished out entire rivers, applying the stinking carcasses by the thousands to their cornfields. Country travelers spoke of an “almost intolerable fetor,” which, given the already powerful odor of the average colonial gentleman, must have been foetid indeed.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 171.

These examples suggest a twist on “You are what you eat.” More accurately, you are what your ancestors ate. There is tremendous variation in what foods humans can thrive on, depending on genetic inheritance. Traditional diets today include the vegetarian regimen of India’s Jains, the meat-intensive fare of Inuit, and the fish-heavy diet of Malaysia’s Bajau people. The Nochmani of the Nicobar Islands off the coast of India get by on protein from insects. “What makes us human is our ability to find a meal in virtually any environment,” says the Tsimane study co-leader Leonard.

Studies suggest that indigenous groups get into trouble when they abandon their traditional diets and active lifestyles for Western living.

…

In other words, there is no one ideal human diet. Aiello and Leonard say the real hallmark of being human isn’t our taste for meat but our ability to adapt to many habitats—and to be able to combine many different foods to create many healthy diets. Unfortunately the modern Western diet does not appear to be one of them.

—Gibbons, Ann. September 2014. “The Evolution of Diet.” National Geographic. Page 52.

Agriculture

People have been changing plants to suit their purposes for at least 9,000 years. Just about every fruit and vegetable we eat is a domesticated species that we have transformed through decades of artificial selection and breeding: saving seeds only from plants with the most desirable characteristics and deliberately mating one plant with another to create novel combinations of traits. In this way, our ancestors turned a scrawny grass named teosinte into tall, plump-eared corn and molded a single species of wild cabbage into broccoli, Brussell sprouts, cauliflower, and kale.

—Jabr, Ferris. July 2014. “Building Tastier Fruits & Veggies.” Scientific American. Page 59.

Trade with a hundred florins, and you will afford meat and wine; put the same sum into agriculture, and at most you may have bread and salt.

—Talmud. Quoted in: Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 376.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 59.

[Babylonians said the god Ea] will bring to you a harvest of wealthy, / in the morning he will let loaves of bread shower down, / and in the evening a rain of wheat!

--Quoted in: Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 45

An executive of a major restaurant chain characterized Americans' attitude in restaurants as "When I go out to eat, I want what I want."

—Carroll, Abigail. Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. Page 204. Basic Books: NY, NY.

Sometimes we eat in a particular way because of conscious decisions, but, more often than not, our eating choices are hardly choices at all: they are reflections of our culture, and our culture is largely a product of our history.

—Carroll, Abigail. Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. Page 213. Basic Books: NY, NY.

Nevertheless it is almost a Newtonian law of history that large agricultural holdings, in proportion to their mass and nearness, attract smaller holdings, and by purchase or otherwise, periodically gather the land into great estates; in time the concentration becomes explosive, the soil is redivided by taxation or revolution, and concentration is resumed.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 434.

If the saying is true that you are what you eat, then Americans are less what they cook for themselves in their kitchens and more what the food industry processes for them.

—Carroll, Abigail. Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. Page 218. Basic Books: NY, NY.

We cannot know the future of the American meal, but we are currently, if imperceptibly, charting its direction when we buy pork chops and potatoes at the farmer's market, teach a chld how to peel carrots, choose to support the new corner bakery, or invite the neighbors over for pie. We are charting it when we adopt a new recipe, plant an herb garden in an abandoned lot, chaperone a field trop to a dairy farm, or can the last of the summer's tomatoes.

—Carroll, Abigail. Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. Page 218. Basic Books: NY, NY.

Organic

It seems like with nine out of 10 farmers who allude to the fact that they’re organic it’s like, “well….except we don’t buy organic seed because it’s expensive.” Most of the farmers at the markets that I go to say “we don’t spray.” But they might tell you in a conversation later—”only if we have to… just last year we sprayed because there was late blight on our tomatoes.” They claim to be organic until they’re going to lose their crop. They might only use a pesticide or herbicide or fungicide once or twice a season, but it’s not fair to the people are actually doing it legit organically. So I struggle with it all the time.

—Barth, Brian. November 18, 2015. “Farm Confessional: Here’s My Beef with Farmers Who Claim Organic When They Are Not.” Modern Farmer. Accessed November 19, 2015 at http://modernfarmer.com/2015/11/farm-confessional-organic-certification-claims/?utm_source=Modern+Farmer+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a62ee75b18-Thursday_November_19_201511_19_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e8a89c7e43-a62ee75b18-75443901&mc_cid=a62ee75b18&mc_eid=a45706d583.

Part of me says it sucks that it is so hard to get certified organic, but I see all these people cheating and being dishonest and I think you need somebody to police that. Otherwise the consumers just get ripped off constantly.

Sustainability

There are lots of things that could follow this pattern [of unsustainability] beyond population, of course. We might think about mine goods, including energy, like fossil fuels, but also essential resources. Or some would say that we are mining the top-soils in modern agriculture.

—Tomkin, Jonathan. Research Associate Professor and Associate Direcotr, School of Earth, Society, and Environment. 2014. “Introduction & Population: Malthus [lecture].” Introduction to Sustainability [a MOOC course]. Coursea.com.

Asked about the word ecology, the composer [John Cage] replied that whenever he heard that seductive word he knew he’d soon hear the word planning, and “when I hear that word, I run in the other direction.”

—Kostelanetz, Richard. February 2016. “The Gut Anarchism of John Cage.” Reason magazine. Page 62.

It turns out that we did not have this sort of collapse that Malthus predicted over the last 200 years. But in defense of Malthus, his model was essentially correct up until the point of time in which he wrote it.

The bee gathering his food can have no doubt as to whether or not he is doing something that is good or bad. But a man reaping the harvest, or gathering fruit, cannot help wondering whether he is undermining the growth of future crops, or whether he is depriving his neighbours of food. Nor can he help thinking about what will happen to the children he is feeding, and much else besides. The more important questions of conduct in life cannot be conclusively resolved by a rational person precisely because there is an abundance of consequences of which he is inevitably aware. Rational man, even if he does not know, then feels that in the more important questions of life he cannot be guided by personal impulses, nor by a consideration of the immediate consequences of his actions. He can see that they are too diverse and often contradictory, as for instance, those that are just as likely to be harmful as to be beneficial to himself. … None of the important questions in life can be resolved by a rational person through considerations of the immediate results and consequences.

—Tolstoy, Leo (1828-1910). What Is Religion, Of What Does Its Essence Consist?

Food, Ag, and Famine

In bad times, peasants resorted to the time-honored hierarchy of famine foods. First they ate the pig's wheat and rice bran. Ten they ate bark and leaves. When those ran out they searched for roots and wild greens. Then it was handfuls of dirt. Finally they consumed the bodies of the dead.

--Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 127.

Food & Obesity

If obesity was an infectious disease—if this was SARS or if this was HIV and we were looking at gloom-and-doom statistics—we would as a country marshal all of our resources in fighting this disease.

—Anding, Roberta A. Professor, Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. “Lecture 20: Obesity—Public Health Enemy Number One.” Nutrition Made Clear [lectures]. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

Most people don’t become obese by eating fruits and vegetables.

Does dieting work? Clearly it does. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that any dietary strategy is going to work—here’s the caveat: you have to stick with it. And unfortunately the average diet in the United States, when dieters have been surveyed, lasts two weeks.

There have been some suggestions that we need to post calories at schools and certainly in college dorms … it’s not really a good solution, and Harvard recently removed this information for fear of contributing to eating disorders, because students were going in and selecting their foods based on the calories and not necessarily the nutritional value.

When both parents are morbidly obese, there’s an 80% chance that children will be obese … When neither parent is obese there’s less than a 10% chance that they’re going to be obese … About 25-30% of obese people have normal-weight parents … your genetic makeup can account for about 50, up to 90% of the variations that you might have in terms of your ability to store body fat.

Some studies suggest that adult women only feel thin when they’re about 10% below their ideal body weight.

Other

In perhaps the most important and overlooked book published on animal agriculture in a generation, Jayson Lusk and F. Bailey Norwood’s Compassion, by the Pound, the authors—agricultural economists—document the hard economic reality of humane farming.

—Bellemare, Marc F. March 26, 2014. “The Fuzzy Ethics Of ‘Humane Meat.’” Accessed March 26, 2014 at http://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/2014/03/the-fuzzy-ethics-of-humane-meat/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marcfbellemare%2FuTio+%28Marc+F.+Bellemare%29.

About his habit of masturbating in public, Diogenes the Cynic said, “I only wish I could be rid of hunger by rubbing my belly.”

—Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. Summer 2011. Page 213.

Agriculture means “care of the fields.”

—Ehrman, Bart D. From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

While American preachers and social reformers, mostly male, had invoked mother’s bread as a symbol of all that was good and pure, going back to the early 1800s, actual mothers had to cry the relentless tedium of daily baking for just as long. Baking was arm-breaking work, ….

--Bobrow-Strain, Aaron. White Bread.

A plowed field is as artificial as a highway.

—Simon, Herbert. (I heard this, it is unverified)

Origin of the word lord traces back to Old English, from a Germanic base, meaning “bread-keeper” or “giver of the bread.”

People don’t go hungry because there isn’t enough food; they go hungry because they can’t afford to eat.

—Sen, Amartya. Quoted in: Rush, Elizabeth [author]. November 21, 2012. “The Futures of Farming.” Narratively.

Rain, rain, dear Zeus, on the fields and plains of the Athenians

—Ancient Greek prayer. Source: Aurelius, Marcus. The Emperor’s Handbook. Book 5:7.

Although we Americans eat more meat than almost anyone else in the world, our meat-centric diets are killing us—or not, depending on whose opinion is consulted. The nation’s slaughterhouses churn out tainted meat and contribute to outbreaks of bacteria-related illnesses. Or not…The only thing commentators might agree on is this: in the early twenty-first century, battles over the production and consumption of meat are nearly as ferocious as those over, say, gun control and gay marriage?

—Ogle, Maureen. 2013. In Meat We Trust. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: NY, NY.

[The Native Americans] lived by hunting, and they believed that if they killed an animal, the animal had consented to be killed. It is as if the animal had agreed … a spiritual contract had been made, and there was an implicit reciprocity being made in the contract. The animal is saying, “I’ll permit you to kill me and eat me but in return I expect that my remains will be treated with the appropriate rituals of respect.”

—Allitt, Patrick N. 2001. “Lecture 3: Natives and Newcomers.” American Religious History [lectures]. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

If meat’s American history tells us anything, it is that we Americans generally get what we want.

—Ogle, Maureen. 2013. In Meat We Trust. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: NY, NY.

We’re a complicated group, we Americans, and we struggle to reconcile our conflicting desires and passions. On one hand, many of us want meat, lots of it, and we don’t care how it’s made as long as it doesn’t cost much. On the other, some of us are determined to break the chains that bind livestock production and meatpacking to assembly-line processes. How to accomplish both—produce immense quantities of meat at an affordable price while relying on (relatively) inefficient methods of producing it—is not clear.

—Ogle, Maureen. 2013. In Meat We Trust. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: NY, NY.

But the good intentions of these type-A types notwithstanding, the economics of organic farming are a potential blow to their fairly large egos. These are individuals with scores of successes in life, but experts say that despite the price premiums that come with organic labeling or other likeminded practices, the math doesn’t always work out. It is just too expensive to do. For that matter, almost all farming, organic or conventional, is a financial boondoggle when it’s outside the realm of factory farming.

—Passy, Charles. December 2013. “The New Gentleman Farmer.” WSJ.Money. 36-43.

Today, crops are grown on nearly 40 percent of the earth's land, and it takes 70 percent of our water to do it. Farming is, by its nature, an assault on the earth.
—Michael Specter in Denialism

One week after my father and I docked the chartered fishing boat on which we had caught 300 pounds of bluefish—I have no idea how many individuals we pulled out of the bay that day, since they were merely calculated by the pound...
—Miyun Park in forthcoming book

"They've got chickens that roost in the trees and lay eggs under the porch," Shelley said. "None of this scientific egg culture that never lets a hen set a foot to ground in her whole life. It's obscene, the way they keep them on chicken wire."
—Wallace Stegner in The Angel of Repose

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature.

The most popular meal in America, at lunch and dinner, is a sandwich accompanied by a fizzy drink.

—The Economist. April 27, 2013. “Food: The saucier’s apprentices.” A review of Michael Pollan’s book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Page 76.

Everyone complains that the Athenian retailers adulterate their goods, give short weight and short change despite the government inspectors, shift the fulcrum of their scales towards the measuring weights, and lie at every opportunity; the sausages, for example, are accused of being dogs.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 13: The Morals and Manners of the Athenians. Page 294.

He also returns to a conundrum he has previously described as the ‘cooking paradox’: why it is that people now spend less time preparing food from scratch and more time reading about cooking or watching cookery programmes on television.

—The Economist. April 27, 2013. “Food: The saucier’s apprentices.” A review of Michael Pollan’s book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Page 76.

I’ve painted it as though it’s conservatives that do all the purity stuff. Liberals do it too. It’s commonly joked that conservatives are always moralizing sex and telling you what you can’t do. But my God, just try to order breakfast with someone who is on the far left.

—Haidt, Jonathan [interviewee]. June 2013. “It’s Hard to Gross Out a Libertarian.” John Tierney [interviewer]. Reason magazine. Page 17.

—Epictetus (2011-08-09). Discourses and Enchiridion (Illustrated, Annotated) (Kindle Locations 274-281). . Kindle Edition.

Then the Lord God formed adam from adamah (human from humus).

—Hebrew translation of Genesis 2:7 according to Fred Bahnson at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suna6LDOv_8.

As word got round that an eccentric man was willing to pay handsomely for ancient [statue] heads and torsos, farmers who might in the past had burned any marble fragments that they plowed up for the lime they could extract from them…began instead to offer them for sale.

—Greenblatt, Stephen. 2012. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. W. W. Norton & Company: NY, NY.

…over 700 whores came to town and hired their own houses…The arrival of somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 visitors put a huge strain on [the gathering], and invited every kind of abuse. Officials tried to combat crime in the usual way. They staged public executions, and set rules on the range of quality of services that visitors should expect. So, for example, every fourteen days the tablecloths and sheets and whatever needed washing should be changed for clean.

—Greenblatt, Stephen. 2012. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. W. W. Norton & Company: NY, NY.

—Elif Batuman. December 19 & 26, 2011. “The Sanctuary.” The New Yorker magazine.

Once upon a time a charming woman told me that she hated food, that she couldn’t stand to cook, and that she would be glad when we had different colored pills to take for the three meals a day. About a year later I was invited to her home for dinner and I have never seen such a beautiful meal. I think I knew, down deep in my heart, that this woman really didn’t hate to cook, but that she had fallen into a dull routine in meal preparation that of course is fatal to any creative ability one might have in the preparation of fine and handsome foods.

—Benell, Julie. 1962. Let’s eat at home.

...agriculture brought about a steep decline in the standard of living. Studies of Kalahari Bushmen and other nomadic groups show that hunter-gatherers, even in the most inhospitable landscapes, typically spend less than twenty hours a week obtaining food. By contrast, farmers toil from sunup to sundown...early farmers had more anemia and vitamin deficiencies, died younger, had worse teeth, were more prone to spinal deformity, and caught more infectious diseases, as a result of living close to other humans and to livestock.

—Elif Batuman. December 19 & 26, 2011. “The Sanctuary.” The New Yorker magazine.

Diamond considers agriculture to be not just a setback but “the worst mistake in the history of the human race,” the origin of “the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

—Elif Batuman. December 19 & 26, 2011. “The Sanctuary.” The New Yorker magazine. Referring to Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Tribal organization did not arise, however, until the emergence of settled societies and the development of agriculture around nine thousand years ago…Rousseau pointed out that the origin of political inequality lay in the development of agriculture, and in this he was largely correct.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY. Page 53.

They went down to the warren. On the middle path they passed a trap, a narrow horseshoe hedge of small fir-boughs, baited with the guts of a rabbit. Paul glanced at it frowning. She caught his eye.
"Is't it dreadful?" she asked.
"I don't know! Is it worse than a weasel with its teeth in a rabbit's throat? One weasel or many rabbits? One or the other must go!"
—D.H. Lawrence in Sons & Lovers

The writers in The Contemporary explained that the importance of the rural Commune lies, not in its actual condition, but in its capabilities of development, and they drew, with prophetic eye, most attractive pictures of the happy rural Commune of the future. Let me give here, as an illustration, one of these prophetic descriptions:

"Thanks to the spread of primary and technical education the peasants have become well acquainted with the science of agriculture, and are always ready to undertake in common the necessary improvements. They no longer exhaust the soil by exporting the grain, but sell merely certain technical products containing no mineral ingredients. For this purpose the Communes possess distilleries, starch-works, and the like, and the soil thereby retains its original fertility. The scarcity induced by the natural increase of the population is counteracted by improved methods of cultivation. If the Chinese, who know nothing of natural science, have succeeded by purely empirical methods in perfecting agriculture to such an extent that a whole family can support itself on a few square yards of land, what may not the European do with the help of chemistry, botanical physiology, and the other natural sciences?"

—MacKenzie, Donald Wallace (1841-1919). Russia.

…for the allotment of the land is by far the most important event in Russian peasant life, and the arrangement cannot be made without endless talking and discussion. After the number of shares for each family has been decided, the distribution of the lots gives rise to new difficulties. The families who have plentifully manured their land strive to get back their old lots, and the Commune respects their claims so far as these are consistent with the new arrangement; but often it happens that it is impossible to conciliate private rights and Communal interests, and in such cases the former are sacrificed in a way that would not be tolerated by men of Anglo-Saxon race. This leads, however, to no serious consequences. The peasants are accustomed to work together in this way, to make concessions for the Communal welfare, and to bow unreservedly to the will of the Mir. I know of many instances where the peasants have set at defiance the authority of the police, of the provincial governor, and of the central Government itself, but I have never heard of any instance where the will of the Mir was openly opposed by one of its members.

—MacKenzie, Donald Wallace (1841-1919). Russia.

The soil [in Athens] is poor: of 630,000 acres in Attica a third is unsuitable for cultivation, and the rest is impoverished by deforestation, meager rainfall, and rapid erosion by winter floods. The peasants of Attica [which is the region containing Athens] shirk no toil—for themselves or their handful of slaves—to remedy this dry humor of the gods; they gather the surplus flow of headwaters into reservoirs, dike the channels of the streams to control the floods, reclaim the precious humus of the swamps, build thousands of irrigation canals to bring to their thirsty fields the trickle of the rivulets, patiently transplant vegetables to improve their size and quality, and let the land lie fallow in alternate years to regain its strength. They alkalinize the soil with salts like carbonate of lime, and fertilize it with potassium nitrate, ashes, and human waste; the gardens and groves about Athens are enriched with the sewage of the city, brought by a main sewer to a reservoir outside the Dipylon, and led thence by brick-lined canals into the valley of the Cephisus River. Different soils are mixed to their mutual benefit, and green crops like beans in flower are plowed in to nourish the earth.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 12: Work and Wealth in [ancient] Athens. Page 193.

Remember, they have no clue about what is to happen to them, because animals are in the 'here and now' they have no reasoning, unlike humans.
—Felicity Stockwell , page 64 of Home Farmer (May, 2010)

I have to say, if you were to catalog all the explanations given for obesity in scholarly journals and elsewhere, it would be hard to find something that isn't said to cause it.

—Stephan J. Dubner, Freakonomics blog, April 5, 2011.

Where there are beasts, there is life.

—traditional Somalian saying

11. By Musonius, from the lecture, "What is the suitable occupation for a philosopher?"

(1) There is another occupation no worse than this, and perhaps one might reasonably consider that it is even better for a man strong in body—namely, earning one's living from the land, if one owns some,
and, indeed, even if one doesn't. Many of those who farm someone else's land, whether publicly or privately owned, are able to support not only themselves but also their children and wives. Because thev
work with their own hands and are industrious, some earn a very good living this way. The earth repays most beautifully and jusdy those who care for her, giving back many times what she receives. For someone willing to work, she supplies an abundance of all the things necessary
for life and does so in a seemly and shame-free manner.

Only someone decadent or soft would say that agricultural tasks are shameful or unsuitable for a good man. How could planting trees, plowing, and working with vines not be a good thing? Aren't sowing, harvesting, and threshing all compatible with freedom and suitable for good men? Just as being a shepherd did not shame Hesiod or keep him from being loved by both the gods and muses, so it would hinder no one else.

To me, this is the main benefit of all agricultural tasks: they provide abundant leisure for the soul to do some deep thinking and to reflect on the nature of education. Tasks that stretch and bend the whole body force the soul to be focused on them alone or on the body alone. Tasks that don't require excessive physical exertion don't prevent the soul from contemplating the better things and thus from becoming wiser than it was—which is the goal of every philosopher. Because of this I very much approve of the shepherd's life. But if a person studies philosophy and farms at the same time, I would not offer

. any other way of life to him; nor would I advocate another occupation.

(4) Isn't it more in accordance with nature to be nourished from the earth, which is both our nurse and mother, than from some other source? Isn't living in the country more suitable for a man than sitting
in the city like the sophists? Isn't living outside more healthv than being secluded in the shade? What is more characteristic of a free person than that he provide necessities for himself rather than receive them

from others? Clearly, not having to ask someone else to provide for one's needs is much more seemly than having to ask. Consequently, earning one's living from farming is noble, blessed, and god-favored, as is paying attention to nobility of character. For this reason, the god declared that Myson of Chen⁵² was wise and announced that Aglaos of Psophis⁵³ was blessed; they lived in the country, worked with their own hands, and avoided spending time in the city. Isn't it worthwhile both to praise and imitate them and to embrace farming with zeal?

(5) But someone might say: "Isn't it a terrible thing for an educated man—one who is able to introduce young people to philosophy—to work the land and engage in manual labor like country people?" Yes, this would really be terrible if working the land prevented him from doing philosophy or helping others to do philosophy. But I think that young people would benefit less by being with their teacher in the city or by listening to him speak in a formal presentation than they do by watching him work in the country and actually do what reason teaches us to do—namely, to work and endure pain ourselves rather than ask someone else to support us. What, after all, prevents the pupil who is working with his teacher from simultaneously listening to him speak about self-control, justice, or bravery? Those who want to do philosophy properly do not need many words. Nor do young people need to absorb the multitude of theories that we see sophists inflating themselves with—theories that truly are enough to consume a man's life. Those who do farm work can learn the most essential and useful things, especially if they will not be working all the time but can take some breaks. I fully realize that few people will want to learn in this way, but it is better for most of the young people who claim to be studying philosophy not to go near a philosopher—at least not those philosophers who are decadent and soft, and by whom, when they come near, philosophy is tainted.

(6) All true lovers of philosophy would be willing to spend time in the country with a good man, even if the place happened to be quite primitive. He would, after all, benefit greatly from the time he spends there by being with his teacher night and day and by being away from those urban evils that interfere with the study of philosophy. He would also be unable to conceal whether he is doing something well or badly, which is highly beneficial for those who are being educated. Likewise, to eat, drink, and sleep while being observed by a good man is very beneficial. These things, which would necessarily result from being together in the country, Theognis also praises:

Drink and eat and sit with them

whose power is great and please them too.

Theognis also makes it clear that only good men can gready benefit those who eat, drink, and sit with them:

From good men you will learn good things. If you mix with bad men, you will destroy even your existing sense.

Indeed, don't let anyone say that farming gets in the way of learning or teaching essential things. This is unlikely to happen as long as the student can be with the teacher and interact in the manner described above for as long as possible. Under these circumstances, farming seems to be the ideal occupation for a philosopher.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

18. By Musonius, from the lecture about food

He often talked in a very forceful manner about food, on the grounds that food was not an insignificant topic and that what one eats has significant consequences. In particular, he thought that mastering one's appetites for food and drink was the beginning of and basis for self-control. On one occasion, he dispensed with his other customary topics and had the following to say about food:

Just as one should choose inexpensive food over expensive food, and food that is easy to obtain over food that is hard to obtain, one should choose food suitable for a human being over food that isn't. And what is suitable for us is food from things which the earth produces: the various grains and other plants can nourish a human being quite well. Also nourishing is food from domestic animals which we don't slaughter. The most suitable of these foods, though, are the ones we can eat without cooking: fruits in season, certain vegetables, milk, cheese, and honeycombs. These foods also are easiest to obtain. Even those foods that require cooking, including grains and some vegetables, are not unsuitable; all are proper food for a human being.

He argued that a meat-based diet was too crude for humans and more suitable for wild beasts. He said that it was too heavy and that it impeded mental activity. The fumes which come from it, he said, are too smoky and darken the soul. For this reason, those who eat lots of meat seem slow-witted. Since of all creatures on earth, the human being is the most closely related to the gods, he must be nourished like the gods. The vapors coming from earth and water are enough for them: what we must do, he said, is get food like that—the lightest and most pure food. If we do this, our soul would be both pure and dry, and being such, it would be best and wisest—so Heraclitus thought when he said, "A dry beam of light is the wisest and best soul."

He added that when it comes to our food, we are worse than brute animals. Although they are pulled by violent desire to their food as if driven by a whip, they at least do not go to extremes and fuss about it: they are satisfied with what falls to their lot and they seek fullness only, nothing more. We humans, however, think up all sorts of devices and tricks to embellish the presentation of our food and to better amuse our palate. We have become so greedy and particular about our cuisine that, just as there are books on music and medicine, people have written books about cooking—books which will greatly increase our gastronomic pleasure, even as they ruin our health.

At any rate, it is clear that those who eat too much rich food harm their bodies. Indeed, some of them resemble pregnant women who crave strange foods. Like pregnant women, they cannot tolerate ordinary food; they have ruined their digestive system. Just as inferior iron constantly needs sharpening, these people's appetites must constantly be sharpened by unmixed wine, vinegar, or some tart sauce.

Compare this to Spartan who said, "I could eat both a vulture and a buzzard," when he saw a picky eater, who had been served a tender, I plump, and expensive bird, refuse to eat it because, he said, he had no, appetite.

Likewise, Zeno of Citium, when he was ill, did not request that dainty food be brought to him. Indeed, when the attending doctor ordered him to eat a young dove, he refused, saying, "Treat me as you would Manes." He wanted, I think, to have the same treatment that one of his slaves would have if he was ill. If slaves can get better without being fed delicacies, so can the rest of us. A good man won't expect to be coddled, any more than a slave does. Therefore, Zeno thought it best to avoid gourmet food, and he was adamant about this. He thought that someone who once experiences gourmet cuisine would want it all the time, inasmuch as the pleasure associated with drinking and eating creates in us a desire for more food and drink. We thought that this lecture about food was rather unlike the lectures Musonius customarily gave.

(1) Most shameful, he said, are gluttony and a craving for gourmet food, a claim no one will deny. I have encountered very few people who take steps to avoid these failings; I encounter many who long for gourmet food when it is absent and cannot control themselves when it is present—who, indeed, so glut themselves with these foods that they ruin their health. Gluttony is nothing other than lack of self-control with respect to food, and human beings prefer food that is pleasant to food that is nutritious.

Furthermore, a craving for gourmet foods is nothing other than lack of moderation with respect to exotic food. Lack of moderation is always an evil thing, but its pernicious nature is best demonstrated in those who lack it in the way they greedily gulp their food. In their inability to keep their hands and eyes off food, they resemble pigs or dogs more than humans. Truly, they are deranged by their craving for gourmet foods. Their behavior towards food is very shameful; this is proved by the fact that we compare them to brute animals rather than to intelligent human beings.

Since this behavior is very shameful, the opposite behavior— eating in an orderly and moderate way, and thereby demonstrating self-control—would be very good. Doing this, though, is not easy; it demands much care and training. Why? Because, although there are many pleasures which persuade human beings to do wrong and compel them to act against their own interests, the pleasure connected with food is undoubtedly the most difficult of all pleasures to combat. We encounter the other sources of pleasure less often, and we can therefore refrain from indulging in some of them for months or even years. But we will necessarily be tempted by gastronomic pleasures daily or even twice daily, inasmuch as it is impossible for a human being to live without eating.

Consequently, the more often we are tempted by gastronomic pleasure, the greater the danger it presents. And, indeed, at each meal, there is not one chance for making a mistake, but several. The person who eats more than he should makes a mistake. So does the person who eats in a hurry, the person who is enthralled by gourmet food, the person who favors sweets over nutritious foods, and the person who does not share his food equally with his fellow-diners. We make another mistake in connection with food when we leave what we are supposed to be doing in order to eat, even though it isn't mealtime.

Since these and other mistakes are connected with food, the person who wishes to be self-controlled must free himself of all of them and be subject to none. One way to become accustomed to this is to practice choosing food not for pleasure but for nourishment, not to please his palate but to strengthen his body. The throat was created as a passageway for food, not as an organ for pleasure. Likewise, the human being has a stomach for the same reason that every plant has a root. Just as the root nourishes a plant by taking up nutrients from the soil, so the stomach nourishes a living creature by extracting nutrients from the food and drink it consumes. Plants take nourishment for the sake of their survival rather than for pleasure, and for humans as well, food is the medicine of life. Therefore, the goal of our eating should be staying alive rather than having pleasure—at least if we wish to follow the sound advice of Socrates, who said that many men live to eat, but that he ate to live. No right-thinking person will want to follow the masses and live to eat, as they do, in constant pursuit of gastronomic pleasures.

For more evidence that the god who made humankind provided us with food and drink to keep us alive rather than give us pleasure, consider this. When the food we eat is serving its purpose—when we are digesting it and are thereby nourished and strengthened by it— our food gives us no pleasure. And yet, the time we spend digesting our food far exceeds the time we spend consuming it. If the god had wanted us to eat for pleasure, the time we spend consuming our food—and enjoying it—would have been longer.

Nevertheless, to obtain those few moments of gastronomic pleasure, countless expensive foods must be prepared and brought overseas from distant lands. Cooks are more highly valued than farmers. Some people spend all their possessions to have their banquets prepared, but they are not made stronger by eating these expensive foods. Indeed, those who eat the least expensive foods are strongest. Thus, slaves are generally stronger than their masters, country folk are stronger than city folk, and the poor are stronger than the rich. Furthermore, those who eat inexpensive food can work harder, are less fatigued by working, and are sick less often than those who eat expensive food. Also, they are better able to tolerate cold, heat, lack of sleep, and so forth.

But even if expensive and inexpensive food were equally effective at strengthening the body, one should choose inexpensive food, inasmuch as it is the kind of food a self-controlled person would choose and is therefore more suitable for a good man. When it comes to food, responsible people favor what is easy to obtain over what is difficult, what involves no trouble over what does, and what is available over what isn't. To summarize the whole subject of food, I say that the goal of eating is to bring about both health and strength. Consequently, one should eat only inexpensive foods and should be concerned with decency and appropriate moderation and, most of all, with restrained and studious behavior.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

—Pallotta, Dan [interviewee]. June 17, 2013. “Pallotta on Charity and the Culture of the Non-Profit Sector.” EconTalk.org. Russell Roberts [host]. Library of Economics and Liberty.

Now there was no need to ship cows to slaughterhouses in the Gulf, he said; plenty of people in India ate beef—young people, city dwellers, even villagers.

—Akash Kapur. “The Sandy: The cost of being a cow broker in rural India.” The New Yorker. October 10, 2011.

Tilling, plowing, reaping, and sowing are not environmentally benigh activities and they never were. Moreover, it has been estimated that pests, viruses, and fungi reduce agricultural productivity throughout the world by more than a third. You can't turn a crop into edible food without killing pests. And you can't kill them without poison—whether man-made or natural.
—Michael Specter in Denialism

I deeply apologize.

—Joe Johnston commenting on his role creating the McDonald’s happy meal. The Daily O’Collegian. September 8, 2011. Page 3.

It is not an exaggeration to say that all of agriculture is intrinsically a struggle against nature.
—Erik Lichtenberg, professor, University of Maryland.

We might as well have had a catechism:
What is a farmer?
A farmer is a man who feeds the world.
What is a farmer's first duty?
To grow more food.
What is a farmer's second duty?
To buy more land.
What are the signs of a good farm?
Clean fields, neatly painted buildings, breakfast at six, no debts, no standing water.
How will you know a good farmer when you meet him?
He will not ask you for any favors.
—Jane Smiley in A Thousand Acres

PETA wrote a letter to the Vice President of the United States, saying, "Turn our servicemen and servicewomen on to the lifesaving benefits of delicious vegan food." Which is it PETA, delicious food or vegan food? It can't be both.
—Stepan Colbert on The Colbert Report, September 14, 2010

Earth, Earth, Earth! O Earth, our mother!

May the All-Wielder, Ever-Lord grant thee

Acres a-waxing, upwards a-growing,

Pregnant with corn and plenteous in strength;

Hosts of grain shafts and of glittering plants!

Of broad barley the blossoms,

And of white wheat ears waxing,

Of the whole land the harvest...

Acre, full-fed, bring forth fodder for men!

Blossoming brightly, blessed become!

And the God who wrought with earth grant us gift of growing

That each of the all the corns may come unto our need.
—Eileen Power in Medieval People (1963). Page 28 of the 2000 Dover reprint. This was a “charm” (pagan chant intended to have worldly impact) a farmer would recant as he began plowing and placed a little bread-cake under the soil, hoping to increase the fertility of the field. During early Middle Ages. This farmer may have to admit to the chant during confession, and do penance.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
—A grievance offered by the Occupy Wall Street protests, as dictated in Reason magazine (Bailouts for Me, but Not for Thee by Matt Welch; December 2011). (Not a quote I identify with)

Word peddlers tend to idealize the countryside if they are exempt from its harassments, boredom, insects, and toil.

—Will and Ariel Durant. 1965. The Age of Voltaire.

Technology is always and everywhere about utilizing natural phenomena and regularities to extract from Nature something she does not willingly give us.

—Joel Mokyr. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850.

The object that we set before ourselves was to be able to clothe ourselves entirely in cloth manufactured by our own hands. We therefore forthwith discarded the use of mill-woven cloth, and all the members of the Ashram resolved to wear hand-woven cloth made from Indian yarn only. The adoption of this practice brought us a world of experience. It enabled us to know, from direct contact, the conditions of life among the weavers, the extent of their production, the handicaps in the way of their obtaining their yarn supply, the way in which they were being made victims of fraud, and lastly, their ever-growing indebtedness.

—Gandhi, Mohandas K. 1929. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth. Relatable to the locavore movement.

These peasants were a superstitious lot who clung to many an ancient magic rite, in spite of the warnings of their priests and stewards. They were filled with awe of the earth. “They considered the field a living creature which had to be tamed, before cultivation was begun, by magic spells…At the first plowing an egg was laid before the plow; if it broke, the earth was willing to accept the sacrifice…Taboos were observed to guard the health of the earth. Women who had just given birth and people with lung sicknesses were not permitted to approach the field. When bodies were taken to the grave, the procession must not cross any cultivated field.”

Every peasant village had its magician who saw to it that the spells were properly observed. These magicians provided portions and spells for healing sick cows, oxen, chickens and children, and were always obliging about concocting philters to help lovelorn peasant girls win the peasant Tristans. Pagan beliefs died hard; as has often been observed, the Church had to confer on innumerable saints the powers of heathen spirits before the simpler folk could be weaned entirely away from their ancient religion.

Among the more expensive of magic rites was the custom of burying deep in the ground a part of the seed for sowing, as a sacrificial offering to Erda, the goddess of earth, who might otherwise be offended when the peasant rudely drove his plow into her body. Charles [read: Charlemagne] vainly called on his stewards to stamp out this practice for the eminently sensible reason that it was wasteful: less seed was sown and the harvest was diminished.

—Richard Winston in Charlemagne (1960).

…I was sitting in a fellow’s garden, and I bit into one of the tomatoes that he had just picked and I instantly thought of my grandmother…this was two or three years after she had died, and I was in Senegal in West Africa, and there’s no reason to be thinking about my grandmother…and a couple of weeks later I thought to myself, “Why did that strong, strong image of my grandmother come to my head?”...Then I suddenly realized, “My gosh, it’s because I tasted a tomato that tasted like the tomatoes that I was used to growing up on the farm there.” And then I then I realized nobody is going to tell me this was just nostalgia. This was not in my head. It was an instinctive reaction to something that was quite real, and I still believe it’s real.

—Cary Fowler of the Global Seed Bank in “Saving Seeds,” on The Story podcast. APM. June 7, 2011.

We’ve had a mass extinction worldwide on the farm … We’ve lost a huge, huge amount of diversity that once existed. I mean today you could say that we had 2,000 or maybe 3,000 different varieties of wheat, or 400,000 different varieties of rice, and thousands of different varieties of apples. But, in the last century, with modernization of agriculture—just in the normal course of events—… we’ve had a diminishment in the number of those varieties being grown, so fewer varieties—generally highly productive varieties that we want the farmer to grow—covering more and more of the acreage around the world, and so what happens to the varieties that used to be there, all that diversity that used to be there? Well, literally it can become extinct.

—Cary Fowler of the Global Seed Bank in “Saving Seeds,” on The Story podcast. APM. June 7, 2011.

Scientists in Russia got a big surprise recently: they found they were able to grow food from seeds that are 30,000 years old. The flower seeds had apparently been saved by a squirrel and preserved in permafrost. Scientists say this is the oldest plant material that has been brought back to life.

—Cary Fowler of the Global Seed Bank in “Saving Seeds,” on The Story podcast. APM. June 7, 2011.

IT IS sadly appropriate that Mohamad Bouazizi, the Tunisian whose self-immolation triggered the first protest of the Arab spring, should have been a street vendor, selling food. From the start, food has played a bigger role in the upheavals than most people realise. Now, the Arab spring is making food problems worse.

—The Economist. “Let them eat baklava.” March 17, 2012. Page 59.

That's ridiculous. This shouldn't even be a debate. Even if you could use all the organic material that you have—the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues—and get them back on the soil, you couldn't feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests

—Norman Borlaug, when asked if organic agriculture could feed the world.

http://reason.com/blog/2009/03/26/norman-borlaug-happy-95th-birt

To Triptolemus all men have erected temples and altars, because he gave us food by cultivation.

—Epictetus. 108 AD. The Discourses.

…and another advantage of buying from your local farmer is…economists call it the multiplier effect. And that’s the number of times a dollar circulates in the community before it leaves the community. So when I go to the grocery store, somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of my dollar stays in the local community—the rest leaves, because it has to pay the truckers, it has to pay the agribusiness giants and the…warehouses. The money leaves the community. And if I spend the money with my local farmer, that guy, he pays his local property taxes, pays his school taxes (his kids go to the school), he goes and spends his money at the local feed store, the local hardware store—he spends the money here, in the community. It doesn’t leave the community. And, depending on who you talk with, that multiplier effect for agriculture—in an agricultural community—is five or six. That means it’s five times as effective as if you go to the supermarket and the money leaves the community. So [local food is] really economic development.

—John English. 2012. Locavore: Local Diet Healthy Planet. Documentary. Director: Jay Canode. Studio: Createspace. (not a statement I agree with)

It’s all about maximum short-run productive efficiency. Like, a factory process. We find something that works well, and then we continue to use it because it works so well. And then, as we say, we begin to apply that same kind of paradigm—a paradigm of industrialization, specialization, standardization, economies-of-scale. We begin to apply that paradigm to everything, and it doesn’t work on everything.

—agricultural economist John Ikerd in the documentary Fresh, 2012. (not a statement I agree with)

When people say the industrial food system is unsustainable, we throw around that word without really thinking through, “Well, what does that really mean?” Well, it really means it can’t go on this way. Monocultures are very dangerous things.

—Michael Pollan in the documentary Fresh, 2012. (not a statement I agree with)

Most of these farms when I started farming had livestock on them. People were raising hogs, people were raising cattle, and even some people when I was a kid had chickens. These big corporations industrialized livestock production. That took the livestock off of the family farm and put them in these big factories.

—George Naylor, Corn-belt farmer, interviewed in the documentary Fresh, 2012.

Once you concentrate animals in these animal cities, that we call factory farms or feedlots, you have all sorts of problems. Not only miserable animals, but microbes like E-coli O157:H7, which is a feedlot bacteria, and it regularly kills people. And, you have a huge sanitation problem. I mean you have these manure lagoons full of real toxic waste, I mean, this isn’t the kind of manure you can spray on a farm field. It’s just too concentrated and it’s got too many pharmaceuticals in it. It’s full of hormones, it’s full of pesticides. You created a pollution problem where you didn’t have one, because if you keep animals on farms their manure is a blessing. You can use it to grow other crops. You can close the nutrient cycle…

—Michael Pollan, interviewed in the documentary Fresh, 2012. (not a statement I agree with)

If you look at nature as the template, and look at the patterns and say, “How can we most closely approximate this?” Let’s treat the herbivore as a herbivore first, and then the other things will fall into place.

—Joel Salatin, sustainable farmer, interviewed in the documentary Fresh, 2012. (not a statement I agree with)

Almost fifteen years ago a boar-hog stabbed me in the knee-cap with its tusk one day… About two weeks later my leg basically increased to about 50% of its size, and was throbbing, and that’s when I went to the doctor. I contracted a strep infection, that was a mutated form of strep. They treated me first with standard types of treatments—Penicillin, …, Amoxicillin, …, and the list went on—it did not phase my infection… They put me in the hospital and gave me an IV and a new generation drug that saved my life. What I was actually doing on my farm was basically feed continual dosages of antibodies…to ward off a low-grade infection…it’s very dangerous. You kill off the weak strain… [of bacterial infections] …and then the strong ones survive and they multiply and mutate and become even stronger.

—Russ Kremer. Natural Hog Farmer. Former factory hog farmer. Interviewed in documentary Fresh (2012). (not a statement I agree with)

One of the complaints that we often hear about organic is, “It’s wonderful. Sure, it’s better for the land, it’s better for the farmer, better for you, but you can’t feed the world with it.” We now know that’s just wrong. We have the science. We know the answer. And that is, that medium-sized organic is far more productive than any sized industrial agriculture. We now actually, for the first time, in the last two to three years, we actually have the studies, the data, that definitely shows that if you wanna feed the world, don’t be industrial agriculture. It turns out that all those inputs and all the expensive machinery, all the pesticides, herbicides—not to mention the fertilizers—make it unsustainable.

—Andrew Kimbrell. Executive Director, The Center for Food Safety. Interviewed in documentary Fresh (2012; 29:40). (not a statement I agree with)

As we’ve industrialized our food we’ve made it cheaper, but we’ve also diminished it nutritionally. According to the USDA’s own numbers, if you look at fresh produce grown in 1950 and compared it nutritionally with fresh produce grown today you will find that the amounts of key nutrients, minerals, vitamins has diminished by 40%.

—Michael Pollan in the documentary Fresh, 2012 (36:00). (not a statement I agree with)

The U.S. study, which was more carefully controlled, found that amounts for a few nutrients like vitamin C, iron, and riboflavin declined somewhat, several were the same, and a few actually increased.

These studies are widely—but very selectively—cited in books, articles, and websites that sell nutritional supplements. You never see any mention of the fact that the level of some nutrients has apparently increased in the last 50 years. Instead, the 80% decline in copper levels observed in the British study is frequently translated as, “Fruits and vegetables have lost 80% of their nutritional value,” which is obviously a gross mischaracterization of the findings.

The authors of both studies are very candid that most of the differences are probably explained by factors other than nutrient depletion of the soil…

—Monica Reinagel. June 21, 2010. “Are Fruits and Vegetables Getting Less Nutritious?” Nutrition Diva podcast.

Cheap food is an illusion. There is no such thing as cheap food. The real cost of the food is paid somewhere, and if it isn’t paid at the cash register it’s paid, you know, it’s charged to the environment, it’s charged to the public purse in the form of subsidies, and it’s charged to your health.

—Michael Pollan in the documentary Fresh, 2012 (36:45). (not a statement I agree with)

Right now we’re heavily subsidizing every calorie of high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oil, which are the building blocks of processed food, and the less healthy food we’re eating. And we’re not doing anything to subsidize or support the growing of healthy, fresh produce. Millions of Americans live in food deserts where you can’t find fresh produce; you can only find processed food. You can find Ramen noodles and you can’t find an apple. People do want to eat this food, they just don’t have access to it.

—Michael Pollan in the documentary Fresh, 2012 (36:45). (not a statement I agree with)

Most farms are family farms. "In 2010 of all the farms in the United States with at least $1 million in revenues, 88 percent were family farms, and they accounted for 79 percent of production. Large-scale farmers today are sophisticated businesspeople who use GPS equipment to guide their combines, biotechnology to boost their yields, and futures contracts to hedge their risk. They are also pretty rich."

—Chrystia Freeland. August 1, 2012. “The Triumph of the Family Farm. The Atlantic.

Farmers are flush with cash.

—Chrystia Freeland. August 1, 2012. “The Triumph of the Family Farm. The Atlantic.

Prior to World War II, it took 100 hours of labor to produce 100 bushels of corn. Today, it takes less than two hours.

—Chrystia Freeland. August 1, 2012. “The Triumph of the Family Farm. The Atlantic.

...in 2009 U.S. farm output was 170 percent above its level in 1948, having grown at a rate of 1.63 percent a year. Those figures understate the productivity revolution, because these increasing harvests have been delivered with fewer inputs, particularly less labor and less land.

—Chrystia Freeland. August 1, 2012. “The Triumph of the Family Farm. The Atlantic.

Continuous technological improvements have resulted in a system of crop farming that someone who left the countryside 20 years ago would be hard-pressed to recognize, and certainly couldn't operate.

—Chrystia Freeland. August 1, 2012. “The Triumph of the Family Farm. The Atlantic.

Ever since people first domesticated cereal crops in the Fertile Crescent 11,000 years ago, farming has followed a seemingly immutable pattern - plow your field, seed your field, harvest your field, repeat. But today, farmers can skip the plowing step.

—Chrystia Freeland. August 1, 2012. “The Triumph of the Family Farm. The Atlantic.

The U.S. today has more bus drivers than farmers.

—Information taken from Chrystia Freeland. August 1, 2012. “The Triumph of the Family Farm. The Atlantic.

I will relate the manner in which corn first came. According to tradition handed down to our people, a beautiful woman was seen to descend from the clouds, and alight upon the earth, by two of our ancestors who had killed a deer, and were sitting by a fire roasting a part of it to eat. They were astonished at seeing her, and concluded that she was hungry and had smelt the meat. They immediately went to her, taking with them a piece of the roasted venison. They presented it to her, she ate it, telling them to return to the spot where she was sitting at the end of one year, and they would find a reward for their kindness and generosity. She then ascended to the clouds and disappeared. The men returned to their village, and explained to the tribe what they had seen, done and heard, but were laughed at by their people. When the period had arrived for them to visit this consecrated ground, where they were to find a reward for their attention to the beautiful woman of the clouds, they went with a large party, and found where her right hand had rested on the ground corn growing, where the left hand had rested beans, and immediately where she had been seated, tobacco.

The two first have ever since been cultivated by our people as our principal provisions, and the last is used for smoking. The white people have since found out the latter, and seem to it relish it as much as we do, as they use it in different ways: Smoking, snuffing and chewing.

We thank the Great Spirit for all the good he has conferred upon us. For myself, I never take a drink of water from a spring without being mindful of his goodness.

—Blackhawk. 1955. The Autobiography of Black Hawk.

Of all the food-related countercultural buzzwords that have gone mainstream in recent years, organic ranks among the most confusing. Like its cousins (cf. local, free-range, or worst of all, natural), the term's promotion by grocery stores everywhere has caused it to escape the strict definitions laid out by the USDA . But from Stanford University comes new research suggesting what we should have known all along: organic food isn't actually more nutritious than traditionally-farmed goods.

In a widely publicized and discussed analysis of more than 200 studies comparing organic to regular food products, researchers have found that organics don't have more vitamins or minerals (with the lone exception of phosphorus, which we all get in sufficient amounts anyway). Nor do they have an appreciable effect when it comes to heading off food-borne illness, although the germs found in conventional meat do have a higher chance of being drug-resistant (more on that in a bit).

That we needed a study to understand how nutritionally similar organic foods are to non-organics is a perfect example of the way we've lost sight of what the term really means. It's worth keeping in mind that organic refers only to a particular method of production; while switching to organic foods can be good for you insofar as doing so helps you avoid nasty things like chemicals and additives, there's nothing in the organic foods themselves that gives them an inherent nutritional advantage over non-organics. In other words, it's not wrong to say organic food is "healthier" than non-organics. It's just unrealistic to think that your organic diet is slowly turning you into Clark Kent.

(You laugh, but according to a Nielsen study cited by USA Today, a ton of people believe just that, or something close to it. Fifty-one percent of those surveyed said they bought organic food because they thought it was more nutritious.)

…

For all the attention devoted to the ways organic is better for you, we should remember that organic began chiefly as an argument about the environment. From the agency's perspective, to buy organic is to respect the land your food came from. It means taking pains to ensure that your farms remain bountiful and productive, even decades from now. The case is one part self-interest over the long term, and one part a statement of ethics. Not really what you'd expect from a mechanical bureaucratic institution.

Buying organic is also a statement about public health. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of antibiotics. Conventional farms have been putting the stuff in animal feed for decades -- even though we've known since the 1970s about the health hazards that the animal use of antibiotics poses for humans. Reducing society's chances of inadvertently creating a superbug is a good reason to purchase organic foods.

There are the more immediate health benefits of buying organic: you'll avoid the chemicals, preservatives, and hormones that conventional farms often use to treat their foods. In the Stanford study, just 7 percent of organic foods were found to have traces of pesticides, compared to 38 percent of conventionally-farmed produce. Again, that doesn't mean organic foods will supercharge your health -- you'll just be at less risk of exposure to potentially harmful substances, for whatever that's worth to you. Quantifying that benefit is a contentious area and certainly worthy of more research.

And then there's the reason many people find most compelling of all: the health of workers in the field. For some consumers, buying organic is a human-rights issue. Reading Atlantic contributor Barry Estabrook's Tomatoland on the ruinous health problems of tomato planters and pickers in Florida because of the use of herbicides and pesticides is enough to make almost anyone choose organic over non-organic. Yes, there are safety rules in place for the use of these lethal chemicals, but as Estabrook's work and the the work of others shows, those rules are frequently not followed.

Even if organic foods may not be uniquely nutritionally fortified as many of us have grown accustomed to thinking, don't write them off just yet. They still mean a great deal. And besides -- it seems unfair to judge organic crops for failing to do something they never claimed to be capable of in the first place. They're simply the victims of our projection.

—Fung, Brian. September 4, 2012. “Organic Food Isn’t More Nutritious, but That Isn’t the Point.” The Atlantic. Accessed September 6, 2012 at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/organic-food-isnt-more-nutritious-but-that-isnt-the-point/261929/.

To imagine that it [the soil] can be kept fertile by applying chemical elements is to ignore the literally vital role played by humus, and, ultimately, to create deserts. This is the heart of the organic argument. In its extreme form it rejects altogether the use of chemical fertilizers; more moderate adherents to the organic cause have been prepared to use them for short-term purposes, or as part of a balanced process of manuring to which humus, not withstanding, is of primary purpose.

—Conford, Philip. 2001. The Origins of the Organic Movement.

Its Broadbalk field, on which, it was claimed, crops of wheat had been grown every year since 1843 with artificials but no organic manures, seemed to prove conclusively that chemical fertilizers were sufficient in themselves to maintain fertility indefinitely.

—Conford, Philip. 2001. The Origins of the Organic Movement.

Broadbalk is no ordinary field. The first experimental crop of winter wheat was sown there in the autumn of 1843, and for the past 166 years the field, part of the Rothamsted Research station, has been the site of the longest-running continuous agricultural experiment in the world. Now different parts of the field are sown using different practices, making Broadbalk a microcosm of the state of world farming.

The wheat yielding a tonne a hectare is like an African field, and for the same reason: this crop has had no fertiliser, pesticide or anything else applied to it. African farmers are sometimes thought to be somehow responsible for their low yields, but the blame lies with the technology at their disposal. Given the same technology, European and American farmers get the same results.

The wheat bearing 4 or 5 tonnes a hectare is, roughly, like that of the Green Revolution, the transformation of agriculture that swept the world in the 1970s. It has been treated with herbicides and some fertilisers, but not up to the standard of the most recent agronomic practices, nor is it the highest-yielding semi-dwarf wheat variety. This is the crop of the Indian subcontinent and of Argentina.

The extraordinary results in the centre of the field are achieved by using the best plants, fertilisers, fungicides and husbandry. The yield is higher than the national average in Britain, and is as good as it gets.

The Economist. February 24, 2011. “The 9 billion-people question.” Accessed September 7, 2012 at http://www.economist.com/node/18200618.

[In a reference to the The Economist article and graph above, Tom Philpott at the grist blog writes]

You don’t have to look very closely at the chart to see that fields treated with manure produce roughly identical yields to those treated with “inorganic fertilisers,” i.e., synthetic nitrogen, mined phosphorous, etc. In other words, based on the Broadbalk experiments highlighted by The Economist itself, there’s no reason to assume, a priori, that organic farming “cannot feed the world.”

—Accessed September 7, 2012 at http://grist.org/industrial-agriculture/2011-03-01-economist-dismisses-organic-agriculture-and-makes-case-for-it/. What the author neglects is that this chart shows organic fertilizer is better because it provides the same yields as organic fertilizers but is cheaper for farmers to purchase.

Images of Broadbalk field:

Doubts about the quality of food had been widespread in the later nineteenth century, chiefly on account of what was added to it; the early organic movement directed attention to the question of what was missing from it, criticizing ‘devitalized’ foods from which the nutritional value had been removed (though of course there was also a suspicious interest in the possible adverse effects of consuming food grown and sprayed with poisonous chemicals).

—Conford, Philip. 2001. The Origins of the Organic Movement. Page 20.

As opponents of what they termed ‘economic orthodoxy,’ the ‘sound finance’ which sacrificed agriculture to its vested interests, they were hostile to free trade and laissez-faire capitalism but could not accept State Socialism, which its bureaucracy, or atheistic, totalitarian Communism as an alternative. In contemporary terms, one might say that they were in search of a Third Way, though this had to be one which based the national economy on agriculture, not industry. Marxist criticism of capitalism might be justified, but the Marxist solution was undesirable. For the sake of social stability a different alternative had to be found. That alternative was variously identified as DISTRIBUTION, GUILD SOCIALISM, SOCIAL CREDIT, Regional Socialism, Italian corporatism, Mosleyite Fascism, High Toryism, and home-grown fringe brands of nationalism. As if this mix were not sufficiently heady, there was a strong element of pacifism along with some Tolstoyan anarchism, and even some admiration for Nazism.

—Conford, Philip. 2001. The Origins of the Organic Movement. Page 23.

...it’s never ‘just food.’ Shopping is highly personalized (or should be) due to all the connotations surrounding home, meals and family…(T) pervasive conversation out there reflects consumers who are yearning for something more personal and participative when it comes to food.

—Speer, Nevil. September 17, 2012. “Reaction to Stanford Study key.” Feedstuffs. Page 8. Speer is actually quoting a comment made in his article the previous week.

I think all of this movement towards doing our own labor, and pickling, and fancy food stuff that you do at home, I think that is really a sign of how spoiled we have all become, that our basic needs are so well taken care of that we need to seek out some sort of hardship to feel whole… What could be better than having all of your basic needs met?

—Levitt, Steven. September 24, 2012. “The Tale of the $15 Tomato: Full Transcript.” Freakonomics blog.

Expert Predictions

In 1980, a few years before I bought one of the early models, AT&T conducted a global market study and came to the conclusion that by the year 2000 there would be a market for 900,000 subscribers. They were not only wrong, they were way wrong: 109 million contracts were active in 2000. Barely a decade and a half later, there are 6.8 billion globally.

—Gore, Al. June 18, 2014. “The Turning Point: New Hope for the Climate.” Rolling Stone. Page 87.

Innovation

The Shakers are credited with devising the circular saw, the wooden clothespin, the flat-headed broom (previous designs had bristles arranged in a circle), and a revolving oven for making baked beans and pies in bulk. Quite different and astonishing are their religious paintings on paper; called Gift Drawings, they are replete with geometric designs as well as mysterious signs and indecipherable texts. They are a pictorial form of glossolalia, parallel to the "speaking in tongues" of the New Testament faithful.

—Komanecky, Michael. July 26-27, 2014. “Practical Purity.” The Wall Street Journal. C8.

Economics

Importance of Economics

Walking into his jail cell with three books—the Bible, an economics text, and the confessions of Nat Turner … —[Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s] intention is to write his sequel to the celebrated letter from Birmingham jail.

—Smiley, Tavis. 2014. Death of a King.

Recessions, The Great Depression, The Great Recession Bubbles, and Economic Cycles

Bank failures were not uncommon, and we hear of “panics” in which bank after bank closed its doors. Serious charges of malfeasance were brought against even the most prominent banks, and the people looked upon the bankers with that same mixture of envy, admiration, and dislike with which the poor favor the rich in all ages.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 19. Page 465. Passage refers to life in in Athens during the fourth century BC, when banks were invented.

To dispel resignation, he used every public forum to dismiss the popular narrative that cast booms and bursts as episodes in a morality play. He vigorously denied the notion that recessions were the inevitable punishment and welcome correctives for extravagance, imprudence, and greed. Instead, Keynes told his readers, “We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.”

—Sylvia Nasar in Grand Pursuit, describing John Maynard Keynes’ view of the Great Depression. Chapter 10. Page 308.

The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump, but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi boom.

—Joseph Schumpeter in The Theory of Economic Development. Quoted by Sylvia Nasar in Grand Pursuit. Chapter 10. Page 308.

The seemingly simple solution to this problem—and my personal advice to anybody looking to sell a house or get a job—is to lower your asking price. But University of Georgia economist George Selgin...says letting wages and prices go where they want to go—namely, down—is not the solution...“Demand-driven deflation is a very bumpy road,” Selgin continued. “Prices and wages are rigid downward. Today there are lots of rigidities in markets that aren’t going to come down easily. So that means any poor sucker who does his share and takes his cuts is going to be living less well and waiting for everybody else to take their cuts.”

—Tim Cavanaugh. “Why Does Keynesian Success Feel Like Failure?” Reason. December, 2011. Pages 70-71.

The economy was suffering from a mechanical breakdown for which there was a (relatively) easy fix. In one column he wrote that there was nothing more profoundly wrong with the economic engine than a case of “magneto” or starter trouble. Prices had fallen so much that farmers and businessmen couldn't sell their products for what it cost to produce them. Hence, they had no choice but to slash production and investment, setting off another round of unemployment and causing prices to fall still further. To break the vicious circle, all the monetary authorities had to do was to lower interest rates by creating more money until business could raise prices and found it worthwhile to begin investing again. He was convinced that easier money would head off anything worse than a garden-variety recession.

—Sylvia Nasar in Grand Pursuit, describing John Maynard Keynes’ view of the Great Depression. Chapter 10. Page 309.

It may be that at the present stage of human knowledge we are not equipped to understand a crisis which is so great and so novel...Nowhere in the whole world has there been a prophet of whom it can be said that his teachings were comprehensive and prompt and sufficient...It is also a crisis of the human understanding, and our deepest failures have not been failures arising from malevolence but from miscalculation.

—Sylvia Nasar in Grand Pursuit, quoting American journalist Walter Lippmann. Chapter 10. Page 319.

Most economic historians agree that not only did no one predict the Great Depression on the basis of any previous depression, but no one could have predicted it on the basis of any existing theory. In retrospect, modern scholars put the primary blame on mistakes by the Federal Reserve, the collapse in confidence and spending by consumers and business, and the wave of selling into falling markets by increasingly panicky investors, but as David Fettig at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has observed, “In the end, if the Great Depression is, indeed, a story, it has all the trappings of a mystery that is loaded with suspects and difficult to solve, even when we know the ending; the kind we read again and again, and each time come up with another explanation. At least for now.

—Sylvia Nasar in Grand Pursuit. Chapter 10. Page 320.

If our national debt were really at dire and unsustainable levels, as conservative economists and Republican leaders have taken to arguing, nervous investors would be driving up interest rates on federal borrowing. But just the opposite has happened: As I’m writing this, 10-year real treasury yields are at 0.00 percent. The seven-year rate is actually negative. Apparently, the financial markets think we’re a pretty good credit risk.

—Kevin Drum. “Rich People Create Jobs?: And five other myths that must die for our economy to live.” Mother Jones. November/December, 2011. Pages 23-25..

Right now, we don’t understand why people get caught up in self-reinforcing expectations of rising prices. The first time you’re in this experiment, you may have bought early and you may have sold before the break. Bring those same people back in another two or three days, put them in the same environment, and we get a lower-volume bubble. Typically, it booms earlier and crashes earlier; they are expecting a bubble. Bring them back a third time, and they tend to trade fairly close to fundamental value...

—Vernon Smith being interviewed by Ronald Bailey. “We Don’t Face Any Good Options” Reason. December, 2011. Pages 44-49.

The economist Simon Johnson suggested that the power of the financial oligarchy in the United States was not too different from what exists in emerging market countries like Russia or Indonesia.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY. Page 9.

If you think about the housing bubble, buyers, sellers, borrowers, lenders, real estate agents, government regulators—everybody believed that prices would rise and continue to rise. And that is the essence of a bubble. Suppose a regulator in 2003 or 2004 said, “Hey, this thing is not sustainable. We’ve got to do something to stop it.” I think he’d have been fired. If the bubble had been stopped in 2003 or 2004, it probably would have been a lot less damaging. But who’s going to know that?

—Vernon Smith being interviewed by Ronald Bailey. “We Don’t Face Any Good Options” Reason. December, 2011. Pages 44-49.

The way I would describe it is: We created new mortgage and financial institutions too fast. No one had an incentive to think it through. Not only were there bad incentives up front with mortgage originators, but those mortgages then would be packaged, mortgage-backed securities issued, and then they were rated and “insured.” but they weren’t collateralized. They were exempt, you see. And exempt meant that they were exempt from the property rights rules that would have applied if derivatives had been classified as securities.

—Vernon Smith being interviewed by Ronald Bailey. “We Don’t Face Any Good Options” Reason. December, 2011. Pages 44-49.

I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.

—Senator Barney Frank, chairman of the Financial Services Committee in 2009. This remark was made on September 25, 2003, as reported by The Wall Street Journal on November 29, 2011 (Editorial: The Barney Frank Era).

The idea that you can reckon with the crisis of the depression without throwing democracy and capitalism overboard is probably the New Deal's signature achievement and legacy.
—Eric Rauchway (EconTalk, 12/1/08)

Any American who has diligently put $100 a month into a domestic equity mutual fund for the past ten years will find his pot worth less than he put into it; a European who did the same has lost a quarter of his money.
—The Economist, 12/6/08, page 13

If savers treated financial assets as they do other goods, they would sell them when they are expensive and buy them when they are cheap. Actually, they do the opposite.
—The Economist, 12/6/08, page 13

Bank runs aren’t a relic of the 20th century. In fact, they risk becoming the hallmark of the 21st—though with a twist.

The 2008 financial crisis displayed characteristics of a classic bank run, but people holding bank accounts weren’t the ones scrambling to get their cash. It was lenders demanding their money from other financial institutions.

Indeed, today’s panics are more likely to involve major financial institutions and are largely hidden from plain sight until they are severe enough to trigger plunging stock prices, bankruptcies, layoffs and rising unemployment. And the current European crisis is a reminder that some of the vulnerabilities exposed in 2008 still exist.

—Kelly Evans. “Bank-Run Risk in the Shadows.” The Wall Street Journal. December 5, 2011. A4.

Saying that poor sales is the biggest problem facing small business is like saying that the biggest problem facing the economy is that it’s not doing very well. It has no content. It tells you nothing about an amorphous concept called “aggregate demand” and even if it did, it does not tell you how to increase aggregate demand.

—Russell Roberts writing in the blog Cafe Hayek on October 9, 2011.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
—Friedrich August von Hayek

The curious task of the non-economist is to demonstrate to economists how little really they know about the species of animal they imagine they can control.

—Not Friedrich Hayek

Mumbledy, pumbledy, my red cow,
She's cooperating now.
At first she didn't understand
That milk production must be planned...
...But now the government reports
She's giving pints instead of quarts.
—Humorist Ogden Nash, during the Great Deparession, in response to the government efforts to exert greater control over the economy, to the detriment of society.

In the United States we like to believe we are a capitalist society based on individual responsibility. But we are what we do. Not what we say we are. Not what we wish to be. But what we do. And what we do is make it easy to gamble with other people's money — particularly borrowed money — by making sure that almost everybody who makes bad loans gets his money back anyway. The financial crisis of 2008 was a natural result of these perverse incentives.
—Russell Roberts in Gambling With Other People's Money: How Perverted Incentives Caused the Financial Crisis.

[Peisistratus, in sixth century BC] gave employment to the needy by undertaking extensive government works.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 3: The Heroic Age. Page 121.

The revenues from the busy port [sixth century BC] enabled the dictator to end a dangerous period of unemployment by a program of public works that called forth the admiration of Herodotus.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 3: The Heroic Age. Page 142.

The idea that we have models that can account for all the uncertainty and unpredictable behavior we see in markets is just crazy. But that’s how the models have been used.

—David H. Freedman quoting economist David Colander. “A Formula For Economic Calamity.” Scientific American. November, 2011.

Scientists struggle with models in many fields—including climate science, coastal erosion and nuclear safety—in which the phenomena they describe are very complex, or information is hard to come by, or as in the case with financial models, both. But in no area of human activity is so much faith placed in such flimsy science as finance.

—David H. Freedman. “A Formula For Economic Calamity.” Scientific American. November, 2011.

The proportion of sell ratings on Wall Street remains under 5%, even today, despite the fact that any first-year MBA student can tell you that 95% of the stocks cannot be winners.

—Mike Mayo on the financial sector and the recent financial crisis in the Wall Street Journal. November 5-6, 2011. C1.

Confidence is not just the emotional state of an individual. It is a view of other people's confidence, and of other people's perceptions of other people's confidence.

—Akerlof and Shiller in Animal Spirits

To fix the banking sector, should we rely more on government regulation and oversight or let the market figure it out? Tougher rules or more capitalism? Right now, we have the worst of both worlds. We have a purportedly capitalistic system with a lot of rules that are not strictly enforced, and when things go wrong, the government steps in to protect banks from the market consequences of their own worst decisions. To me, that’s not capitalism.

—Mike Mayo on the financial sector and the recent financial crisis in the Wall Street Journal. November 5-6, 2011. C2.

...the real problem with regulation is that it often doesn’t work very well, in part because it’s always considering problems in the rearview mirror. The financial system today is almost dizzyingly complex and moving at light speed, and new rules tend to address fairly precise things, like banning specific types of securities or deals. The more effective solution would come from letting market forces work. That doesn’t mean no rules at all—a banking system like the Wild West, with blood on the floor and consumers being routinely swindled. We need a cultural, perhaps generational, change that compels companies to better apply accounting rules based on economic substance versus surface presentation.

—Mike Mayo on the financial sector and the recent financial crisis in the Wall Street Journal. November 5-6, 2011. C2.

“Never forget, dear boy, that academic distinction in economics is not to be had from giving a clear account of how the world works. Keynes knew that; had he made his General Theory completely comprehensible, it would have been ignored. Economists value most the colleague whom they most struggle to understand.”

—John Kenneth Galbraith in A Tenured Professor (1990), page 50.

Moreover, the obscurities of the General Theory (which I have since come to recognize as due, in every case, to defective thinking), expressed as they were in the language of science, appeared likely to enhance its reputation (for all too many people in all spheres – the academic sphere not excluded – are apt to accept obscurity for profundity).

—W. H. Hutt. The Keynesian Episode: A Reassessment. 1979. Page 11.

Fisher was a very clear writer. I remember a student once asked Leontief in class why there was no school of economics built around Fisher. And Leontief said: Well, it’s because he wrote so clearly—everyone could understand what he was saying.

—Vernon Smith being interviewed by Ronald Bailey. “We Don’t Face Any Good Options” Reason. December, 2011. Pages 44-49.

To rule a country of a thousand chariots, there must be reverent attention to business, and sincerity; economy in expenditure, and love for men; and the employment of the people at the proper seasons.

—Confucius

What unit of plan or purpose, one might ask, was to be found in an administration that at various times tinkered with inflation and price controls, with deficit spending and budget-balancing, cartelization and trust-busing, the promotion of consumption and the intimidation of investment, farm-acreage reduction and land reclamation, public employment projects and forced removals from the labor pool?

—David M. Kennedy describing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in Freedom From Fear

Why, the president mused one night at dinner, did they lack confidence in the economy? Because, Eleanor replied tellingly, “They are afraid of you.”

—David M. Kennedy describing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in Freedom From Fear

There are times when the economy works well and times when it doesn’t, and when it works well it’s easy to find a job and when it doesn’t work well it’s really hard to find a job, but we don’t really understand those differences.

—Russell Roberts in “Ramey on Stimulus and Multipliers,” EconTalk, October 24, 2011.

...economic debates in the 1930s about macroeconomics were so frustrating because people couldn't even agree on what the terms meant—what was meant by investment. We've made some progress; certainly made some progress in what doesn't work. But aren't we still shooting from the hip when we've got a 0.5 to a 2.0 and we've got to decide whether to pass some package of increased government spending? Do we have any scientific unbiased way to assess its impact ex ante? Unbiased scientific way. I mean, you are right that I think that sometimes researchers' biases come—we do have a range. Nobody's saying it's 10. In the standard Keynesian model, they often have multipliers of 5. Very few people are suggesting that, and most people don't believe that. We think that probably the maximum is 2; and even with a multiplier of 2, it is not clear that it's worth passing a stimulus that is going to help us in the short run and yet have very negative consequences in terms of taxes later.

—Valerie Ramey, being interviewed by Russell Roberts in “Ramey on Stimulus and Multipliers,” EconTalk, October 24, 2011.

I find estimates of the multiplier—a $1 increase in government spending, what does that do to GDP—that range from 0.8 to 1.2.

—Valerie Ramey, being interviewed by Russell Roberts in “Ramey on Stimulus and Multipliers,” EconTalk, October 24, 2011.

Mathematical arguments drawn from the assumption that human actions proceed with the statistical regularity that might be found in a flock of sheep are often exceedingly difficult to refute in detail, and yet they rest on an insecure foundation. Man is not merely an animal. He is also a rational being, and accordingly, he reacts to new circumstances in a way that can only be determined by taking the possibility of rational purpose into account.

—Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse in Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911, page 15). The Columbia University Press.

The economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, one of the most influential stimulus enthusiasts out there, claims that when the government spends $1 on infrastructure, the economy gets back $1.44 in growth. But economists are far from a consensus about the returns on federal spending. Some find large positive multipliers (meaning that every dollar in government spending generates more than a dollar of economics growth), but others find negative multipliers (meaning every dollar in spending hurts the economy). As Eric Leeper, Todd Walker, and Shu-Chum Tang put it in a recent paper for the International Monetary Fund, “Economists have offered an embarrassingly wide range of estimated multipliers.”

—Veronique de Rugy. December, 2011. “Road to Nowhere.” Reason Magazine. Pages 21-22.

For all the financiers’ faults (“too big to fail”, the excessive use of derivatives and the rest of it), the huge hold in most governments’ finances stems less from bank bail-outs than from politicians spending too much in the boom and making promises to do with pensions and health care they never could keep.
—The Economist. “Rage against the machine.” October 22, 2011. Page 13.

Read his memoir, An American Life, and you will also find Reagan referring to the Works Progress Administration, among the biggest government jobs programs of all time, as “one of the most productive elements” of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Read accounts of Reagan’s tenure as California governor and you will find him proposing, in 1971, that a WPA-style public works program replace the state’s welfare apparatus.

—Thomas Frank. “More Government, Please!” Harper’s Magazine. December 2011, page 10.

But if we are so concerned about job creation, why not [have the government] just create jobs?...We have waited for them [read: the job creators of the private sector] long enough. It is time we took the business of job creation into our own hands.

—Thomas Frank. “More Government, Please!” Harper’s Magazine. December 2011, pages 10-11. Frank was referring to the government hiring workers.

By and large, the things they built [FDR’s New Deal] are treasured today. Indeed, there was a genius and grandeur to their far-flung labors. The Roosevelt Administration dealt with unemployment by putting murals in post offices, by bringing electricity to deepest Appalachia, by paying artists to paint, theater directors to state plays, and penniless authors to assemble collections of folklore and write a famous series of guidebooks.

—Thomas Frank. “More Government, Please!” Harper’s Magazine. December 2011, page 11. Frank was referring to the government hiring workers.

I am often asked if the recent global financial crisis marks the beginning of the end of modern capitalism. It is a curious question, because it seems to presume that there is a viable replacement waiting in the wings. The truth of the matter is that, for now at least, the only serious alternatives to today’s dominant Anglo-American paradigm are other forms of capitalism.

—Kenneth Rogoff. “Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable ?” Project Syndicate. December 2, 2011.

...the Basel rules have been pushing banks into government bonds for years on the assumption that they represent a risk-free asset. Under Basel’s risk-weightings, government debt of your home country is assigned a zero risk under both the old rules and the new.

—Wall Street Journal editorial. December 7, 2011. A18.

My current view is we are faced with a future where bank runs are a common occurrence, as they were in the 19th century, if only through shadow banks; and we will live with it and flounder in search of a solution.

—Tyler Cowen interviewed by Russell Robers. “Cowen on the European Crisis.” EconTalk. December 5, 2011.

You’re right, we did it...but thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

—Ben Bernanke to Milton Friedman, referring to Friedman’s conclusion that central bankers were responsible for much of the suffering in the Great Depression. As reported in The Economist (December 10, 2011; page 76).

...the probability of default by the GSEs is extremely small...the expected cost to the government is still very modest.

—Joseph Stiglitz, Jonathan Orszag, and Peter Orszag. March, 2002. “Implications of the New Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Risk-based Capital Standard.” Fannie Mae Papers. Note: GSEs refer to “government sponsored enterprises”, namely, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yes, the ones who went broke big-time and needed bailing out by taxpayers.

Why do we have big banks? Well, because banks like monopoly power, lobbying power. Because banks know that when they’re too big, they will be bailed.

—Willem Buiter. Chief Economist. Citigroup. Statement during interview for documentary Inside Job (2010).

Markets are inherently unstable, or at least potentially unstable. An appropriate metaphor is the oil tankers. They are very big, and therefore you have to put in compartments to prevent the sloshing around of oil from capsizing the boat. The design of the boat has to take that into account. And after the [Great] Depression the regulations actually introduced these very watertight compartments. And deregulation has led to the end of compartmentalization.

—George Soros. Chairman. Soros Fund Management.. Statement during interview for documentary Inside Job (2010).

The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought, and that's sort of exactly the Mexican story. It took forever and then it took a night.

—Rudiger Dornbusch, as quoted by John Mauldin in Business Insider. January 21, 2012.

Anger is understandable. The financial crisis of 2007-08 has produced the deepest recession since the 1930s. Most of the financiers at the heart of it have got off scot-free. The biggest banks are bigger than ever. Bonuses are flowing once again. The old saw about bankers—that they believe in capitalism when it comes to pocketing the profits and socialism when it comes to paying for the losses—is too true for comfort.

—Schumpter column. The Economist. January 7, 2011. Page 60.

It’s hard for us, and without being flippant to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions.

—Joseph Cassano on an AIG conference call with investors (August, 2007). As documented on the movie Inside Job (2011). Beginning at 39:40. They ended up losing everything.

Reporter: We have so many economists coming on our show, saying, “Oh, This is a bubble, it’s going to burst. This is going to be a real issue for the economy. Some say it could even cause a recession at some point. What is the worst-cast scenario if, in fact, we were to see prices come down substantially across the country?

Ben Bernanke: I don’t buy your premise. It’s an unlikely possibility. We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis.

—As documented on the movie Inside Job (2011). Starting at 57:20.

I regard Mr. Keynes’ neo-mercantilist position in economics in general, and with respect to money and monetary theory in particular, as essentially taking the side of the man-in-the-street, against the effort of the economic thinker and analyst to get beyond and to dispel the short-sighted views and prejudices of the former…. His work and influence seem to me supremely “anti-intellectual,” in the only meaning of intellectual life which is worthy of approval or support.

—Letter from Frank Knight to Jacob Viner, as quoted in Don Patinkin’s 1981 collection Essays On and In the Chicago Tradition.

There is no evidence for the view that Keynesian countercyclical discretionary fiscal policy in the 1930s ended the Great Depression.

—John Taylor. First Principles. 2012.

According to [Milton] Friedman , the Fed’s failure in the 1930s was a matter of not printing enough money. Bernanke deduced that the real failure was letting the banking system implode. “What Bernanke discovered was that it wasn’t the quantity of money, it was that the banks stopped lending,” says Stanley Fischer, formerly Bernanke’s thesis adviser at MIT and currently the governor of the Bank of Israel. “More than the decline in money, it was the collapse of credit.” The implication was that regulating banks in good times—and, if need be, rescuing them in bad—was of prime importance, something Bernanke would remember in the 2007–09 crisis.

—Roger Lowenstein. April 2012. “The Villian.” The Atlantic. An article about Ben Bernanke.

As a scholar, he had studied how bank failures worsened the Depression; as the Fed chair, he didn’t scrutinize the banks closely enough—that is, he overlooked the fact that dicey mortgage-backed securities made up a sizable portion of the assets of the biggest banks. “Risk was concentrated in key financial intermediaries,” he told me. “It led to panics and runs. That’s what made it all so bad.” Speaking of government officials collectively, he added, “Everyone failed to appreciate that our sophisticated, hypermodern, highly hedged, derivatives-based financial system—how ultimately fragile it really was.”

There was, I think, another reason for his blindness: Bernanke had an academic’s faith in the market’s essential rightness. He was so skeptical of the notion of mass-market folly that in his scholarly writings, he referred to bubbles in quotation marks. He was not, like Greenspan, ideologically opposed to government intervention, but he was dubious that anyone could identify, in real time, when markets were off course.

—Roger Lowenstein. April 2012. “The Villian.” The Atlantic. An article about Ben Bernanke.

That must never happen again.

—Ben Bernanke remarking on the government’s bailout of AIG in the Great Recession. In interview by Roger Lowenstein. April 2012. “The Villian.” The Atlantic. An article about Ben Bernanke.

If banks, presently, were to lend all their excess reserves, say in the form of cash, the supply of currency would nearly triple overnight, and the price of a burger would, you can bet, do the same. And if the Fed were faced with such an onslaught, and chose to soak up the excess reserves by quickly selling its assets, the deluge would overwhelm markets, send interest rates soaring, and snuff out the recovery.

—Roger Lowenstein. April 2012. “The Villian.” The Atlantic. An article about Ben Bernanke.

Allen [Greenspan] was a great wizard. No one understood what he said, but he said it in such a way that everybody bought it.

—Arthur Levitt, remarking on Allen Greenspan. 2009. Frontline: The Warning. Public Broadcasting Station.

What does it mean to say that we have a structural unemployment problem? The usual version involves the claim that American workers are stuck in the wrong industries or with the wrong skills. A widely cited recent article by Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago asserts that the problem is the need to move workers out of the “bloated” housing, finance and government sectors.

Actually, government employment per capita has been more or less flat for decades, but never mind — the main point is that contrary to what such stories suggest, job losses since the crisis began haven’t mainly been in industries that arguably got too big in the bubble years. Instead, the economy has bled jobs across the board, in just about every sector and every occupation, just as it did in the 1930s. Also, if the problem was that many workers have the wrong skills or are in the wrong place, you’d expect workers with the right skills in the right place to be getting big wage increases; in reality, there are very few winners in the work force.

All of this strongly suggests that we’re suffering not from the teething pains of some kind of structural transition that must gradually run its course but rather from an overall lack of sufficient demand — the kind of lack that could and should be cured quickly with government programs designed to boost spending.

—Paul Krugman. May 10, 2012. “Easy Useless Economics.” The New York Times.

Private nonfarm hours, however, did not exceed their 1929 level until 1942, when Americans were energetically building up the war-supply industries and a gigantic complex of military facilities to accommodate an armed force that eventually exceeded 12 million men and women in uniform. As late as 1939, Roosevelt’s seventh year in the presidency, private nonfarm hours were 16 percent below their total in 1929 – and about 21 percent below the trend high-employment level for 1939 (computed on the assumption of a constant rate of growth of such hours between 1929 and 1948). Perhaps no other single comparison expresses so succinctly, so unambiguously, and so irrefutably the New Deal’s failure to bring about full economic recovery.

—Bob Higgs. 2012. Delusions of Power. Page 148.

[T]he Great Depression was deepened and prolonged by the policies of the New Deal, not because Washington spent too little in an attempt to prime the economic pump, but because what it did spend was influenced more by FDR’s strategy for reelection to the White House in 1936 than by the economic misery into which the nation had been plunged….

A third and final lesson to be drawn from the Great Depression as well as the New Deal’s responses to it is that it may be better to do nothing than to rush into the adoption of policies, many of which are irreversible, that do much more harm than good.

—Shughart, William F. “The New Deal and Modern Memory.” 2010 Presidential Address to the Southern Economic Assocation.

Economics has often ignored the critical distinction between austerity for the government and government-imposed austerity on the private sector. In the former, governments which are over-budget sell assets, restrain their hiring, and limit their mission to essentials. That's growth-oriented austerity.

In the private-sector version of austerity, governments impose new taxes and mandates on the private sector while maintaining their own personnel, salaries and pensions. That's the antigrowth version of austerity prevalent in Europe's austerity programs.

Many economic models, including the U.S. Congress's budget scoring system and Keynesian stimulus, ignore national debt levels and disregard whether spending decisions are made by the private sector or the government. This creates the absurd result that an economy in which the government spends and invests increasing amounts—even 100% of GDP—has the same projected growth rate as an economy where the government spends and taxes less.

—David Malpass. May 24, 2012. "Greece's False Austerity." The Wall Street Journal. A17.

ONE OF THE most seductive narratives about the recent financial crisis is that it was caused by dizzying increases in the amount of leverage on the balance sheets of Wall Street firms, leaving the financial system virtually no margin for error. Leverage, we’ve been told repeatedly, went from about 12-to-1 in 2004 to 33-to-1 in 2008. (Leverage is the ratio of debt or assets to equity; at 33-to-1 leverage, a mere 3 percent drop in the value of a firm’s assets can wipe out its equity.) The reason for the increase, so the story goes, was an underappreciated change, in April 2004, to an obscure Securities and Exchange Commission rule, which let Wall Street off its short leash and allowed unprecedented risk-taking. If not for that, according to the popular press and many accomplished scholars, the crisis might not have happened. The acceptance of this thesis has colored not only how we think about what happened but also the new laws that were designed to prevent the next crisis. The problem is, it’s flat wrong. And because we have misunderstood the facts, we may now be trying to cure the wrong disease.

…

BOTH STIGLITZ AND Blinder were right to point out that Wall Street was highly leveraged before the crash, on the order of 33-to-1 or more. But the truth is that in recent decades, Wall Street firms have almost always been highly leveraged. For instance, according to a 1992 study by the U.S. General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office), the average leverage ratio for the top 13 investment banks was 27-to-1 midway through 1991 (up from 18-to-1 in 1990). A subsequent GAO report, in 2009, noted that the big Wall Street investment banks had higher leverage in 1998 than in 2006. According to SEC filings, in 1998, the year before it went public, Goldman Sachs was leveraged at nearly 32-to-1, while in 2006 it was leveraged at 22-to-1. In 1998, Bear Stearns’s leverage was 35-to-1; in 2006, its leverage was 28-to-1. Similar patterns applied at Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. To be sure, leverage has fluctuated over time: In the early 1970s, for instance, it was generally below 8-to-1. But in the 1950s, it sometimes exceeded 35-to-1.

—William D. Cohan. June 2012. “How We Got the Crash Wrong: Leverage was not the problem—incentives were.” The Atlantic.

But a lot of small investors are sitting the rally out.

Forty-six percent of U.S. households now have money in stocks or stock mutual funds, down from 59 percent in 2001, says the Investment Company Institute. This year alone, some $70 billion has been pulled out of stock funds.

When people have money to spare, they tend to keep it in savings and checking accounts, though they earn much less money there, says David Santschi, executive vice president of operations at TrimTabs Investment Research, which tracks money flows.

"[The stock market] is not where the real money has been flowing this year," he says. "The real money has been flowing into mattresses, so to speak."

—Jim Zarroli. August 12, 2012. “Small Investors Stay Wary of Betting on Wall Street.” Weekend Edition Sunday. National Public Radio.

In other words, by letting trading activity be guided by VaR, we have essentially exposed our economic fate to a deeply flawed mechanism. Such flawedness, as was the case not only in this crisis but also before, can yield untold malaise.

The main issue with VaR is that it can easily and severely underestimate market risk. Given the model’s powerful presence in financeland, that underestimation translates into recklessly huge and recklessly leveraged risk-taking on the part of banks. A particularly big problem is that VaR can translate not just into huge risk-taking and leverage for regular assets, but also for very toxic assets. As a tool that ignores the fundamental characteristics of assets, VaR can easily label the obviously risky as non-risky. VaR can mask risk so well that an entire financial system can be inundated with the worst kinds of exposures and still consider itself comfortably safe, assuaged by the rosy comforting dictates from the glorified analytical radar. VaR makes accumulating lots of toxic trading assets extremely feasible. VaR, in sum, enables danger.

VaR is an untrustworthy and dangerous measure of future market risk for one main reason: It is calculated by looking at the past. The upcoming risk of a financial asset (a stock, a bond, a derivative) is essentially assumed to mirror its behavior over the historical time period arbitrarily selected for the calculation (one year, five years, etc.). If such past happened to be placid (no big setbacks, no undue turbulence) then VaR would conclude that we should rest easy, safe in the statistical knowledge that no nasty surprises await. For instance, in the months prior to the kick-starting of the crisis in mid-2007, the VaR of the big Wall Street firms was relatively quite low, reflecting the fact that the immediate past had been dominated by uninterrupted good times and negligible volatility, particularly when it came to the convoluted mortgage-related securities that investment banks had been enthusiastically accumulating on their balance sheets. A one-day 95 percent VaR of $50 million was typical, and typically modest in its estimation of losses: At that level, a firm would be expected to lose no more than $50 million from its trading positions 95 percent of the time (in other words, it would be expected to lose more than $50 million only 12 days out of a year’s 250 trading days). When you consider that those Wall Street entities owned trading assets worth several hundred billion dollars and that the eventual setbacks amounted to several dozen billion dollars, we can appreciate that VaR’s predictions were excruciatingly off-base. The soulless data rearview mirror may have detected no risk, but certainly that did not mean that the system was not flooded with the worst kind of risk, ready to explode at any time. In finance, the past is simply not prologue, but someone forgot to tell VaR about it.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

The fact that the mathematical engineering behind VaR tends to assume that markets follow a Normal probability distribution (thus assuming extreme moves to have negligible chance of happening, something obviously quite contrary to empirical evidence) can also contribute to the model churning unrealistically low numbers as big losses are ruled out, as can do VaR’s reliance on the statistical concept of correlation, which calculates the future expected co-movement of different asset classes, based on how such codependence worked out in the past. If several assets in the portfolio happened to be uncorrelated or, better yet, “negatively correlated” in the past, VaR will take for granted that those exposures should cancel each other out, yielding lower overall portfolio risk estimates. However, as any seasoned trader would tell you, just because several assets were negatively correlated we can’t infer that they won’t move in tandem (positively correlated, implying that chances are that they can all tumble concurrently, thus painting a much worse overall risk picture) next month. Market history is flooded with cases when assets that were supposed to move independent of each other all tanked at the same time. Correlation in finance simply can’t be captured mathematically.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

And let’s not forget that VaR measures risk only up to a degree of statistical confidence (typically 95 percent or 99 percent), thus leaving out the so-called “tail events,” or those market episodes that have a lower chance of taking place. Big losses may lurk in those extremes, but that’s beyond VaR’s territory, so the model won’t register such possibilities. Yet another rationale for taking VaR’s results with a pinch of salt. If the very worst loss that took place in the relevant historical sample was, say, $500 million, then VaR won’t be as high as $500 million because the model’s statistical reach doesn’t cover 100 percent of past bad scenarios, just 95 percent or 99 percent (if the 99th worst result in that sample happened to be, say, $34 million then that would be the 99 percent VaR, obviously well below the worst-case $500 million). The most unlikely scenarios are not captured by the model, and the most unlikely scenarios may be the ones we should worry most about.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

Invented by Wall Street in the late 1980s, VaR quickly became the accepted de rigueur market risk measurement tool inside dealing floors around the globe. Trading decisions and traders compensation began to depend on what VaR said; if the number churned by the model was deemed unacceptably large, a trader would be asked to cut down their positions, if the number was deemed comfortably tame the trader would be assigned more capital. If you made good money while enjoying a lowish VaR, you would be considered a hero by your bosses, someone capable of bringing in big bucks with seemingly minimal risk. Clearly, traders had every incentive to own portfolios endowed with low VaRs, and thus began a long-honored tradition to try to game the system into delivering subdued mathematical risk estimates. The pernicious effects of such gaming may have come fully home to roost during the credit crisis, two decades after the quantitative prodigal son was first allowed to infiltrate us.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

Anybody with half a brain who chooses to use it understands that subprime CDOs are far from risk-lite. Unluckily for us, VaR was not endowed with a brain. The result: VaR permitted investment banks to accumulate untold amounts of very illiquid, very lethal assets in an extremely highly leveraged fashion (i.e., on the cheap, capital-wise). Just before the crisis, the typical VaR-dictated trading-related leverage around Wall Street and the City of London was 100 to 1 (even 1,000 to 1). That is, banks were forced to post only $1 in capital for every $100 (or $1,000) of assets that they wanted to own. That’s a lot of leverage. The most insignificant drop in value of your portfolio can wipe you out, fast. Given that the portfolio that was being financed with so little equity and so much debt was (thanks to VaR’s blindness as to the true nature of an asset) inundated with poisonous stuff, it is easy to understand why the meltdown, when it inevitably came, was so shocking and so sudden. When asset prices began to dive following disruptions in the U.S. mortgage market in mid-2007, the huge and toxic trading positions that banks had built on the back of very modest VaR numbers began to bleed very large losses, quickly eating away the very small capital bases sanctioned by those very modest VaR numbers, and making the banking industry insolvent over night.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

How can we be so sure that the regulatory measures abetted bankers’ ferociously enthusiastic embarking on the leverage express, which eventual derailment sank the world? Among other things, because the numbers dictate so. The proof, if you want, is in the pudding. As of August 31, 2007, for instance, the $400 billion–strong asset side of Bear Stearns balance sheet contained $141 billion in financial instruments, $56 billion of which were mortgage-related. All those billions were supported by just $13 billion in equity. That means that at the outset of the crisis, Bear was leveraged more than 30 times over (the ratio for November 2006 was pretty similar). Or consider Lehman Brothers. As of May 31, 2007, $21 billion supported $605 billion in assets, half of which were of the financial instruments variety ($80 billion mortgage-related). Similarly, on September 31, 2007, Merrill Lynch’s balance sheet showed $1 trillion in assets ($260 billion trading assets, $56 billion mortgage-related, $22 billion subprime residential-related) on top of just $38 billion of equity. That’s three for three so far when it comes to Wall Street powerhouses leveraged 30 times, with trading positions outnumbering equity by around 10 to 1, and with mortgage positions (including very nasty stuff) by themselves way above the entire equity capital base. If losses exceeded just 3 percent of assets value, the entire equity cushion would be gone and the firm would collapse; given how many of those assets were suspect and how low the value of suspect assets can go in a short period of time, it seems clear that those Wall Street giants were sitting on dynamite.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

And (hold on to your seats), the BIS found that market risk capital requirements as a percentage of total trading assets were in the range of between 0.1 percent and 1.1 percent (only one of the banks had posted capital in excess of 1 percent of all its trading positions).2 Yes, that would be between 1,000-times leverage and 100-times leverage. If assets go down by just 1 percent or even by just 0.1 percent the capital allocated to those trading positions would be wiped out. Pretty leveraged, if you ask me.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

As 2006 ended and 2007 approached, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers had one-day 95 percent VaR of $50 million, while Bear Stearns disclosed a 95 percent VaR of $30 million. Regulatory capital requirements were roughly defined as 10-day 99 percent VaR multiplied by a factor of three, which (again roughly) would imply multiplying one-day VaR by 9. That would be the amount of capital that would have to be committed by the banks. Let’s say, roughly, $470 million in the cases of Merrill and Lehman, $280 million in the case of Bear Stearns. Merrill at the time owned $203 billion of on-balance-sheet trading assets, Lehman $226 billion, and Bear $125 billion. $1 billion equals $1,000 million. This would yield market risk capital requirements equal to 0.23 percent, 0.21 percent, and 0.22 percent of total trading assets respectively. Am I the only one who would categorize such cushions as insufferably small? Certainly, my off-the-cuff calculations are bound to be less than exact, but it is interesting to note that even if we doubled the nominal size of those capital requirements the trading-specific leverage ratio would be remarkably in line with the results outlined in the BIS study highlighted earlier. Even if we doubled them again, none of the three institutions would have presented, barely six months before the unleashing of the mayhem, market-specific capital charges of at least 1 percent of (on-balance-sheet) trading positions. I think this is again more than enough to allow us to say that VaR wildly erred on the side of excessive gearing.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

VaR’s insultingly low estimations permitted banks to play the trading game almost for free, precisely at the time when such entertainment was becoming both more voluminous and dangerous than ever before.

Would a thinking person have considered 100-to-1, 500-to-1, or 1,000-to-1 leverage on trading portfolios loaded up with nasty subprime securities prudent? Of course not. It would not have been allowed.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

First, and for the umpteenth time, VaR heavily borrows from historical data. This is particularly true in the case of possibly the two most popular methods for calculating VaR, so-called Historical Simulation and Covariance. Historical Simulation, which became the favorite of banks leading up to the crisis, literally simulates how a current portfolio would have behaved during a preselected past period and builds estimation of future losses based on those results. As simple as that. It’s interesting to note that while VaR was promoted and embraced by bankers and regulators largely due to its perceived sophistication and high-tech engineering, in the end, the number was calculated with the simplest, most rudimentary of methods: Take a look at a database of past market prices and manually select the worst loss that took place; not a lot of high-tech sophistication there. Covariance was the original methodology and is much more mathematically and computationally intensive, and also resorts to past market data for the purposes of estimating the future volatilities of and correlations between the portfolio’s components.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

Naturally, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that a tool based on “the past is prologue” and “Normality rules” can’t deserve to be considered inalterably trustworthy. Many may have been fully aware of VaR’s deficient foundations but chose to keep their doubts to themselves as they had more to gain from the preservation of VaR as a relevant tool. Bankers have been basically allowed to calculate their VaR in any way they wanted, using as much past data as they see fit, employing the mathematical trickeries of their choice, and even choosing which financial assets should be included in the calculation. Essentially, a bank’s VaR will be whatever that bank wants it to be. And the temptation to have a VaR as low as possible can be difficult to fight: For many financiers, more leverage and more risk-taking can be the path to untold quick riches. So what do you do? You can search for the most favorable historical time period: If the past two years contain too much volatility you may want to also borrow from the three years prior, which happened to be quite sunny and tranquil, so as to compensate and obtain an overall sample that will paint the desired not-too-turbulent picture that can yield a not-too-abundant VaR. Or you can search for the most desirable combination of assets that happen to display the right type of historical correlation (i.e., no or negative co-movements) that, through the diversification effects allowed by the model, can deliver a tamed VaR. Definitely another strong argument for concluding that VaR will tend to be too low. And bank leverage and risk-taking, thus, a tad too overextended.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

As can be seen, overall VaR can be reduced by almost 50 percent as a result of including in the calculation estimated co-movements among asset families (what Merrill called “diversification benefits”). Where do those diversification figures come from? Historical evidence. Here is Merrill’s literal justification for enjoying a sharply reduced final VaR: “The aggregate VaR for our trading portfolios is less than the sum of the VaRs for individual risk categories because movements in different risk categories occur at different times and, historically, extreme movements have not occurred in all risk categories simultaneously.”6 But what if the future betrays the (selective) past and asset families that were not supposed to move together begin to naughtily move together? What if assets that were not supposed to move againts Merrill at the same time begin to move against Merrill at the same time? Then the correlation argument would have turned out to be a hoax, a conduit to hiding true risk, and to produce undercapitalized banks incapable of coping with real danger when it materializes.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

As a result of those capricious decisions, the system becomes much more leveraged and exposed, thus much more prone to accidents. Nothing else has taken place that would justify such increase in danger. All that has occurred is that a few risk managers inside a handful of big institutions have selected more or less cells in their historical price data Excel spreadsheets. Is that an adult and responsible way to determine factors as influential as bank capital and bank risk? Why not leave it all to coin-tossing? “How much leverage should the banking industry enjoy? How much risk should banks take on? Uh, let me see. . . . Heads we use two years of data to get VaR; tails we use six years of data. Flip it up!” Call me crazy, but I suspect there must be sounder approaches to dealing with issues that affect the lives of millions around the globe.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

Given how low VaR numbers have become, the slightest of setbacks will result in internal VaR limits being breached across essentially all banks at exactly the same time. When a VaR limit is breached (i.e., when the real losses suffered by a trading desk happen to be higher than the maximum loss limit imposed on it by risk managers), traders are typically asked to cut down positions until their exposures are reduced back below their VaR limit. In a quest to reduce risk, traders are forced to sell some of their portfolio into the market. If many firms do this concurrently, massive volatility and crashing prices may rapidly ensue; if everyone (or almost everyone) is dumping large amounts of the same stuff, liquidity can quickly disappear as prospective buyers either shy away or bid their time waiting for prices to unavoidably tumble yet further. The end result: massive liquidations leading to additional massive liquidations (as VaR gets breached over and over again), causing huge losses and potentially a system-wide breakdown (as after one point not only the more exotic stuff, but all types of assets get sold in a desperate search for liquidity). Market correlations go to one as every asset family is dumped, banks stop trusting each other, average investors lose their shirts (without knowing exactly why), short-term credit is constrained, and politicians may have to come to the rescue.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

By pulling together all the institutions listed above, we would roughly have about 120 VaR exceptions for 2007. Those banks’ VaRs (using differing degrees of confidence) would have altogether allowed for some 50 exceptions annually. So that would amount to something like two-and-a-half times more real setbacks than theoretically predicted. But because basically all the breaches took place in the second half of the year, we could state that when it came to crisis time, the theory actually underperformed five-to-one…

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

Some may wonder how seriously financial pros really took VaR as guide through the market jungle. Perhaps they voiced to the world that they followed VaR for risk-management purposes, but they didn’t entirely abide by the tool when making risk-based decisions, such as trading. Banks may report VaR religiously, but how obediently do they actually listen to it? How intensely do they actually let it influence their decisions? This is admittedly a potentially gray area. Traders are assumed to be restricted by internal VaR limits, so, yes, a low VaR will always tend to help those eager to punt and punt and punt. A low VaR will always assist those eager to take risky bets in the name of risklessness. But it is not incontrovertibly clear how each institution truly lets its internal trading wishes be affected by its VaR numbers. Some may postulate that such grayness may diminish the charge that VaR caused the crisis; perhaps banks would have acted just the same in the absence of low VaR figures, even in the absence of VaR itself.

—Pablo, Triana. 2011. The Number That Killed Us: A Story of Modern Banking, Flawed Mathematics, and a Big Financial Crisis. John Wiley & Sons: NY, NY.

—Weissman, Jordan. August 23, 2012. “60 Years of American Economic History, Told in 1 Graph.” The Atlantic. Accessed August 30, 2012 at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/60-years-of-american-economic-history-told-in-1-graph/261503/. Source of data is in the graph.

Russ: So, given that past--again, I hate to sound more cynical than you are, because you have had a lot of life experiences that I haven't had, particularly those vacation trips to Colombia I'm sure were really delightful. But I have to say that when TARP passed, I have a simpler view of government. Which is: Whatever it does, that's sort of the purpose. And so what I saw TARP doing was helping banks get money. And the professed goal of the program, which was to increase lending, never struck me as a plausible one. In fact, early on in the TARP program--and you talk about this in the book a little bit, and more about other aspects of it--I remember Secretary Paulson being greatly disappointed that banks weren't doing more with the money, and weren't lending. And I thought: Well, he didn't give them any incentive. He just gave them a lot of money. And if they are worried about the future, and if their books are not very good, it's not surprising to me they are not lending. But you spent a lot of time as the Special Inspector General and talking about it in the book, that you thought this was actually the purpose of the legislation. And there were people who actually pretended that it was? Correct?

Guest: Yeah, I think that's an important point of understanding what my job was. So, part of the role of SIGTARP as Congress created us was to be--and this really goes for any Inspector General for any massive government program--was to be on the lookout for what the stated intentions were of the program. And here, it's not incidental. As we all recall, TARP was not a tremendously popular bill at the time, and it failed the first time it went through the House. And it seemed like in the aftermath many political careers were destroyed by it, when it came time for re-election in 2010. But one of the things that Congress insisted upon, because they didn't want to vote for something that was just going to be purely a bailout for the banks, was these other goals, these other conditions. Even more than lending, was helping to preserve home ownership.

Russ: Yeah.

Guest: And to do something about the raging foreclosure crisis. And ultimately Treasury justified its use of the money in the way that it did by buying shares of the banks to prevent them from collapsing, essentially. Justified it under the idea that the banks were going to take it and use it to increase lending. So part of our job was to track that policy goal and point out the failures that Treasury had in trying to accomplish that goal. And as you said, one of the failures was a complete absence of conditions or requires or even incentives, carrots. Often the banks, to try to get them to deploy that money back into the financial system. And the other aspect of that, which we spent a lot of time, was to try to get more transparency. And the idea that we should know as American people and Treasury should want to know, as the people running this program, what it was precisely the banks were using the TARP money for. And we ran into a real brick wall in the form of Treasury of just refusing to have the banks report on that. And our idea of doing that was one general goal of good government and transparency. But second, it would help Treasury measure implementation against this goal, which was supposedly to get money back into the system. But I think you are right: One of the reasons they fought us so hard on this sort of very basic requirement of getting the banks to behave about how they are using TARP funds is that they didn't want a public record of where it was going. Because they kind of knew that was never really the intent. As we later found out, as we started doing our audit function, our investigative function, at the time that that TARP money was going out, even though Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson were issuing Press Releases saying how healthy and viable the banks were and they would use this to deploy the capital into the system, privately they confessed to us that they had real doubts about the survival of several of these banks. Bernanke mentioned that Goldman-Sachs was soon to go, and Paulson thought that Morgan-Stanley would have been the next one to go, absent TARP.

—Neil Barofsky interviewed by Russell Roberts. September 3, 2012. “Barofsky on Bailouts.” EconTalk. Library of Economics and Liberty. Accessed September 5, 2012 at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/09/barofsky_on_bai.html.

Russ: Well, the less cynical part of me says that they desperately needed to prop up these banks to keep a meltdown from occurring, and this was the politically attractive way to do it. You pretended it was to encourage lending and credit, but what it really did was to salvage the books of the banks in ways that would keep them afloat. The cynical part of me comes back, though, and says: Well, how do you know Goldman Sachs was next? I mean, who told you that? Well, Goldman Sachs, I'm sure. A lot of banks told the Fed and people at Treasury how perilous these times were. There's an event you don't mention in the book that I think about way too often, which is I think it was 24 phone calls between Hank Paulson and Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, the week before, or two weeks before the American International Group (AIG) bailout. And we don't know what they talked about. But I don't think it was their kids' summer vacation. I think it was why this was crucial for the future of mankind. I don't think it was a conspiratorial--I hope it wasn't a conspiratorial--corrupt thing where Blankfein said: Hey, we are going to lose $15 billion dollars if AIG goes under; we are expecting $15 billion. I assume he explained how desperately Western Civilization needed this to happen.

Guest: No, and I think you strike on one of the major themes of the book, which is: This is part of the problem that existed then and continues to exist today, is that because of this revolving door between Washington and Wall Street, you have a government, and the Treasury Department and federal regulators like the Federal Reserve, that is so captured by the interests of Wall Street, so familiar, that when you are within a crisis or when you are crafting legislation or when you are designing a bailout program, as I saw time and time again, you go to those people for advice and guidance and your information. And not surprisingly, when they provide you that advice and guidance, it is mostly in the interests of those Wall Street banks. Not necessarily in the interest of the taxpayer or the general Main Street or the rest of the country that is supposed to be benefiting.

…the only institutions to weather the storm were the cooperatives and credit unions that functioned on an entirely different economic model. Worldwide, almost none had to ask for government bailouts.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

But 98 years later, the Obama administration still doesn't get it. According to an Aug. 15 article by Paul Tough in the New York Times Magazine, the administration's economic team during the financial crisis—Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, Jason Furman—"was carrying around this list of multipliers" from Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics. A dollar spent to cut corporate taxes would grow the economy 30 cents; make the Bush tax cuts permanent, 29 cents; extend unemployment benefits, $1.64; food stamps, $1.73. "And food stamps was always at the top. That had the largest multiplier." This is economic malpractice.

—Kessler, Andy. September 19, 2012. “The U.S. Needs More i-Side Economics.” The Wall Street Journal. A15.

Money and Finance

So in real terms Mr Average actually became just 0.9 per cent better off. Allowing for inflation, the income of the median household in the United States has in fact scarcely changed since 1990, increasing by just 7 per cent in eighteen years.2 Now compare Mr Average’s situation with that of Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. In 2007 he received $68.5 million in salary, bonus and stock awards, an increase of 25 per cent on the previous year, and roughly two thousand times more than Joe Public earned. That same year, Goldman Sachs’s net revenues of $46 billion exceeded the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of more than a hundred countries, including Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia; Bolivia, Ecuador and Guatemala; Angola, Syria and Tunisia. The bank’s total assets for the first time passed the $1 trillion mark.3 Yet Lloyd Blankfein is far from being the financial world’s highest earner. The veteran hedge fund manager George Soros made $2.9 billion. Ken Griffin of Citadel, like the founders of two other leading hedge funds, took home more than $2 billion. Meanwhile nearly a billion people around the world struggle to get by on just $1 a day.4

—Niall Ferguson. 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. (Note: this is not a statement in opposition to Goldman Sachs, rich people who created their wealth, or the financial sector in general; it is interesting only in that it helps us understand what the economic world looks like.)

...the Ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man

—Niall Ferguson. 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

“Debtors and creditors in the end never have a good relationship,” said Hans-Werner Sinn, a leading German economist. “It is like between friends. If you have a friend you don’t give him a loan, you give him a gift. You make a gift and don’t expect to get it back. But when you become his creditor he stops being your friend.”

—Irwin, Neil. July 29, 2015. “How Germany Prevailed in the Greek Bailout.” The New York Times.

...money is the root of most progress.

—Niall Ferguson. 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret...For example, the Renaissance created such a boom in the market for art and architecture because Italian bankers like the Medici made fortunes by applying Oriental mathematics to money. The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Habsburg Empire because having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust. It was Nathan Rothschild as much as the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It was financial folly, a self-destructive cycle of defaults and devaluations, that turned Argentina from the world’s sixth-richest country in the 1880s into the inflation-ridden basket case of the 1980s.

—Niall Ferguson. 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

...paradoxically, the people who live in the world’s safest country are also the world’s most insured.

—Niall Ferguson. 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

While stands the banks of England, England stands! When fall the banks of England, England falls!

—Mary Poppins.

At times, the ascent of money has seemed inexorable. In 2006 the measured economic output of the entire world was around $47 trillion. The total market capitalization of the world’s stock markets was $51 trillion, 10 per cent larger. The total value of domestic and international bonds was $68 trillion, 50 per cent larger. The amount of derivatives outstanding was $473 trillion, more than ten times larger. Planet Finance is beginning to dwarf Planet Earth. And Planet Finance seems to spin faster too. Every day two trillion dollars change hands on foreign exchange markets. Every month seven trillion dollars change hands on global stock markets. Every minute of every hour of every day of every week, someone, somewhere, is trading. And all the time new financial life forms are evolving.

—Niall Ferguson. 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

...I have come to understand that few things are harder to predict accurately than the timing and magnitude of financial crises, because the financial system is so genuinely complex and so many of the relationships within it are non-linear, even chaotic.

—Niall Ferguson. 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

For where money is the measure of everything, many vain and completely superfluous trades are bound to be carried on simply to satisfy luxury and licentiousness.

—Thomas More in Utopia, 1516. (Not a quote I identify with).

There ensued one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of American finance. Each morning for the next several weeks, Roosevelt over his breakfast eggs would name the price at which the government would buy gold that day. Hard-money men quit the administration in disgust. Roosevelt personally fired one prominent dissenter, Treasury Undersecretary Dean Acheson.

—David M. Kennedy describing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in Freedom From Fear

Ive known many people who have worked for the Fed. IN my experience, they’ve all been guilty of what F. A. Hayek called “fatal conceit.” It’s the belief that smart people can do the impossible—and I don’t care how great your mathematical models are, you cannot integrate the economic activity of seven billion people around the planet.

—John A. Allison, former CEO of BB&T, speaking at the Cato Institute’s 29th Annual Monetary Conference.

I’ve asked numerous Fed policy decision-makers a basic question over the years: Do central bankers believe in price controls? Do they think the government can, for instance, set the price for automobiles? The answer, of course, is no—to which I’ve asked a follow-up. When the Fed sets interest rates, aren’t they setting the most important price in the economy—the price of money? I’ve never gotten a credible answer.

—John A. Allison, former CEO of BB&T, speaking at the Cato Institute’s 29th Annual Monetary Conference.

Scorn for moneymen has a long pedigree. Jesus expelled the moneychangers from the Temple. Timothy tells us that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Muhammad banned usury. The Jews referred to interest as neshek—a bite. The Catholic church banned it in 1311. Dante consigned moneylenders to the seventh circle of hell—the one also populated by the inhabitants of Sodom and “other practisers of unnatural vice”.

—Schumpter column. The Economist. January 7, 2011. Page 60.

Without money to grease them, the wheels of commerce turn slowly or not at all. Civilisations that have eased the ban on moneylending have grown rich. Those that have retained it have stagnated. Northern Italy boomed in the 15th century when the Medicis and other banking families found ways to bend the rules. Economic leadership passed to Protestant Europe when Luther and Calvin made moneylending acceptable. As Europe pulled ahead, the usury-banning Islamic world remained mired in poverty. In 1000 western Europe’s share of global GDP was 11.1% compared with the Middle East’s 8.6%. By 1700 western Europe had a 13.5% share compared with the Middle East’s 3.4%.

—Schumpter column. The Economist. January 7, 2011. Page 60.

The rise of banking has often been accompanied by a flowering of civilisation. Artists and academics railing against the “agents of the Apocalypse” might also learn from history. Great financial centres have often been great artistic centres—from Florence in the Renaissance to Amsterdam in the 17th century to London and New York today. Countries that have chased away the moneylenders have been artistic deserts. Where would New York’s SoHo be without Wall Street? Or the great American universities without the flow of gold into their coffers?

—Schumpter column. The Economist. January 7, 2011. Page 60.

"We reject the idea that all races and nations are created equal," she says. "We have become economic slaves of the Zionist economy and usurers."

—anonymous Greek citizen who affiliates herself with nationalism and fascism, and believes Greece is being run by corrupt officials in an ineffective democratic system. Sylvia Poggioli. “Greek Bailout Fuels Rise of Extreme Politics. March 19, 2012. National Public Radio.

In medieval Europe Jews were persecuted not only because they were not Christians but also because killing them was a quick way to expunge debts. Karl Marx, who came from a Jewish family, regarded Jews as the embodiments of capitalism who could only be rescued from their ancestral curse through revolution. The forgers of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” wanted people to believe that Jewish financiers were engaged in a fiendish global conspiracy. Louis McFadden, the chairman of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency in the 1930s, claimed that “the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the lawful money.” The same canards have been used against Chinese minorities across Asia.

—Schumpter column. The Economist. January 7, 2011. Page 60.

So what does ail Europe? The truth is that the story is mostly monetary. By introducing a single currency without the institutions needed to make that currency work, Europe effectively reinvented the defects of the gold standard—defects that played a major role in causing and perpetuating the Great Depression.

—Paul Krugman. “What Ails Europe?” February 26, 2012. The New York Times.

When it comes to understanding financial crises and economic fluctuations one generally has a choice between two explanations. One describes malaise as the result of bad decisions by consumers, firms, and/or government. The other is a lament of how everything would have been better if I (the economist talking) were in charge of policy.

—F. Bailey Norwood (in response to previous quote) in Seeds. February 27, 2012.

What’s wrong with the idea of taking away the power, from a secret group of individuals, to print money at will?

—Ron Paul, quoted by Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker. February 27, 2012.

Finance is at its most dangerous when it is perceived to be safe.

—The Economist. February 25, 2012. “Playing with fire.” Special Report: Financial Innovation.

…it is virtually impossible to quantify the social impact of a financial innovation because finance involves so many externalities, often unintended ones. For example, it would be almost impossible to measure the aggregate costs and benefits of a fundamental innovation like a bank. Instead, they reckoned, a thought experiment—imagining what the world would look like without a particular innovation—might help.

—The Economist. February 25, 2012. “Playing with fire.” Special Report: Financial Innovation. Describe a paper by Mssrs Lerner and Tufano.

I have to say, the part I find strange about this—not being a finance person—is the focus of Wall Street on getting the right price. We don't do that anywhere else in the economy. If you hadn't, if it was a long time ago and we hadn't had this scientific revolution in mathematical finance and financial engineering, if you had said to me: What's the right price of the option? I'd have said: Well, sell it. Put it on the market. See what people pay for it. That's the right price. That's how we price everything else in the world. We don't say—you give the examples, it's a nice example, the example of apartment buildings. We don't say: Well, this apartment has so many square feet, it's so many miles from this subway station and it's got this school district, so therefore the right price is $2300/month. And if somebody says: Well, I'll pay $2400, we don't say we hear a fool. That's what people value it at. Because we don't pretend to have scientific weights on the attributes of the apartment. We understand that it has something to do with square footage and something to do with location, but we don't pretend to try to weight those, because everyone weights them differently. And similarly, with financial products, people weight risk differently. Of course they can diversify some of it away. And I think maybe this is your point: that you can't diversify all of it away and pretend that you can, pretend you can create a portfolio of something that's "the same" when it's not quite the same. Maybe it's an illusion.

—Russell Roberts at econtalk.org. March 12, 2012. “Derman on Theories, Models, and Science.” Library of Economics and Liberty.

I have nothing against investment banking, but it’s like massaging money rather than creating money. If you’re in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS…[if you’re an investment banker, on the other hand]…you don’t create anything new. You simply massage other people’s money and take a cut.

—Michio Kaku as quoted by Brian Bolduc in The Wall Street Journal. March 10-11, 2012. A11.

Furthermore, the state bonds that he was given in part payment—the bonds that the peasants were struggling so hard to pay off—were slowly losing their value as Russia suffered a mild inflation. “Those damned bonds are already worth only two-thirds of what they were,” he had remarked to Anna just the week before.

—Edward Rutherfurd. 1991. Russka. Page 568. Crown Publishers.

“Why do you practice usury,” he replied.

She frowned.

“You lend money at interest.”

“Yes, but what the Bible calls usury is excessive interest, which is different,” he responded calmly. “All money must carry some interest, otherwise no one has any reason to lend.”

—Edward Rutherfurd. 1987. Sarum. Page 477. Crown Publishers. Setting was around 1290.

The meeting went well, and after less than an hour, Forest concluded the deal. Its terms were simple. The Fleming was to act as exclusive agent for the new venture; Forest would finance any other dealings he wished to undertake. He would also pay off the merchant's debts, taking his house in Antwerp as security. In effect, by the end of the afternoon, Forest owned him.

"And the secret of him is," young Shockley had confided to Forest beforehand, "he likes to live well and he spends his money as fast as he makes it: he'll never pay off his debt to you."

—Edward Rutherfurd. 1987. Sarum. Page 622. Crown Publishers. Setting was around 1547.

There were plenty of poor in Sarum. Not only was the Sarum cloth trade in a recession, but on the land, things were worse. Spain’s decades of importing gold from the New World had brought about a huge increase in bullion that had spread inflation to every part of Europe. Corn prices rose, and the tenants on their farms had to pay more for their necessities. The fines paid on entering a tenancy went up and the peasantry were hit hard.

—Edward Rutherfurd. 1987. Sarum. Page 645. Crown Publishers. Setting is 1580.

Not that Journal readers ever expected a convention of global bureaucrats in a Swiss village to protect U.S. taxpayers. But Mr. Hoenig did a public service at an American Banker symposium by reviewing the relevant history from 2008: "It turns out that the Basel capital rules protected no one: not the banks, not the public, and certainly not the FDIC that bore the cost of the failures or the taxpayers who funded the bailouts. The complex Basel rules hurt, rather than helped the process of measurement and clarity of information."

…

She pointed to the example of the so-called Volcker Rule to limit proprietary trading at big banks. "It is hard to write a very detailed rule that would address every concern that we hear," said Ms. Miller. "But it is even harder to write a simple rule that is conceptually clear to handle the nuances of a complex financial system."

We'd say the Volcker Rule proves more or less the opposite, as an Administration draft ran to 298 pages and included 1,347 questions. What is downright impossible is for regulators to try to craft rules so complex that they address every concern raised by every interest group and then expect to have a functioning banking system.

—September 15-16, 2012. “Speech of the Week.” The Wall Street Journal. A12.

PITY the financial regulator. The evidence suggests that bank executives, and the independent directors on their boards, fail to understand the complex organisations they control. How is an outside supervisor to manage, particularly when the best and brightest of its staff can be lured away by the higher salaries on offer in the City or on Wall Street?

In practice, as Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England highlighted in a speech at the recent Jackson Hole meeting of central bankers (see Free Exchange), regulators have responded by trying to match the complexity of the firms they supervise. The first set of Basel rules on bank capital was just 30 pages long; the second go had 347 pages; Basel 3 has 616. In America the Glass-Steagall act of 1933, which separated commercial and investment banking, was a concise 37 pages; the Dodd-Frank act of 2010 ran to 848, and may spawn a further 30,000 pages of detailed rule-making by various agencies.

All these rules require banks to fill in reams of forms, and regulators to monitor the results. Mr Haldane estimates that Basel 3 may consume the time of 70,000 workers in the European banking industry. In 1935 there was one American financial regulator for every three banks; now there are three regulators for every bank.

The financial crisis of 2007-08, and the continued weakness of banks, suggest that complexity has not served its purpose. In a world of multiple connections, where the distribution of future probabilities cannot be known (unlike the probabilities involved when spinning a roulette wheel), simple rules of thumb may be more useful than sophisticated models.

…

The regulators behind the Basel rules have tended to think a leverage ratio is too unsophisticated. Take two banks, each with $4 billion of equity and $100 billion of assets. On a simple measure of leverage, they look equally risky. But Bank A’s assets are invested entirely in Treasury bonds and Bank B’s are lent to Miami condominium developers. Common sense suggests Bank B’s balance-sheet is much more risky, and the Basel rules “risk-weight” assets so that it ends up holding more capital.

But risk weighting creates problems of its own. Before the crisis, the Basel rules provided an incentive to create AAA-rated securities (such as the infamous structured products linked to subprime mortgages), since they carried a low capital charge for banks. In addition, banks were allowed to use their own models to calculate the riskiness of their balance-sheets. Unsurprisingly they erred on the side of optimism. The result, as the world headed into 2007, was that banks’ balance-sheets were much riskier than they appeared.

—The Economist magazine. September 8, 2012. “Rover the regulator.” Buttonwood. Page 70.

Bullion is the accessory of war, and not of peaceful trade.

—Geoffrey W. Gardiner. From: Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY. Page 211.

The treasury is based upon the mining, the army upon the treasury; he who has army and treasury may conquer the whole earth.

—Kautilya in Arthasastra, a political treatise from the Mauryan dynasty in India (321-185 B.C.). From: Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY. Page 233.

…the first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

—Ernest Hemingway. Quoted by Trennert, Jason DeSana. April 3, 2012. “The Stock Market and the ‘Tina’ Factor.” The Wall Street Journal. Opinion. A17.

That’s what Occupy Wall Street doesn’t quite understand,” Kaufman adds. “You can’t just get rid of debt, of student loans and the like, because money enters the market as debt. That’s what it is, at the core.”

—Dr. Frederick Kaufman [interviewee]. Rush, Elizabeth [author]. November 21, 2012. “The Futures of Farming.” Narratively.

Personal Finance

[compound interest is] the most powerful force in the universe.

—Albert Einstein.

…

Thrift—that is, work and delayed gratification—is both a personal and societal good. It is supposed to allow us to be self-sufficient in future years, support older generations now, and finance the great engine of progress that has been the American economy. But why save when common instruments such as savings accounts, money-market funds and CDs guarantee that you'll lose out to inflation?

For those of us determined to remain savers, low rates force speculation in commodities like gold or oil that we hope won't lose too much value against the dollar. Call it the honest-saver's dilemma. It's one that unelected central bankers don't have the right to force on us, no matter how much their models may tell them low rates will goose the market or ease the deflation of the housing bubble.

That latter rationale is an admission of what serious economists have always known easy money to be: a redistribution of wealth to debtors from savers. Or, as a general rule, from the more virtuous to the less virtuous. This is true when the headline inflation rate is high, but also when it's merely higher than the predictable return on savings.

In an insightful 2009 essay, the Manhattan Institute's Steve Malanga connected the loose mores of the 1970s to the loose monetary policy of that period:

"The economic shocks that followed the tumultuous late 1960s, especially the devastating inflation of the 1970s, reinforced an emerging materialism. . . . The inflation hit hardest those who had embraced the work ethic, destroying lifetimes of savings in unprecedented price spikes and sending the message that 'saving and shunning debt was for saps,' Fortune observed."

Saps. Chumps. Whatever. That's what savers become when central bankers challenge Einstein's most powerful force, or our grandparents' hard-learned advice.

—Pollock, Robert L. September 17, 2012. “Bernanke and the Fed Repeal Einstein.” The Wall Street Journal. A17.

It is a well-established fact, after all, that a substantial proportion of the general public in the English-speaking world is ignorant of finance. According to one 2007 survey, four in ten American credit card holders do not pay the full amount due every month on the card they use most often, despite the punitively high interest rates charged by credit card companies. Nearly a third (29 per cent) said they had no idea what the interest rate on their card was. Another 30 per cent claimed that it was below 10 per cent, when in reality the overwhelming majority of card companies charge substantially in excess of 10 per cent. More than half of the respondents said they had learned ‘not too much’ or ‘nothing at all’ about financial issues at school.8 A 2008 survey revealed that two thirds of Americans did not understand how compound interest worked.9 In one survey conducted by researchers at the University of Buffalo’s School of Management, a typical group of high school seniors scored just 52 per cent in response to a set of questions about personal finance and economics.10 Only 14 per cent understood that stocks would tend to generate a higher return over eighteen years than a US government bond. Less than 23 per cent knew that income tax is charged on the interest earned from a savings account if the account holder’s income is high enough. Fully 59 per cent did not know the difference between a company pension, Social Security and a 401(k) plan.2 Nor is this a uniquely American phenomenon. In 2006, the British Financial Services Authority carried out a survey of public financial literacy which revealed that one person in five had no idea what the effect would be on the purchasing power of their savings of an inflation rate of 5 per cent and an interest rate of 3 per cent. One in ten did not know which was the better discount for a television originally priced at £250: £30 or 10 per cent. As that example makes clear, the questions posed in these surveys were of the most basic nature. It seems reasonable to assume that only a handful of those polled would have been able to explain the difference between a ‘put’ and a ‘call’ option, for example, much less the difference between a CDO and a CDS.

—Niall Ferguson. 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

IF THERE is a sacred belief among investors, it is that equities are the best asset for the long run. Buy a diversified portfolio, be patient and rewards will come. Holding cash or government bonds may offer safety in the short term but leaves the investor at risk from inflation over longer periods.

Such beliefs sit oddly with the performance of the Tokyo stockmarket, which peaked at the end of 1989 and is still 75% below its high. Over the 30 years ending in 2010, a “long run” by any standards, American equities beat government bonds by less than a percentage point a year.

In the developed world, the period since the turn of the millennium has been a particular disappointment. Since the end of 1999 the return on American equities has been 7.6 percentage points a year lower than that on government bonds (see chart 1). That has left many corporate and public pension funds in deficit and many people with private pensions facing a delayed, or poorer, retirement. Understanding why equities have let investors down over the past decade will help them work out what to expect in the future.

…

Academics started to focus on this problem in the mid-1980s when a paper by Rajnish Mehra and Edward Prescott indicated that the ex post return of American equity investors had been remarkably high, at around seven percentage points a year. It seems unlikely that investors expected to do so well.

—The Economist. March 17, 2012. “Shares and shibboleths.” Page 81.

Other countries were affected by post-war inflation, but none so badly as Germany. At the height of the hyperinflation...prices stood at 14,000 times their prewar level in Austria, 23,000 times in Hungary, 2.5 million times in Poland, and 4,000 million times in Russia...but in Germany prices had reached one billion times their prewar level, a decline that has entered the annals of history as the greatest hyperinflation ever.

—Richard Evans in The Coming of the Third Reich (2005).

Anyone who had invested money in war bonds or other loans to the state lost it. But anyone who had borrowed a large sum of money as a mortgage for a house or flat was likely to end up acquiring the property for virtually nothing. Often these two situations were united to one degree or another in the same person. But for those who depended on a fixed income were ruinous. Creditors were embittered, the economic and social cohesion of the middle class was shattered, as winners and losers confronted one another across new social divides...

—Richard Evans in The Coming of the Third Reich (2005).

The contradictory effects of inflation and stabilization on the farming community had merged into a general crisis of agriculture by the late 1920's. While large landowners and farmers had bought machinery on higher purchase and thus were able to modernize at very little real cost to themselves, peasants tended to hoard money and so lost it, or spent it on domestic goods, and so gained no benefit for their businesses. After the inflation, government measures to ease credit restrictions on agriculture to help recovery only made things worse. As peasants borrowed heavily to make good their loses, expecting a fresh round of inflation, then found they were unable to pay the money back because prices were declining instead of rising.

—Richard Evans in The Coming of the Third Reich (2005).

The German government found it difficult to raise money by issuing bonds because investors knew what inflation had done to the bonds issued during the war. International markets had very little confidence in the German state to deal with the economic problems of the day. It soon became clear that investors’ lack of faith was entirely justified.

—Richard Evans in The Coming of the Third Reich (2005).

To people who've worked their whole lives playing by the rules, that is, to the majority of adult Americans in the early 1970's, inflation at the hands of wayward government policy seemed to be a betrayal. People who had been thriftiest watched down payments for buying a home disappear, college savings accounts shrivel, retirement nest eggs vanish, the value of monthly pension checks shrink. Harvard Business School Professor Samuel Hayes recounted the damage to a relative of his in a magazine story: “He was the epitome of the Protestant Ethic. He had inherited money, he had saved, he was very frugal, had a very modest house, had part of his investment money in bonds and short-term securities, had always maintained liquidity. And he came out of the Seventies looking like a fool.”

—From Wall Street Journal, editorial section, June 12, 2009.

We fancy, because an individual would be much richer, were his stock of money doubled, that the same good effect would follow were the money of every one increased; not considering, that this would raise as much the price of every commodity, and reduce every man, in time, to the same condition as before.

—David Hume in On the Balance of Trade

I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.

—James Carville as quoted in The Wall Street Journal. February 25, 1993. A1.

If the government’s capital requirements favor certain ways of holding assets, all banks will hold their assets in those ways, and they will all be struck by the same type of problems at the same time…After each crisis, the authorities investigate what worked better and then force market players to conform to this ‘best practice’. All these attempts to make the system as safe as possible really make it extremely sensitive to small blows and changes.

—Johan Norberg. May 2012. “Financial Crisis II.” Reason magazine.

If you ask people where [financial] risk will flow, there are two camps. One says risk will flow to the smartest person, the person who best understands it; and the other [camp] says risk will flow to the dumbest person, the person who least understands it. And at least based on my experience and my understanding of what has been happening in the derivatives market, it’s the latter.

—Frank Partnoy. “Money, Power & Wall Street. Frontline. PBS.

The financial system is in a credit-confidence trap. Like a badly balanced ship trying not to capsize during a storm, banks and financiers are unwilling to make loans or accept collateral in exchange for securing debts — they fear being overwhelmed by the next wave of crisis. Even though the first sovereign default, in Greece, has passed, there is no obvious port in this storm.

How did the system get so far out of balance? And how can scientists — accustomed to modelling complex events to explain and make predictions — help to create a financial system that is more self-stabilizing? Existing financial models failed to predict the crisis of 2008 and the follow-on crisis of 2011–12. They missed the huge system-wide risks that developed as banks promoted an undisciplined supply of mortgages and created an increasingly complex web of relationships through legal contracts that transferred risk throughout the financial markets.

Market forces function only if all risks are fairly priced. The system-wide risks that these bonds held were not taken into account, so the bonds were sold too cheaply. A clear scientific goal, therefore, is to build better system-wide models of the global financial system. Both the industry and regulators could use such models to judge financial risk and make decisions.

—Jeff Swensen. “Scientists and bankers—a new model army.” Nature. Column: World View. April 11, 2012.

The regional bank failures of the 1970s and 80s had a significant impact on the investors in those institutions, but they did not cause a national financial crisis. The reason is simple: The banks were not so large that the banking system, the FDIC and other agencies could not deal with them.
Today we see the opposite. Five institutions control 50% of the deposits in this country. They are definitely too big to fail. In a capitalist economy, there should be no such entity. We should promote competition and innovation in the financial industry, not protect an oligopoly. We need to place limits on banks and cushion the economy against future shocks.
—Warren A. Stephens, head of Stephens, Inc. Letter to the editor published in The Wall Street Journal on April 30, 2012 (A15). The Wall Street Journal on April 27, 2012 (A15).

In the end, by 2008 thre were 28 million subprime or very weak mortgages. Those are known as Alt-A mortgages. That’s half, incidentally, of all the mortgages in the financial system. Of that 28 million, 20.4 million were on the books of government agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the FHA [Federal Housing Administration] and other government agencies and banks that were holding them as a requirement of the Community Reinvestment Act, which applied to banks. So that’s why I say that the government’s housing policy was responsible for creating these mortgages. They never would have been created without the government demanding that they be created and providing the funds to buy them.

…

My point was [that] without the government’s housing policy, there never would have been a financial crisis. That’s not exactly the same thing as saying that government housing policy caused the financial crisis. It’s stating it another way—that is, but for the government’s housing policy, there wouldn’t have been a financial crisis.

…

From my perspective, what really happened was a result of government housing policy causing, enabling, a lot of people to get mortgages who otherwise couldn’t get these mortgages. And then they couldn’t sustain the mortgages when the bubble that was growing stopped growing. And as a result, we had the financial crisis.

—Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute, interviewed by Anthony Randazzo. “The Financial Crisis Was the Result of Government Housing Policy.” June, 2012. Reason magazine.

Friedman mistook a symptom for the cause. As Hawtrey and Cassel understood, the contraction of the U.S. money supply was the result of a deflation associated with a rising value of gold, an appreciation resulting mainly from the policy of the insane Bank of France in 1928-1929 and an incompetent Fed stupidly trying to curb stock-market speculation by raising interest rates. Bank failures exacerbated this deflationary dynamic, but were not its cause. Once it started, the increase in the monetary demand for gold became self-reinforcing, fueling a downward deflationary spiral; bank failures were merely one of the ways in which the increase in the monetary demand for gold fed on itself.

—David Glasner. “Krugman v. Friedman.” Uneasy Money blog. May 2, 2012.

Alexis: Will the public every forgive us for TARP?

Colleague: Look, the people will forget. The people always forget. After Long Term Capital Management crashed, they forgot. After the Savings and Loan Crisis, they forgot. And, you know, the people will forget again, and things will go back to normal.

—Alexis Goldstein, a former Wall Street computer programmer who quit and joined the Occupy Wall Street movement, recalling a conversation soon after the passing of TARP. Interviewed by The Story podcast; “Walking Away From Wall Street;” May 24, 2012; NPR.

Today, five giant banks control more than one-third of all deposits. Wall Street claims this makes it more efficient; but even if the Big Five banks were efficient (which is open to question—how “efficient” are institutions that didn’t know they were carrying a huge backlog of underwater loans?), they were all deeply involved in creating the meltdown that cost taxpayers billions in bailouts, and the overall economy trillions.

…

On the eve of the Great Depression in 1929, 250 banks controlled roughly half the nation’s banking resources. Now, a mere six banks control almost 74 percent of the nation’s banking resources.

—Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna. May 22, 2012. “Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not so Wild a Dream.” The Nation.

If one looks at the history of debt, then, what one discovers first of all is profound moral confusion. Its most obvious manifestation is that most everywhere, one finds that the majority of human beings hold simultaneously that (1) paying back money one has borrowed is a simple matter of morality, and (2) anyone in the habit of lending money is evil.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

Looking over world literature, it is almost impossible to find a single sympathetic representation of a moneylender—or anyway, a professional moneylender, which means by definition one who charges interest.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

All human interactions are not forms of exchange. Only some are. Exchange encourages a particular way of conceiving human relations. This is because exchange implies equality, but it also implies separation. It’s precisely when money changes hands, when the debt is cancelled, that equality is restored and both parties can walk away and have nothing to do with each other.

Debt is what happens in between: when the two parties cannot yet walk away from each other, because they are not yet equal. But it is carried out in the shadow of eventual equality. Because achieving that equality, however, destroys the very reason for having a relationship, just about everything interesting happens in between. In fact, just about everything human happens in between…

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

When the ancients thought about money, friendly swaps were hardly the first thing that came to mind.

True, some might have thought about their tab at the local alehouse, or, if they were a merchant or administrator, of storehouses, account books, exotic imported delights. For most, though, what was likely to come to mind was the selling of slaves and ransoming of prisoners, corrupt tax-farmers and the depravations of conquering armies, mortgages, and interest, theft and extortion, revenge and punishment, and, above all, the tension between the need for money to creative families, to acquire a bride so as to have children, and use of that same money to destroy families—to create debts that lead to the same wife and children being taken away.

…

…most of our contemporary language of social justice, our way of speaking of human bondage and emancipation, continues to echo ancient arguments about debt.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

Look at a coin from your pocket. On one side is “heads”—the symbol of the political authority which minted the coin; on the other side is “tails”—the precise specification of the amount the coin is worth as payment in exchange. One side reminds us that states underwrite currencies and the money is originally a relation between persons in society, a token perhaps. The other reveals the coin as a thing, capable of entering into definite relations with other things.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY. Graeber is quoting anthropologist Keith Hart.

Coinage is only invented twice in world history, once in the Greek Lydian world and once in China. And we just see that within 50 years, the use of coinage just sweeps across the Greek world. Very efficient way to do business, lowers transactions costs. And I think it's just an example of an institutional innovation that has been spread quickly across the entirety of the ecology. And ditto, for that matter, democracy.

—Ober, Josiah. August 6, 2012. “Ober on the Ancient Greek Economy.” Econtalk podcast. Library of Economics and Liberty. Interviewed by Russell Roberts.

The Poor

Poverty is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation ... It

is the lot of man--it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour therer could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.

--Scottish merchant and statistician Patrick Colquhoun. Stated in 1806. Quoted in: Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History.

According to a new study published online by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people raised in poor households are, as adults, more likely than those raised in affluent households to make impulsive decisions that forfeit future gains when confronted with economic uncertainty. Exposure to instability, it seems, not only diminishes the former group’s sense of control, it also hinders their ability to finish challenging tasks. In one experiment, researchers found that individuals with poor childhoods gave up trying to solve a difficult puzzle over 25 percent earlier than those with wealthy upbringings.

—Hiebert, Paul. September 19, 2014. “Why the poor remain poor.” Pacific Standard.

Prosperity and Happiness

… let me tell you about a dirty little secret of economics — namely, that we don’t know very much about how to raise the long-run rate of economic growth. Economists do know how to promote recovery from temporary slumps, even if politicians usually refuse to take their advice. But once the economy is near full employment, further growth depends on raising output per worker. And while there are things that might help make that happen, the truth is that nobody knows how to conjure up rapid productivity gains.

—Krugman, Paul. June 19, 2015. “Voodoo, Jeb! Style.” The New York Times. Opinion.

This is my long-run forecast in brief: The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.
—Julian Simon (1932-1998), Professor of Economics, University of Maryland

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

—Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776.

Look at what the simple machinery of the household has done for society. Years ago the housewife sat of an evening and plied her needle when the heavier labors of the day were done. The garments that rose before her aching sight threatened to overwhelm her. It is not so now, and we may thank inventors that have provided machines to do the drudgery of the needle.

—Scientific American. 1864. “Down With Homework.” Quoted in the September 2014 edition of Scientific American, page 98.

Capitalism can make you well off. And it also leaves you free to be as unhappy as you choose. To ask any more would be asking too much.
—The Economist Magazine

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

—Kenneth Boulding, an economist and Quaker. Quoted in: United States. Congress. House (1973) Energy reorganization act of 1973: Hearings, Ninety-third Congress, first session, on H.R. 11510. p. 248

The typical Englishman was a farm laborer. According to economic historian Gregory Clark, his material standard of living was not much better than that of an average Roman slave. His cottage consisted of a single dark room shared night and day with wife, children, and livestock. His only source of heat was a smoky wood cooking fire. He owned a single set of clothing. He traveled no farther than his feet could carry him. His only recreations were sex and poaching. He received no medical attention. He was very likely illiterate. His children were put to work watching the cows or scaring the crows until they were old enough to be sent into “service”. In good times, he ate only the coarsest food—wheat and barley in the form of bread or mush. Even potatoes were a luxury beyond his reach.

—Sylvia Nasar in The Grand Pursuit, page xii.

...in spite of our progress and the growth in knowledge, or perhaps because of such progress and growth, the future will be increasingly less predictable, while both human nature and social "scientists" seem to conspire to hide the idea from us.
—Nasim Taleb, page xxxii in The Black Swam

A mere fifty years after [Jane Austin’s] death [in 1817], that world was altered beyond recognition. It was not only the “extraordinary advance in wealth, luxury and refinement of taste” or the unprecedented improvement in the circumstances of those whose condition was assumed to be irremediable. The late Victorian statistician Robert Giffen found it necessary to remind his audience that in Austen’s day wages had been only half as high and “periodic starvation was, in fact, the condition of the masses of working men throughout the kingdom fifty years ago.”

—Sylvia Nasar in The Grand Pursuit, page xiii.

When a loyal retainer died, he or she might be praised for “having performed the duties of the station of life in which he had been pleased to place her in this world.” The Georgian reformer Patrick Colquhoun had to preface his radical proposal that the state educate the children of the poor with assurances that he did not mean that they “should be educated in a manner to elevate their minds above the rank they are destined to fill in society” lest “those destined for laborious occupations and an inferior situation in life” become discontended.

In Jane Austen’s world, everybody knew his or her place, and no one questioned it.

—Sylvia Nasar in The Grand Pursuit, page xiii.

The notion that man was a creature of his circumstance, and that those circumstances were not predetermined, immutable, or utterly impervious to human intervention is one of the most radical discoveries of all time. It calls into subject the dictates of God and nature. It implied that, given new tools, humanity was ready to take charge of its own destiny. It called for cheer and activity rather than pessimism and resignation. Before 1870 economics was mostly about what you couldn’t do. After 1870, it was mostly about what you could do.

—Sylvia Nasar in The Grand Pursuit, page xiii-xiv.

All of these thinkers were searching for intellectual tools that could help solve what Keynes called, “the political problem of mankind: how to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty.”

—Sylvia Nasar in The Grand Pursuit, page xv.

The fact that Malthus sought to explain was that, in all societies and all epochs including his own, “nine parts in ten of the whole race of mankind” were condemned to lives of abject poverty and grinding toil. When not actually starving, the typical inhabitant of the planet lived in chronic fear of death by hunger. There were prosperous years and lean ones, richer and poorer regions, yet the standard of life never departed for long from subsistence....Malthus had concluded that the drive to reproduce trumped all other human instincts and abilities, including rationality, ingenuity, creativity, even religious belief.

—Sylvia Nasar in The Grand Pursuit, page 5.

Political economy is a mere skeleton unless it has a little human covering, and filling out, a little human bloom upon it, and a little human warmth in it.
—Charles Dickens in Household Words

The past, when it is seen at all, appears always in a halo of romance.

—Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse in Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911, page 1). The Columbia University Press.

In 1990, 43% of the population of developing countries lived in extreme poverty (then defined as subsisting on $1 a day); the absolute number was 1.9 billion people. By 2000 the proportion was down to a third. By 2010 it was 21% (or 1.2 billion; the poverty line was then $1.25, the average of the 15 poorest countries’ own poverty lines in 2005 prices, adjusted for differences in purchasing power). The global poverty rate had been cut in half in 20 years.

…

In 1990-2010 the driving force behind the reduction of worldwide poverty was growth.

…

GDP, though, is not necessarily the best measure of living standards and poverty reduction. It is usually better to look at household consumption based on surveys.

…

Growth alone does not guarantee less poverty. Income distribution matters, too. One estimate found that two thirds of the fall in poverty was the result of growth; one-third came from greater equality. More equal countries cut poverty further and faster than unequal ones.

—The Economist. June 1, 2013. “Briefing: Poverty.” Pages 22-24.

Social progress, then, is only one among many possibilities of social evolution. At least it is not to be assumed that every form of social evolution is also a form or a stage in social progress...The fact that a thing is evolving is no proof that it is good, and the fact that society has evolved is no proof that it has progressed.

—Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse in Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911, page 8). The Columbia University Press.

The generation preceding the French Revolution was a time of buoyant and sanguine outlook. There floated before men the idea of an Age of Reason that was near at hand, when mankind should throw off the incubus of the past and resume a life in accordance with nature in a social order founded on a rational consideration of natural rights...At this point Malthus intervened by calling attention to a “natural” law of great significance. This was the law that human beings multiplied in a geometrical ratio; that it was only by the checks of famine, pestilence, and war that they were prevented from overspreading the earth, and that, to cut the matter short, whatever the available means of subsistence mankind would always, in the absence of prudential checks, multiply up to the limit at which those means become inadequante.

—Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse in Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911, pages 13-18). The Columbia University Press.

From Labrador to Coral Sea
Our lives were stunted, bleak, unfree.
We shared our huts with rats and fleas
And lost our children to disease.
(Our holy men would sigh and nod
and tell us, "That's the will of God.")

But then, with steam, vaccines, and votes,
Our fortunes rose like tide-raised boats.
We'd more to eat; drew breath more years;
Dethroned (or worse) our tsars, emirs;
Sent men and mirrors as our eyes
To search the black galactic skies;
And in our cells, till then unseen,
We found our Fates, our djinns: our genes.

The world's still cruel, that's understood,
But once was worse. So far so good.
—James C. Davis in Epilogue to The Human Story

The writer Tobias Smollett once gave this picture of the milk that was sold on the strees of Edinburgh, Scotland (around the 1700's). It was, he said, "carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco quids from foot passengers; overflowings from muck carts, spatterings from coach wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke's sake, the spewings of infants, who have slobbered in the tin cup measure, which is thrown back in that condition among the milk, for the benefit of the next customer; and finally, the vermin [fleas and lice] that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milkmaid."
—James D. Davis, from The Human Story. Writer Tobias Smollett lived from 1721 to 1771.

This is what happened to one family, the Cocus, all five of whom had work as spinners and weavers. In the summer of 1693 a poor harvest made the price of bread rise steeply. At the same time, the failure of the harvest caused a crisis in the textile business. So work was scarce and family incomes fell just when the price of bread went up. It is easy to guess what happened to the Cocus. At first, says the historian Pierre Goubert, they probably used the coins saved up for rainy days, and then they pawned their few belongings. Then, "they began to eat unwholesome food, bran bread, cooked nettles, moldy cereals, entrails of animals picked up outside the slaughterhouse." Soon they were starving, weak, and listless, and suffered from "pernicious and mortifying fevers." As winter began, the Office of the Poor had the Cocus on its list. Three months later the youngest daughter died, and two months after that the eldest daughter and the father. "All that remained of a particularly fortunate family, fortunate because everyone in it worked, was a widow and an orphan. Because of the price of bread."
—James D. Davis, from The Human Story. Davis' citation is: Goubert, Pierre. The World We Have Lost.1965. pp.112-13.

On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
—Thomas Babington Macaulay

If any consensus among historians, economists, and historically inclined social scientists is to be found regarding the economic history of the world, it is that what is regarded today as modern economic growth started in Britain as a result of the Industrial Revolution.

—Joel Mokyr. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850. Page 4.

Seventeen Reasons to be Cheerful

1. We’re better off now.

2. Urban living is a good thing.

3. Poverty is nose-diving.

4. The important stuff costs less.

5. The environment is better than you think.

6. Shopping fuels innovation.

7. Global trade enriches our lives.

8. More farm production = more wilderness.

9. The good old days weren’t.

10. Population growth is not a threat.

11. Oil is not running out.

12. We are the luckiest generation.

13. Storms are not getting worse.

14. Great ideas keep coming.

15. We can solve all our problems.

16. This depression is not depressing.

17. Optimists are right.

—Matt Ridley. Reader’s Digest. March 21, 2012.

Country	Big Macs a McDonald's worker can buy with 1 hour of labor
Japan	3.09
US	2.41
Western Europe	2.23
Canada	2.19
. . .
Middle East	0.39
India	0.35
Latin America	0.35

—Ashenfelter, Orley. 2012. “Comparing Real Wage Rates: Presidential Address.” American Economic Review. 102(2):617-42.

Guest:Well, one example that has been published by people at the U. of Iowa is the cause of death. Because, if you are talking about health care, you would think you'd want to talk about the things that are related to health care. And one ranking in this was done to the rankings for all the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, all the most developed countries in the world, ranked the United States toward the bottom for life expectancy.

Russ: Consistent with the numbers you said.

Guest: Consistent with the numbers I said. Yet when they compensated for differences in suicide and immediate death from high speed motor accidents—

Russ: Things where the health care system is probably not going to able to save you.

Guest: Yeah. The health care system has nothing to do with your surviving a gunshot wound to the head, basically.

Russ: Or an accident at 60 miles per hour without a seat belt.

Guest: Exactly. High speed accidents. And when they compensated for that by giving everyone the same number of suicides and instant deaths like that and then redoing the ranking, the United States elevated to Number One in life expectancy.

Russ: Sounds like a cheap statistical trick. But it could be true, the right thing to do. Because, and correctly, suicides and high speed deaths should not indict your health care system. But of course there's some vagueness about how we measure high speed automobile death, I suppose. Some uncertainty about that.

Guest: But when you really look at the numbers on suicides, there's an extraordinarily high number of difference in the United States versus these other countries where they are doing the rankings.

Russ: Much higher.

Guest: Much higher in the United States.

Russ: As is automobile accidents per capita. You are saying, I assume.

Guest: Yeah. I haven't looked at the exact number of automobile accidents. But another example of that would be just looking at what is the cause of death. And when you look at adults, children, and young adults, though I think the age of 40, something like 25%, 30% of deaths only, were due to an illness.
—Roberts, Russell and Scott Atlas. July 30, 2012. “Scott Atlas on American Health Care.” EconTalk.org.

You say we are better off: you say my house has been enriched by the strangers who have entered it. But it is my house, and I did not invite the strangers in, or ask them to enrich it, and I do not care how poor it is if I am only master of it.

—Landes, Richard. August 6, 2012. “Romney Is Right on Culture and the Wealth of Nations.” The Wall Street Journal.” A13. This quote was made by a Palestine to the British Peel Commission in 1936.

Henry Ford is popularly credited with inventing the middle class by doubling his workers' salaries to $5 per day in 1914. A multiplier for the economy, right? Wrong.

The year before, Ford revolutionized manufacturing with the moving assembly line, slashing automobile build times to just 90 minutes from 14 hours. That's productivity. It allowed Ford to reduce the price over time of his Model T to $290 from $950. Demand took off because it was far cheaper than the cars made by his 88 competitors.

By 1927, 15 million Model Ts were sold to people (most of whom did not work for Ford) and businesses that retired their horses and used these new automobiles productively to lower their own costs, fueling a boom. Raising wages was a byproduct, not a cause. From Ford Motor's corporate website about the wage increase: "While Henry's primary objective was to reduce worker attrition—labor turnover from monotonous assembly line work was high—newspapers from all over the world reported the story as an extraordinary gesture of goodwill."

—Kessler, Andy. September 19, 2012. “The U.S. Needs More i-Side Economics.” The Wall Street Journal. A15.

In 1948, less than three per cent of American homes had a television; by 1952, that figture was fast approaching fifty per cent.

—Lepore, Jill. September 24, 2012. “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business.” The New Yorker.

According to Jacob Riis’ 1890 muckraking classic How the Other Half Lives, one quarter per day bought prospective lodgers the pretense of privacy in a partitioned room with just enough space to hold a cot and a chair. Fifteen cents netted a bunk in an open room with a locker for one’s clothes. One thin dime delivered the bunk minus the locker. And for 7 cents, you could get the budget bunk or, as Riis described it, “an apology for a bed” that consisted of “a strip of canvas strung between rough timbers.”

—Beato, Greg. November 2012. “Brink Back the Flophouse.” Reason magazine.

Russ: … So, for those who don't agree, don't accept. Actually, why don't you lay out the basic goods that you think are components of the good life. And then we'll talk about what the challenges might be of this idea. Go ahead.

Guest: Well, we suggest seven: health, security, respect, personality, harmony with nature, friendship, and leisure are our goods. They are not meant to be completely exhaustive and they are not meant to be dogmatic. And they also link up with each other in rather complex ways. But they are the basic goods. We think that without the existence of these goods to some degree in everyone's life, that life cannot be a good life.

—Russell Roberts interviewing guest Robert Skidelsky about his book How Much is Enough? October 1, 2012. “Robert Skidelsky on Money, the Good Life, and How Much is Enough.” Econtalk.org. Library of Economics and Liberty: econlib.org.

Babies born today are 200 times less likely to die in early life than if they were born a century ago.

At older ages, the chances of dying are also substantially lower now than they were just four generations ago.

A new study, which compared modern human lifespans with those of hunter-gatherers and chimpanzees, suggest that industrialization and development since 1900 -- not any genetic shift -- are responsible for our species' dramatic gains in life expectancy.

—Sohn, Emily. October 15, 2012. “Why 72 Is The New 30.” Discovery News. Human News.

Liberty, Self-interest, the Harmony of Markets, and Bourgeois Dignity

Human life is constituted by the harmonious exchange of benefits, and is held fast in a pact of mutual assistance not by fear but by mutual affection.

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). On Anger. From Anger, Mercy, Revenge. 2010. The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Robert A. Kaster.

The government should do nothing for the merchant except to leave him alone. No regulations can guide him in his enterprises so well as his own interest … The state owes commerce nothing but protection. Among commercial nations those that allow their subjects the most unlimited liberty may be sure of soon excelling all others.

—D’Holback. Source: Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part IX. The Age of Voltaire. Page 708.

… the work of the medieval communes did credit to the skill and courage of the businessmen who managed them. Under their leadership Europe experienced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries such prosperity as it had not known since the fall of Rome.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 641.

If you look at human history, it is indisputable that market-based systems have produced more wealth than any other system in human history by a factor of — you choose the number. And that has been, net, a force for good.

In our own lives, you think about the changes in the standard of living that have taken place here in the United States. Then you think about hundreds of millions of people who have been lifted out of poverty in China or in India — and you can't scoff at that. If a child has enough food to eat, if they have medicine that prevents deadly diseases, if people have a roof over their heads and can afford to send their kids to school, that is part of justice and part of my ethics. And so I think a broadside against the entire market-based system would be a mistake.

What I do think is true is that mindless free-market ideologies that ignore the externalities that any capitalist system produces can cause massive problems. And it's the job of governments and societies to round the edges and to address big system failures. That, by the way, is not controversial among market economists. There are a whole bunch of concepts involved in that that you can open up in any standard economic textbook in the United States or anywhere else in the world. And pollution has always been the classic market failure, where externalities are not captured and the system doesn't deal with them, even though it's having an impact on everybody.

—Barack Obama (interviewee). September 23, 2015. “Obama Takes on Climate Change: The Rolling Stone Interview.” The Rolling Stone. Page 44.

The evidence strongly suggests that the Dutch did in fact enjoy a "decent sufficiency." Unlike in other parts of Europe, with a tiny minority who dined lavishly ad a vast majority whose food supply was insecure, if not invariably inadequate, even the poor who had to resort to the food handed out in the Leiden poorhouse had bread and milk or buttermilk for breakfast ad supper, and a midday main meal that included vegetable soup and meat twice a week and on other days offered various porridges, grains, vegetables, and milk.

--Lauden, Rachel, commenting on the diets of early Muslims. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 227.

To my brother Severus I owe…the idea of a state in which all men are equal under the law and free to say what they think, and of an empire that respects above all else the liberty of its subjects.

—Aurelius, Marcus (121 AD – 180 AD). The Emperor’s Handbook. A new translation of Meditations.

Even so the economic revolution of the thirteenth century was the making of modern Europe. It eventually destroyed a feudalism that had completed the function of agricultural protection and organization, and had become an obstacle to the expansion of enterprise. It transformed the immobile wealth of feudalism into the fluent resources of a world-wide economy. It provided the machinery for a progressive development of business and industry, which substantially increased the power, comforts, and knowledge of European man. It brought a prosperity that in two centuries could build a hundred cathedrals, any one of which presumes an amazing abundance and variety of means and skills. Its production for an extending market made possible the national economic systems that underlay the growth of the modern states. Even the class war that it let loose may have been an added stimulant to the minds and energies of men. When the storm of the transition had subsided, the economic and political structure of Europe had been transformed. A flowing tide of industry and commerce washed away deep-rooted impediments to human development, and carried men onward from the scattered glory of the cathedrals to the universal frenzy of the Renaissance.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 649.

Whoever is fortunate enough to be an American citizen came into the greatest inheritance man has ever enjoyed. He has had the benefit of every heroic and intellectual effort men have made for many thousands of years, realized at last. If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish. The opportunity is equally great to justify the faith which animated that long travail, and bequeathed them such a noble and happy heritage.
—Isabel Paterson in The God of the Machine

These lessons include that markets—the mind of free millions—allocate scarce resources more efficiently and fairly than do committees in Congress; that the collusion of government with either big business or big labor stifles competition and leads to political cynicism; that government will be respected more when it does a few things well rather than too many poorly; and that innovation and human progress spring not from bureaucratic elites but from the genius of individuals.

—Wall Street Journal. July 7, 2014. “Free People, Free Markets.”

So having a lot is not immoral. It is the good luck to be born in America. By all means let us spread the good luck around. The luck consisting of reasonably honest courts and reasonably secure property rights and reasonably nonextractive governments and reasonably effective educational systems, and a reasonably long time for the reasonably good ideas to do their work. Growth has little to do with foreign aid or foreign investment or foreign trade. It is mainly domestic.
—Deirdre N. McClosky in The Bourgeois Virtues

In 1800 the average human consumed and expected her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to go on consuming a mere $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two. The figure is expressed in modern-day American prices, corrected for the cost of living. It is appalling. By contrast, if you live nowadays in a thoroughly bourgeois country such as Japan or France you probably spend about $100 a day. One hundred dollars as against three: such is the magnitude of modern economic growth.
—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 1.

Economic history has looked like an ice-hockey stick lying on the ground. It had a long, ling horizontal handle at $3 a day extending through the two-hundred-thousand-year history of Homo Sapiens to 1800, with little bumps upward on the handle in ancient Rome and the early medieval Arab world and high medieval Europe, with regressions to $3 afterwards—then a wholly unexpected blade, leaping up in the last two out of the two thousand centuries, to $30 a day and in many places well beyond.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 1.

This growing gap between what we do every day and what we know how to do only makes us more desperate to find an easy explanation when something goes wrong. Denialism provides a way to cope with medical mistakes like Vioxx and to explain the technological errors of Chernobyl or Bhopal. There are no reasssuring safety statistics during disasters and nobody wants to hear about the tens of thousands of factories that function flawlessly, because triumphs are expected, whereas calamities are unforgettable.
—Michael Specter in Denialism

[For every individual] generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of the domestick to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

—Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776). Book IV, Chapter II, Paragraph IX.

...if we stopped doing everything for which we do not know the reason, or for which we cannot provide a justification…we would probably soon be dead
—Friedrich August von Hayek

A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have.
—Thomas Jefferson

But the assaults on the alleged vices of the bourgeoisie and capitalism after 1848 made an impossible Best into the enemy of an actual Good. They led in the twentieth century to some versions of hell. In the twenty-first century, please—dear Lord, please— let us avoid another visit to hell.
—Deirdre N. McClosky in The Bourgeois Virtues

We do not have to be Hobbesians or utilitarians and reduce "love" to self-interest. We can be stoic or Christian, or followers of Grotius or Adam Smith, and suppose that people care. In fact I'd claim we had better, if we want to be scientific about it.
—Deirdre N. McClosky in The Bourgeois Virtues

All that I have aimed at is to put you on the right track, and make you acquainted with the truth that all legitimate interests are in harmony. That is the predominant idea of my work, and it is impossible not to recognize its importance.

—Bastiat, Economic Harmonies. Page 434.

The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources — if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality.
—Friedrich August von Hayek (in The Use of Knowledge in Society, 1945)

Mises' teaching is to show that we have not adopted freedom because we understood what benefits it would bring: that we have not designed, and certainly were not intelligent enough to design, the order which we now have learned partly to understand.
—Friedrich August von Hayek (introduction to 1981 edition of Mises's Socialism)

Over the last couple of months, American consumers have learned a shocking lesson about supply and demand. If you demand products that don't cost anything, people will make them out of poison, mud, and shit.
—Bill Maher

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

— F.A. Hayek in The Fatal Conceit.

Englishmen are, as a rule, too much occupied with the multifarious concerns of the present to look much ahead into the distant future. We profess, indeed, to regard with horror the maxim, Apres nous le deluge! and we should probably annihilate with our virtuous indignation any one who should boldly profess the principle. And yet we often act almost as if we were really partisans of that heartless creed. When called upon to consider the interests of the future generations, we declared that "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," and stigmatise as visionaries and dreamers all who seek to withdraw our attention from the present. A modern Cassandra who confidently predicts the near exhaustion of our coal-fields, or graphically describes a crushing national disaster that must some day overtake us, may attract some public attention; but when we learn that the misfortune is not to take place in our time, we placidly remark that future generations must take care of themselves, and that we cannot reasonably be expected to bear their burdens. When we are obliged to legislate, we proceed in a cautious, tentative way, and are quite satisfied with any homely, simple remedies that common sense and experience may suggest, without taking the trouble to inquire whether the remedy adopted is in accordance with scientific theories. In short, there is a certain truth in those "famous prophetick pictures" spoken of by Stillingfleet, which "represent the fate of England by a mole, a creature blind and

—MacKenzie, Donald Wallace (1841-1919). Russia.

But Liberty assumes only one shape. Once convinced that each of the molecules that compose a fluid possesses in itself the force by which the general level is produced, we conclude that there is no surer or simpler way of seeing that level realized than not to interfere with it. All, then, who set out with this fundamental principle, that men’s interests are harmonious, will agree as to the practical solution of the social problem—to abstain from displacing or thwarting these interests.

Constraint, on the other hand, may assume a thousand shapes, according to the views we take of it, and which are infinitely varied. Those schools that set out with the principle that men’s interests are antagonistic, have done nothing yet toward the solution of the problem, unless it be that they have thrust aside Liberty. Among the infinite forms of Constraint, they have still to choose the one they consider good, if indeed any of them be so. And then, as a crowning difficulty, they have to obtain universal acceptance, among men who are free agents, for the particular form of Constraint to which they have awarded the preference.

—Bastiat, Economic Harmonies. Page 434.

If we are to entrust some men with arbitrary power, prove first of all that these men are formed of a different clay from other mortals; that they in their turn will not be acted upon by the fatal principle of self-interest; and that, placed in a situation that excludes the idea of any curb, any effective opposition, their judgments will be exempt from error, their hands from rapacity, and their hearts from covetousness.

—Bastiat, Economic Harmonies. Page 436.

Perhaps no other sector of American society so demonstrates the failure of government spending and interference. We’ve destroyed individual initiative, individual innovation and personal achievement, and marginalized anyone willing to point it out.

—Fran Tarkenton writing the article “What if the NFL Played by Teachers’ Rules?” in The Wall Street Journal. October 3, 2011. A15.

Some reformers, including Bill Gates, are finally catching on that our federally centralized, union-created system provides no incentive for better performance. If anything, it penalizes those who work hard because they spend time, energy and their own money to help students, only to get the same check each month as the worst teacher in the district (or an even smaller one, if that teacher has been there longer). Is it any surprise, then, that so many good teachers burn out or become disenchanted?

—Fran Tarkenton writing the article “What if the NFL Played by Teachers’ Rules?” in The Wall Street Journal. October 3, 2011. A15.

...consuming less in rich America would add nothing to the goods available to China. Not a grain of rice. Countries are rich or poor, have a great deal to consume or very little, mainly because they work well or badly, not because some outsider is adding to or stealing from a God-given endowment.
—Deirdre N. McClosky in The Bourgeois Virtues

The activities of countless far-flung men and women over the course of many months had to be intricately choreographed and precisely timed, so that when you showed up to buy a fresh Thanksgiving turkey, there would be one — or more likely, a few dozen — waiting. The level of coordination that was required to pull it off is mind-boggling. But what is even more mind-boggling is this: No one coordinated it.

No turkey czar sat in a command post somewhere, consulting a master plan and issuing orders. No one forced people to cooperate for your benefit. And yet they did cooperate. When you arrived at the supermarket, your turkey was there. You didn't have to do anything but show up to buy it. If that isn't a miracle, what should we call it?

Adam Smith called it "the invisible hand" — the mysterious power that leads innumerable people, each working for his own gain, to promote ends that benefit many. Out of the seeming chaos of millions of uncoordinated private transactions emerges the spontaneous order of the market. Free human beings freely interact, and the result is an array of goods and services more immense than the human mind can comprehend. No dictator, no bureaucracy, no supercomputer plans it in advance. Indeed, the more an economy is planned, the more it is plagued by shortages, dislocation, and failure.

It is commonplace to speak of seeing God's signature in the intricacy of a spider's web or the animation of a beehive. But they pale in comparison to the kaleidoscopic energy and productivity of the free market. If it is a blessing from Heaven when seeds are transformed into grain, how much more of a blessing is it when our private, voluntary exchanges are transformed - without our ever intending it - into prosperity, innovation, and growth?"

—Jeff Jacoby writing in the Boston Globe (2003).

We think today of property rights as something that comes from the state. That couldn’t possibly be how they originated. Our small-group experiments are trust games. Imagine a trust game in which I’m a first mover and you’re the second mover. I move first. I can choose $10 for each of us, or I can pass to you. If I pass to you, the $20 becomes $40. You can give me 15 and keep 25, or you can give me nothing and get the whole 40. Game theory says I should never pass to you, because if you’re self-interested, you’ll take the 40. But what’s remarkable is half the people we recruit in the undergraduate lab—half of the first movers [pass] to the second. And two-thirds to three-quarters reciprocate with 15/25—they don’t take the total. You can’t understand that with game theory. You can understand it by reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

—Vernon Smith being interviewed by Ronald Bailey. “We Don’t Face Any Good Options” Reason. December, 2011. Pages 44-49.

Property rights come out of human sociality and then eventually get into civil government. But they arise originally in small groups.

—Vernon Smith being interviewed by Ronald Bailey. “We Don’t Face Any Good Options” Reason. December, 2011. Pages 44-49.

The bouts of famine that still haunt Africa were routine throughout history and the globe. These were ended only when, only where, and only to the extent that bourgeois culture and its adornments – chiefly, reasonably free entrepreneurial markets – flourished. To recognize this fact is to rob western busybodies of sexy agendas; but it is also to point the only way toward real prosperity for Africans.

—Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek. “Nourishing Bourgeois Culture.” November 27, 2011.

Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich? It’s not primarily because they possess natural resources—many nations have those. It’s primarily because of habits, values and social capital...many people...believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.

People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not. Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness.

This ethos is not an immutable genetic property, which can blithely be taken for granted. It’s a precious social construct, which can be undermined and degraded.

—David Brooks. December 1, 2011. “The Spirit of Enterprise.” New York Times.

There’s no such thing as a poor urbanized country; there’s no such thing as a rich rural country.

—Edward Glaeser quoted by Robert Kunzig. “A City Solution.” National Geographic. December, 2011.

Spillover works best face-to-face. No technology yet invented—not the telephone, the Internet, or videoconferencing—delivers the fertile chance encounters that cities have delivered since the Roman Forum was new. Nor do they deliver nonverbal, contextual cues that help us convey complex ideas—to see from the glassy eyes of our listeners, for instance, that we’re talking too fast.

—Robert Kunzig. “A City Solution.” National Geographic. December, 2011.

It is the interest of the people that their daily, weekly, and monthly consumption should be proportioned as exactly as possible to the supply of the season. The interest of the inland corn dealer is the same. By supplying them, as nearly as he can judge, in this proportion, he is likely to sell all his corn for the highest price, and with the greatest profit; and his knowledge of the state of the crop, and of his daily, weekly, and monthly sales, enable him to judge, with more or less accuracy, how far they really are supplied in this manner. Without intending the interest of the people, he is necessarily led, by a regard to his own interest, to treat them, even in years of scarcity, pretty much in the same manner as the prudent master of a vessel is sometimes obliged to treat his crew. When he foresees that provisions are likely to run short, he puts them upon short allowance. Though from excess of caution he should sometimes do this without any real necessity, yet all the inconveniences which his crew can thereby suffer are inconsiderable in comparison of the danger, misery, and ruin to which they might sometimes be exposed by a less provident conduct. Though from excess of avarice, in the same manner, the inland corn merchant should sometimes raise the price of his corn somewhat higher than the scarcity of the season requires, yet all the inconveniences which the people can suffer from this conduct, which effectually secures them from a famine in the end of the season, are inconsiderable in comparison of what they might have been exposed to by a more liberal way of dealing in the beginning of it.

—Adam Smith in An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Book IV. Chapter 5.

The Industrial Enlightenment developed a new set of criteria by which projects and devices were judged: efficiency and commercial viability. Markets, rather than government officials or aristocratic aesthetes, were to be the ultimate arbiters. In that regard, the British engineers differed from their continental colleagues, where elegance, sophistication, and usefulness to the state often came before usefulness in industry.

—Joel Mokyr. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850. Pages 55-56.

A second one is the growth of commerce; opportunities for positive-sum exchange, as opposed to zero-sum plunder. When it’s cheaper to buy something than to steal it, that changes the incentives and you get each side valuing the other more alive than dead—the theory of gentle commerce [that comes] from the Enlightenment.

—Steven Pinker in an interview with Ronald Bailey, answering the question of why violence has declined throughout history. February, 2012. “The Decline of Violence.” Reason magazine.

I am not a pacifist resiting war. I am a free man resisting slavery.

—James W. Harris. February, 1987. “Paul Jacob’s Fight Against the Draft.” Reason magazine.

Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, the countries with bad economic politics are unhappy each in its own way. Good policies are boringly similar: rule of law, property rights, and above all dignity and liberty for the bourgeoisie.

—Deirdre McCloskey in Bourgeois Dignity, page 122.

First, in all countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, economic activity shrunk at the beginning of transition, in some very sharply. In many countries, economic decline started earlier, but still continued. In Russia, the steepness and the length of the decline (almost a decade) was a big surprise…

Second, the decline was not permanent. Following these declines, recovery and rapid growth occurred nearly everywhere. Over 20 years, living standards in most transition countries have increased substantially for most people, although the official GDP numbers show much milder improvements and are inconsistent with just about any direct measure of the quality of life (again raising questions about communist GDP calculations). As predicted, capitalism worked and living standards improved enormously. One must say, however, that for a time things looked glum. So lesson learned: have faith – capitalism really does work…

Fifth, economists have greatly exaggerated the benefits of incentives by themselves, without changes in people. Economic theory of socialism has put way too much weight on incentives, and way too little on human capital. Winners in the communist system turned out not to be so good in a market economy. Transition to markets is accomplished by new people, not by old people with better incentives. I realised this and wrote about it in the mid-1990s, but the lesson both in firms and in politics in profound: you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, even with incentives.

—Andrei Schleifer. Professor of Economics. Harvard University. Seven things I learned about transition from communism. February 5, 2012.

Economic change in all periods depends, more than most economists think, on what people believe.

—Joel Mokyr. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850.

The question “in whose interests” is always a good first place to look for answers as to why policies are made the way they are. But it should never be the final stop. Looking for just the answer to the cui bono issue overlooks the obvious fact that economic interests were often opposed by other economic interests. Alliances were formed, deals were made, and persuasive rhetoric about what was best “for the nation” must be taken into account. Reformers were met every inch of the way by incumbents and reactionaries, with the outcome indeterminate. There was nothing predetermined or inexorable about these outcomes, but once they took place, it is impossible to explain the transformation of the British economy without them.

—Joel Mokyr discussing the change in social norms and virtues that allowed economic policies giving birth to the Industrial Revolution. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850.

Much as some economists may be suspicious of cultural beliefs underpinning economic change, we cannot avoid facing changing idology and institutions when discussing the eighteenth century.

—Joel Mokyr. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850.

Pundits, at times like these, insist America must finally get an energy policy. But we have one. It’s called the price mechanism, and unless drastically interfered with, it has always given us a price at which we can buy all the gasoline we want.

—Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. February 25-26, 2012. “What’s Right With Gas Prices.” The Wall Street Journal.

“…here is the true originality of my approach. For I shall show that the key to our spiritual salvation lies not in religion, not in politics, not even in justice, but in economics. And here”—he smiled complacently—“I have my bible and my prophet: I refer of course to the great Scotsman, Adam Smith, and his book The Wealth of Nations.

—Edward Rutherfurd. 1991. Russka. Page 540. Crown Publishers.

Give a woman some rice, and you save her for a day. That’s the simplest form of what Christians flatter themselves by calling “Christian charity.” Give a man some seed and you save him for a year. That’s the plan of investment in capital, tried for decades in foreign aid, without much success. But give a man and a woman the liberty to innovate, and persuade them to admire enterprise and to cultivate the bourgeois virtues, and you save them both for a long life of wide scope, and for successively wider lives for their children and their grandchildren, too. That’s the Bourgeois Deal, which paid off in the Age of Innovation.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity.

Guest: Well, one of their advisors who urged them to keep the price controls and rationing in place was John Kenneth Galbraith, who was seconded by the U.S. State Department. Galbraith of course had been a price controller in the United States during the war; was in the process of writing a book called the Theory of Price Controls defending the practice. So he comes to Germany and says: There's no chance of getting recovery by decontrol.

…

Russ: Let me ask you about Galbraith. Now, to those of us who like prices, us Hayekians who really are big fans of the ability of prices to signal information, steer resources, and do all their magical stuff; then we have people on the other side, and they appear throughout the book--people like Galbraith, who don't trust prices. There are people like Pigou who say there are externalities; we've got to adjust them. There's a lot of folks like that who appear throughout the book. And then we get an episode like this German episode. You could argue it's as close as we could get to a natural experiment: after Erhard removes price controls and is told it will be a disaster, it's not a disaster.

Guest: Not at all. Almost immediately shelves fill with goods. The black market activity comes out in the open; the factories go back to work; construction crews start rebuilding the cities; and it's a remarkable recovery.

Russ: So, I don't want to pick on John Kenneth Galbraith because he's not alone, and you and I might do the same thing in the face of empirical evidence that shakes our world view; but did he write an article saying he was wrong? Did anybody from that experience say: Wow, we really underappreciated what prices can do? And we should leave them alone. Except sometimes.

Guest: Galbraith, I do not think ever wrote that article. And in fact he went from advising post-war Germany to advising post-war India. In fact, he became the Ambassador to post-war India under John F. Kennedy. And India was considering central planning of a sort, and Galbraith said: No question you have to do that; there's no other way for the economy to develop; if you rely on the market, nothing's going to happen. He gives a series of lectures which is published as a book in which he basically gives that advice: You are not going to develop unless you have a central government plan for generating the right amount of investment in heavy industry, and so on. So, I don't think Galbraith ever did learn that lesson.

—Roberts, Russell. May 28, 2012. “Larry White on the Clash of Economic Ideas.” EconTalk.org.

The culture of respectability and gentility helped solve the standard collective action problems that bedevil the production of public goods. The emergence of a plethora of networks, clubs, friendly societies, academies, and associations created a civil society, in which the private provision of public goods became a reality and created what might be called a civil economy.

—Joel Mokyr. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850.

     In Islamic society, the merchant became not just a respected figure, but a kind of paragon: like the warrior, a man of honor able to pursue far-flung adventures; unlike him, able to do so in a fashion damaging to no one.
     ...
     There was a particular hostility to anything that smacked of price-fixing. One much repeated story held that the prophet himself had refused to force merchants to lower prices during a shortage in the city of Medina, on the grounds that doing so would be sacriligious, since, in a free-market situtation, "prices, depend on the will of God." Most legal scholars interpreted Mohammed's decision to mean that any government interference in market mechanisms should be considered similarly sacrilegious, since markets were designed by God to regulate themselves.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY. This passage refers to the fact that the first real instance of capitalism occurred in Medieval Islamic societies.

Detroit News -- "A state representative said Friday he will introduce legislation capping the markup on tickets sold on the secondary market — in particular on websites like StubHub — at 10 percent above face value.

State Rep. Douglas Geiss, D-Taylor, requested a bill in response to a story published Thursday on DetroitNews.com, which showed ticket prices for the Detroit Tigers' upcoming seven-game homestand beginning Aug. 3 are, on average, listed at 17 percent above average ticket prices.

"It appears that we've got legalized scalping going on," Geiss said Friday. "There is a need within society for those with tickets that they can no longer use. But when you start talking about tickets with a face value of $100 being listed for $1,000 … that is usurious."

Geiss said after seeing infield box seats listed at 10 times face value on StubHub, he discovered Michigan case law allows venue operators to grant permission to resell tickets, but nowhere in the law does it permit the markup price on those tickets."

To Rep. Geiss: What about tickets that are selling for 10 times below face value, wouldn't you consider that to be as objectionable as tickets that are selling for 10 times above face value? That is, if a ticket selling for 10 times its face value iamplies that the seller is "scalping" the buyer, then wouldn't a buyer of a ticket priced at 10 times below its face value be "scalping" the seller?

—Perry, Mark J. August 9, 2012. “Michigan Politician Objects to Tickets for 10X Face Value, What About Tickets 10X Below Face?” Carpe Diem blog.

The return on an average bank robbery is, frankly, rubbish.

—Mosher, Dave. September 2012. “Not Worth the Risk?.” Scientific American. Mosher is quoting authors of an article in the journal Significance.

Why do you say that America’s political system is degenerating into crony capitalism?

There is not a well-understood distinction between being pro-business and being pro-market. Businessmen like free markets until they get into a market; once they are in it they want to block entry to others. Pro-marketeers want free markets at all times. The more conservative pro-marketeers are fearful of criticizing business, because they assume they will be seen as criticizing the free market. But we need to stand up and criticize business when business is not helping the cause of free markets.

In what way?
Take lobbying. Lobbying may once have been reactive but now it’s proactive—businessmen use it to shape policy and ask for tax advantages. This is corruptive of democracy.

Examples, please.
Companies with a lot of money abroad sponsored a bill in 2004-2005 that allowed them to repatriate their profits at a low tax rate. Thus $1 produced $220 of tax savings. The Bush-approved drug and Medicare act was a huge bonanza for the drug industry. Their market value increased by several billion dollars when this was announced. I could continue.

—Zingales, Luigi. August 23, 2012. “When business and government are bedfellows.” The Economist. Accessed August 30, 2012 at http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/08/quick-study-luigi-zingales-crony-capitalism.

—Seabright, Paul. 2004. In the Company of Strangers: A Modern History of Economic Life.

Henry Ford is popularly credited with inventing the middle class by doubling his workers' salaries to $5 per day in 1914. A multiplier for the economy, right? Wrong.

—Kessler, Andy. September 19, 2012. “The U.S. Needs More i-Side Economics.” The Wall Street Journal. A15.

In a famous exchange, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek was asked, "Is it your view that if I went out tomorrow [with a government subsidy] and bought a new overcoat, that would increase unemployment?" "Yes," answered Hayek, "but it would take a very long mathematical argument to explain why."

Minus the math, Hayek's argument was that money would be removed from the productive economy, and capital would be wrongly allocated to overcoats based on this false demand. Substitute Chevy Volts and you get the picture.

—Kessler, Andy. September 19, 2012. “The U.S. Needs More i-Side Economics.” The Wall Street Journal. A15.

Individualism is a necessary condition for capitalism, and a necessary condition for limited government. You will never get real capitalism without a proper moral defense of individualism. So this is all about individualism. And the challenge we face in the world around us is that the traditional morality we all grow up with—that we are all taught, that is preached by everyone in the culture, left, right, and center—is a morality that I believe is incompatible with limited government and capitalism. It’s a morality of “you are your brother’s keeper.” It’s a morality of “your moral responsibility in life is to others.” Therefore, in a deep sense, your life is not yours to live. We need to demolish that idea. We need to destroy that idea and replace it with Rand’s view that your life is yours to live as you see fit, morally yours to live. And you have no moral obligations towards others, other than not to violate their rights, and to treat them with justice.

—Brook Yaron. Interviewed by Matt Welch. November 2012. “Rand to the Rescue.” Reason magazine.

The spread of Islam [in the Medieval Age] allowed the market to become a global phenomenon, operating largely independent of governments, according to its own internal laws. But the very fact that this was, in a certain way, a genuine free market, not one created by the government and backed by its police and prisons—a world of handshake deals and paper promised backed only by the integrity of the signer—meant that it could never really become the world imagined by those who later adopted many of the same ideas and arguments: one of purely self-interested individuals vying for material advantage by any means at hand.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

How is it that for years past, you and I have been able to find gas stations open at almost any hour of the day or night, and have been able to drive up to them with complete confidence that the request to "fill up" would be honored with alacrity and even with a cleaning of the windshield. To judge from the rhetoric that pollutes the air these days, it must have been because there was a powerful Federal Energy Office hidden somewhere in the underground dungeons in Washington . . . efficiently allocating petroleum products throughout the land, riding herd on greedy oil tycoons lusting for an opportunity to mess things up and create long lines at their gas stations.

Of course, we know very well that the situation is precisely the reverse. The lines date from the creation of a real Federal Energy Office. . . .

How can thinking people believe that a government that cannot deliver the mail can deliver gas better than Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf and the rest?

—Friedman, Milton in Newsweek, March 4, 1974. From The Wall Street Journal. “Notable and Quotable: Milton Friedman writing on gas lines in 1974.” November 4, 2012.

Capitalism

Industrial Revolution

Most economic historians reckon there was very little improvement in living standards in Britain in the century after the first Industrial Revolution. And in the early 20^th century, as Victorian inventions such as electric lighting came into their own, productivity growth was every bit as slow as it has been in recent decades.

—The Economist. October 4, 2014. “The third great wave.” Special Report: The World Economy.

Taylorism comes from the work of Frederick Taylor, who in 1911 published the Principles of Scientific Management, which was really the first real management text....Taylor's great contribution was devising a means of detailing a division of labor and breaking down the production process to its smallest possible component...The idea was: let's don't have an artisan assemble a whole stove, but let's have one person put on the side panel, another person screw in these screws, another person put on the knobs, and so forth. Breaking the production process down to its smallest possible components and releasing businesses from the need to hire skilled labor, from hiring skilled artisans. You can hire unskilled labor if all they will be doing is screwing in bolts and so forth...Taylor's ideas were really taken by Henry Ford and put into practice in his model of mass production in the assembly line for the Model T. Ford started making Model T's... in 1914 and he was able to, by employing an assembly line model, by breaking down the production process into its smallest components (whereas before you would go into an auto maker and order a custom car) after Ford instituted the assembly line he could make thousands cars, tens of thousands of cars, based on the same model and sell them for a much lower price. So, the assembly line model...realized incredible efficiencies in economics. This is best seen in the price of Model T's which cost in 1910...$780. In 1914, after the assembly line had been instituted, it cost $360.

—Fischer, Edward. 2004. “Lecture Twenty-One: Late Capitalism—From Ford to Disney.” Peoples and Cultures of the World. The Teaching Company.

...and this is really the promise of capitalism: greater efficiencies in the production process create more goods that can be sold for a lower price and thus making them available to a wider swath of society...more stuff for everybody...also involved is uniformity. Products have to be alike to gain these efficiencies. Ford was famous for saying, "You can have a Model T in any color, as long as it's black."

—Fischer, Edward. 2004. “Lecture Twenty-One: Late Capitalism—From Ford to Disney.” Peoples and Cultures of the World. The Teaching Company.

Fordism displaced a predominantly craft based production in which skilled laborers exercised substantial control over the conditions of their own work...and what this does is increases alienation. It increases alienation of workers from the fruits of their labor. .. If you're just screwing in a screw on a wheel and you're doing that thousands of times a day you don't feel that same investment... There's not that personal connection between the worker and the product that's being created.

...

Ford was able to overcome the... effect of this alienation by paying his workers well. There's a tradeoff ...you're not going to be the craftsman or the artist you once were, but you're gonna be paid enough...

...

This Fordist model of mass production...really took off in the early part of the twentieth century in the U.S. and was applied to lots of different models, not just cars. Hilton made a fortune, for example,by building hotel rooms that were exactly alike in cities around the world. There was this appeal of uniformity. McDonald's...you can buy the same Big Mac in Beijing or ...in Paris. There was this uniformity of products that went along with this, a commodification of production. Commodification means making a production that is not unique.

—Fischer, Edward. 2004. “Lecture Twenty-One: Late Capitalism—From Ford to Disney.” Peoples and Cultures of the World. The Teaching Company.

Consumer Research

Asking what the consumer wants sounds really obvious, but it’s not.

—University of Florida tomato farmer Harry Klee. Quoted in: Jabr, Ferris. “Building Tastier Fruits & Veggies.” July 2014. Scientific American. Page 59.

Participatory Economics

Today, the global cooperative movement appears to have arrived at a crossroads. With the collapse of communism, and with the capitalist system in crisis and facing unceasing demands for reform, the case for the expansion of economic democracy has never been more relevant or more urgent. More importantly, there is a need for a middle path that avoids the extremes of market rejection on the one hand (as in the case of Marxism) and the unbridled power of capital as expressed in neoliberalism on the other.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY. Note: this “middle path” might resemble T. Roosevelt’s “Third Way” in his New Nationalism.

Why does the [Participatory Economics] movement get so agitated about McDonalds? It’s an interesting question. They have bad food. It’s a corporation. [It] employees wage slaves. McDonald's is not alone in these characteristics. Especially in the latter two. [Why does the movement hate McDonalds?] I think it as something to do with not liking the clientele more than anything else. .. I'll give you one more example. Think college in Pennsylvania… [it has a large football stadium and games sell out] They have three hundred radicals. I'm chatting with them...I said how many of you have been to a football game...two hands go up out of three hundred people. Any other constituency on that campus...seventy to eighty five percent of them, maybe ninety percent, will have gone to a football game, but in an audience of radicals: two out of three hundred. So I say to them, "I'm going over here pass this sports bar... how many of you have been to this sports bar and have sat down to talk to people about war, poverty, racism or sexism...Now, it's not a matter of raising their hands or not: they're rolling in the aisle laughing. We are a movement that hates the constituency...we fear them, dislike them, we don't like their taste, their preferences...and I think it cripples our capacity. ... The problem in the United States right now is not the audience, it's not the population: it's us. We don't know any more what it means to build a movement.

—Albert, Michael. October 19, 2006. Against Neoliberalism: A Vision for the Future. Given to the Department of Geography and Sociology. University of Strathclyde.

At Saturn what they tried to do is reduce the alienation through new styles, post Fordist styles, of labor management relations, changing the culture of the workplace in order to change the economics of production...

At Saturn, they form groups of teams, and so rather than having a person just screw in one screw on a dashboard they would assign a team to do the whole dashboard assembly. ...and these teams are empowered in very significant ways. They act like little companies within the plant. They make contracts with the production team behind them on the assembly line and the production team in front of them on the assembly line, and they're able to decide how many cars a day they're able to put dashboards on.

They're even able to decide their working hours. They have flex-time and they decide whether they want to come in at 8:00 in the morning or 9:00 in the morning...this empowers the workers to feel more invested in the company they're working for.

Now this is allowed by a unique memorandum of understanding between the UAW, the United Auto Workers, and GM, to establish Saturn. ...it allowed shop floor workers (blue collar workers) to sit in on management meetings. It allowed them to participate in marketing decisions. It allowed them to participate in major purchasing decisions. It really integrated management and labor in a new way...What the workers agreed to do was to take a large portion of their salary in profit sharing based on profitability and efficiency of their teams...

In 2003 this memorandum of understanding was rejected, was revoked by the union during the economic downturn of the 2000s. The profit-sharing just wasn't profitable to the workers any longer. They decided to go back to the old style kind of contract.

—Fischer, Edward. 2004. “Lecture Twenty-One: Late Capitalism—From Ford to Disney.” Peoples and Cultures of the World. The Teaching Company.

What truly conditions how people live and what societies will become is the degree to which people can exercise control over their lives. Economics is central to this. This is the question that lies at the bottom of the resentment and rage that continues to fuel the resistance to blogalization generally and the corporate model of free market capitalism specifically. This is true in rich and poor countries alike and the recent global economic crisis has brought this truth home with a vengeance.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

The collapse of socialism as a viable challenge to the capitalistic idea has indeed left a vacuum where, at one time at least, there resided some hope of a more humane alternative. Most of those protestors on the streets of Seattle would be hard pressed to propose something that could truly replace the system they were protesting. But the policy makers and politicians who understand that something has to change are also in a bind. Beyond salvaging the status quo, very little has been proposed as a way of rethinking the philosophical, social and organizational foundations that underpin the capitalist systems that are now in peril.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

Thus, corporate ownership frequently seeks to remove all social and ethical constraints on a company’s pursuit of ever-greater profits and growth. Anything that is legal is considered allowable, and if profitable, is deemed desirable, regardless of the social or ethical implications. Corporate acts of patriotism and altruism become nothing more than public relations strategies designed to minimize societal constraints on profits and growth.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Page 17.

Labor unions and other special interest groups have emerged to counteract the power of large industries to exploit their workers, civil society, and the natural environment, but thus far they have been unable to restrain corporate power and growth.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Page 18.

As corporate consolidation takes place vertically—that is, consolidating the control of resources, manufacturing, distribution, and retailing—free market coordination is replaced by corporate central planning. Ironically, corporatism is transforming capitalism into a perverse form of communism, in which corporate ownership, rather than government ownership, is replacing individual private ownership and central planning by corporations, rather than government, is replacing free market allocation of resources.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Page 19.

In neoclassical economics, free trade does not address issues of social equity or justice.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Page 14.

Indeed, there are logical reasons to believe that free trade, as is currently being promoted, would lead to further exploitation of the people and natural resources of the weak by the strong among nations and to further exploitation of the weak by the strong within nations. Economic sustainability will require that we reexamine and heed the neglected principles of competitive free markets.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Page 15.

Historically, capitalism has been defined as an economic system based on the private ownership of property and the private allocation of resources, through free markets. Communism, by way of contrast, is characterized by public ownership of property and government allocation of resources, through central planning. Capitalism is further distinguished from communism by differing theories of value. Communists believe that all economic value results from the application of labor to natural resources, and all capital thus represents value previously appropriated from workers by the capitalists. Capitalists believe that economic value can arise from all factors of production—land, labor, management, and capital—and that profits legitimately accrue to those who risk diminishing the value of their capital, as they seek to enhance the value of capital, through investment.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Page 17.

…the choice between a hypothetical free market on the one hand and a demonic socialism on the other was always a false choice.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

…the operation of a hypothetical free market has never really been the issue. Markets have never been “free” in the normal sense of the term, nor will they ever be. They have always been, and will always remain, subject to external constraints—legal, political, cultural, religious. The question is to what degree and for what ends these controls operate.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

…what exactly lay beneath this continuing insistence on the sanctity of the free market system? Was it the residual force of an ingrained ideology? Was it blithe ignorance? Or was it a cynical ploy to protect the privileges of powerful vested interests? Probably, it was all three.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

…although [they said], “We have no formulas for achieving any of those things,” they sought participatory democracy, decentralized organization, and collective property. Like many of the revolutionary philosophies…the arguments of the youth movement were long on critique and assumed that once the source of oppression…was removed, a just and natural society would result.

—Kobylka, Joseph F. 2006. “Lecture Thirty-Four: The New Egalitarian and Freedom.” Cycles of American Political Thought. The Teaching Company.

The role of collective interests—the public good—in regulating the operation of markets had never been questioned until the advent of the Industrial Revolution in England.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

It was well understood that unrestricted competition leads to monopoly, a truth that seems lost on conventional economic thinking. Indeed, this conception of market forces operating within recognized social and moral limits persisted well into the 18^th century.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

Today, negative evidence continues to mount, supporting the indictment of corporate organizations as having become abusive, destructive, and counterproductive to society as they have grown in economic and political power—just as the guilds did before them. Corporations are the primary polluters of the natural environment and extractors of nonrenewable resources. Corporations are the primary exploiters of workers and disruptors of local economies. Transnational corporations are the primary sources of the concern held by participants of a growing number of global environmental and social justice movements.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Page 44.

A strong case can be made that the societal usefulness of the industrial era has passed.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Page 44.

The only effective constraint to corporate exploitation is for workers and consumers to act collectively and thereby equalize their powers with the power of the corporation.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Page 55.

The central planning of an entire economy has been shown to be an unworkable, unacceptable approach to allocating most resources. Thus, the vast majority of all investment decisions must remain in the private sector.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Page 67.

Free enterprise will not reward people equally, no matter how efficient the system. Consequently, social values must be measured through the political process…Ethical values, like other first principles, can never be known with scientific certainty. The ethical values of a society arise from a common sense among members of the society concerning what is morally good or bad and right or wrong. Ethical or moral values cannot be assessed by markets, by political majorities, or even supermajorities. The more and ethical values of a society must be defined by a process of consensus…Consensus results from an earnest seeking of common beliefs and values, not from vote swapping, compromises, or coercion.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Pages 72-73.

The Constitution of the United States currently focuses primarily on defining the social principles of a democratic belief system…the U.S. Constitution defines the principles of social equity and justice of the nation. However, social equity and justice make up but one of the four ethical cornerstones of sustainability…

The nation must recognize three additional basic types of rights of all people in order to ensure sustainability. First, all people must be afforded a basic right to be protected from economic exploitation. No person has a right to benefit economically at the expense of another. Second, all people must be afforded a basic right to a clean and healthy environment. No person has the right to foul the environment within which another must live. And third, people of future generations must be afforded social, economic, and environmental rights equal to the rights afforded to people of the current generation. As with social equity, these rights are self-evident, fundamental first principles, matters of common sense. These four ethical cornerstones, social justice, economic security, ecological integrity, and intergenerational equity, provide the moral foundation upon which a sustainable economy must be built.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Pages 75.

Sustainable resource allocation and development requires two types of decisions: individual or private decisions, and collective or public decisions. In regard to the latter, societies must make collective decisions concerning the allocation of resources to which all have been deemed to have an equal right because each person must be given an equal voice in determining how such resources are to be used…Thus, collective or public decisions are necessary to ensure social equity…

…If all people are to have equal opportunity to pursue happiness, that right likewise must be ensured collectively, through government. This is not communistic or socialistic philosophy.

—Ikerd, John. 2005. Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense. Kumarian Press, Inc.: Bloomfield, CT. Pages 76.

…even in times of shortage [during the 1700s in England] they expected prices to be regulated by custom.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

The “mob had been in motion all the day; but their business was only with the forestallers of the market, who had bought up all the corn far and near, to starve the poor, and load a Dutch ship, which lay at the quay; but the mob brought it all out into the market, and sold it for the owners at the common price. And this they did with all the calmness and composure imaginable, and without striking or hurting anyone.

—John Wesley’s description of an Irish incidence when the custom of regulated and reasonable prices was violated. From: Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

Contrary to the common view that modern market society grew out of humankind’s natural propensity to barter and engage in commercial exchange for profit, the organizing principles for economic systems right up to the advent of the Industrial Revolution were reciprocity, redistribution and family-based farming, or some combination of the three. In this framework, the orderly production and distribution of goods was secured by a wide range of personal motives that were guided by well-established rules of social conduct. The profit motive was not prominent among them. This is not to say that there was not a class of individuals that pursued gain just as avidly as businessmen do today…But this single-minded drive for profit was still restricted to a relatively small class of merchant specialists. It did not serve as the founding principle of the economy as a whole.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

But there was also in this period [ of the Industrial Revolution] a conscious and sustained effort to erase any semblance of the artisan’s traditional independence. The transition from artisan to worker entailed two tasks: the progressive elimination of skill and the internalization of those sub missive attitudes that fitted the man to the discipline of the machine.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

…while the cooperative model parts company with capitalism, it remains firmly connected to the notion that the market can be made responsive to human needs—without the need for a planned socialist economy…

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

…the free market worldview boils down to this: the claims of capital to be sovereign and the exercise in the field of economics of that despotic power that was only recently ceded in the field of politics. The exercise of democracy that laissez faire capitalists now celebrate as good and holy in politics must be banned from economics. This is rich terrain for irony. For while maintaining the principle of authoritarian control of markets and enterprises by capital in the economy, free market mythology also claims that free markets—and by extension capitalism—are the foundation of democracy.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

…markets do not, and cannot, guaranteed equitable or dignified outcomes. The conflation of markets with democracy is a confusion at the most elementary level.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

The patrician classes have always enlisted the power of government to advance their interests and the fight for democracy has always been the struggle to break this nexus. Despite free market rhetoric to the contrary, this codependence of state control with the market system is one source of the tension between democracy and capitalism. It is even more pronounced in state attempts to control the market with centralized command models, as was the case with Marxist brands of socialism.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.

—Al Capone. Accessed October 2, 2012 at http://thinkexist.com/quotes/al_capone/

I am like any other man. All I do is supply a demand.

—Al Capone. Accessed October 2, 2012 at http://thinkexist.com/quotes/al_capone/

Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.

—Al Capone. Accessed October 2, 2012 at http://thinkexist.com/quotes/al_capone/

Creative Destruction

The book is somewhat misnamed since it really deals with how some nations succeed. The answer, in a word: institutions. In particular, the lucky development of “inclusive” political and economic institutions that interacted to generate a virtuous circle of sustained economic growth. Inclusive institutions and sustained economic growth are new in history. Acemoglu and Robinson argue that since the Neolithic agricultural revolution, most societies have been organized around “extractive” political and economic institutions that funnel resources from the mass of people to small but powerful elites. Once they are on the gravy train, elites are naturally wary of economic growth since it could destabilize the social and political arrangements that make them rich.

Every set of extractive institutions is extractive in its own way, while all sets of inclusive institutions are inclusive in pretty much the same way. For example, ancient Rome ran on slavery; Russia on serfdom, Imperial China strictly limited domestic and foreign commerce; India depended upon hereditary castes; the Ottoman Empire relied on tax farming; Spanish colonies on indigenous labor levies; sub-Saharan Africa on slavery; the American South on slavery and later a form of racial apartheid not all that unlike South Africa’s; and the Soviet Union on collectivized labor and capital. The details of extraction differ but the institutions are organized to chiefly benefit elites.

So why don’t extractive elites encourage economic growth? After all, growth would mean more wealth for them to loot. Acemoglu and Robinson show that the institutions that produce economic growth are inevitable threats to the power of reigning elites. The “key idea” of their theory: “The fear of creative destruction is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards between the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions. Technological innovation makes human societies prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new, and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of certain people.” Thus throughout history reactionary elites naturally resisted innovation because of their accurate fear that it would produce rivals for their power.

“The fear of creative destruction is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards between the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions. Technological innovation makes human societies prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new, and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of certain people.” Thus throughout history reactionary elites naturally resisted innovation because of their accurate fear that it would produce rivals for their power.

—Ronald Bailey in Reason magazine (July, 2012) reviewing Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2012). Anything in quotes are from the book.

Innovations in agriculture, for example, have allowed the percentage of our income that we spend on food to decline to about 10% today from 24% in 1950. In that time, producers' profits have remained steady at about 10% of revenues. If you do the math, which Mr. Conard himself does in a footnote, you find that the split of value, over time, favors consumers by a ratio of 20-to-1. A similar split, he argues, can be detected almost anywhere one looks in our economy.

—Carney, Brian M. June 13, 2012. “Please Don’t Soak the Rich.” The Wall Street Journal. A review of Edward Conard’s Unintended Consequences (2012).

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the basis of the world’s economy had been agriculture. Until then, 80 to 90 percent of Europeans and Americans had lived on and off the land: the rich derived their wealth from the land and the rents it brought.

—Pipes, Richard. 2001. Communism: A History. Random House, Inc.

The emergence of large-scale mechanical manufacture changed that. Money from industry and commerce gradually replaced income from rents as the main source of wealth. It also created a new form of poverty, for as mechanization lowered drastically production costs, traditional forms of small-scale, manual production became obsolete and many artisans were thrown out of work.

—Pipes, Richard. 2001. Communism: A History. Random House, Inc.

The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.

…

The seemingly religious flavor of Bain's culture smacks of the generally cultish ethos on Wall Street, in which all sorts of ethically questionable behaviors are justified as being necessary in service of the church of making money. Romney belongs to a true-believer subset within that cult, with a revolutionary's faith in the wisdom of the pure free market, in which destroying companies and sucking the value out of them for personal gain is part of the greater good, and governments should "stand aside and allow the creative destruction inherent in the free economy."
Taibbi, Matt. August 29, 2012. “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.” Rolling Stone magazine. Accessed September 6, 2012 at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829#ixzz25h84xssM

Views on Profit-Making

A man can grow rich only if he is able to offer better values—better products or services, at a lower price—than others are able to offer.

—Ayn Rand in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

Alec Baldwin: [referring to the villain played by Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street] … and you say greed is good. Do you think in our lifetime that that line has changed … where people believe that is true?

Michael Douglas: The affirmation that I got from that villain … [was obtained by] one more drunken guy from the street going, “Hey man! Greed is good! You’re the man! You’re why I got into this business!” … And I’d go, “Hey, I’m the villain [in the movie].”

—Michael Douglas. December 22, 2013. “David Letterman and Michael Douglas.” Here’s The Thing: With Alec Baldwin [podcast]. National Public Radio.

Another important difference between Britain and America was the system of rewards and status. Industrialists never acquired high social status or popular esteem in Britain, nor did those who were simply “rich” (that is, “vulgar”). The aristocracy, which set the tone for British life, favored a life of conspicuous leisure, not hard work.

—Allitt, Patrick N. 2014. The Industrial Revolution [lectures]. Lecture 26: Anglo-American Contrasts. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

Now let me define the difference between economic power and political power: economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value: political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear.

—Ayn Rand in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

The first Kayapo encounters with the grimy Brazilian banknotes led to the coining of their evocative word for money: pe-o caprin, or, “sad leaves.” More and more sad leaves were a part of the Kayapo life, especially in villages close to towns on the Brazilian frontier. In the Kayapo village of Turedjam, near Tucuma, pollution from clear-cutting and cattle ranching had wrecked the fishing grounds, and it was not uncommon to see Kayapo shopping in supermarkets for soap and frozen chicken.

—Brown, Chip. “Kayapo Courage.” National Geographic. January 2014.

The offspring of a toad is a toad and the offspring of a merchant is a merchant.

--A historical saying in Japan. Quoted in: Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 54.

By and large, the effort of the Church to control the profit motive was an heroic assertion of Christian morality; it formed a wholesome contrast to the imprisonment or enslavement of debtors that had disgraced Greek, Roman, and barbarian life and law. We cannot be sure that men are happier today than they would have been had the view of the Church prevailed.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 631. Refers to work in the High Middle Ages, before industrialization.

Comrade! you have the air of a merchant of tennis-balls; and you come and sit yourself beside me! I am a nobleman, my friend! Trade is incompatible with nobility.

—Hugo, Victor (2012-12-31). The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hapgood Translation, Unabridged) (Kindle Locations 7659-7662). e-artnow. Kindle Edition.

... The Chinese class system was divided as follows, with the highest class listed first.

1. The Gentleman / Noble: "...The Gentlemen are at the top of the hierarchy because they manage the affairs of society, so their social utility is at the most..."

2. Farmer / Peasant: "...because they produce the food which everyone needs to survive."

3. Artisan: "...because while they don't produce food, they make things that are of use to everybody."

4. Merchants: "Merchants are at the bottom because they don't produce anything themselves. They don't grow food, they don't make objects of utility. What they do is take things that other people have produced, move'em around, and enrich themselves in the process. So they are seen in the Confuciun system as being in a sort of socially-parasitic role. They do perform a social function, but it is one which is tainted—it is morally less acceptable, because they enrich themselves from the production of others."

All quotes are from Kenneth J. Hammond: "Five Dynasties and the Song Founding," Lecture 14, From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History. The Teaching Company. 2004.

"Yes, and I thought of the teapot you bought me—"
"One and three," said Paul.
"Fivepence!"
"It's not enough, mother.
"No. Do you know, I fairly sneaked off with it. But I'd been extravagant, I couldn't afford any more. And he needn't have let me have it if he hadn't wanted to.
—D.H. Lawrence in Sons and Lovers, illustrating that every voluntary purchase benefits both the buyer and the seller.

Why then didn't you put my money on deposit, so that when I came back, I could have collected it with interest?
—Jesus Christ in Luke 19:23.

Mohammed did not disdain commerce--he was its graduate; even in his sovereign Medina days, says a tradition, he bought wholesale, sold retail, and made profit without qualm; sometimes he acted as auctioneer. His language was rich with commercial metahors; he promised wordly success to good Moslems, and offered heaven as a bargain for little belief. He threatened hell to lying or cheating merchants; denounced monopolists, and speculators who "keep back grain to sell at a high rate" and bade the employer "give the laborer his wage before his perspiration dries." He prohibited the taking or giving of interest. No reformer ever more actively taxed the rich to help the poor. Every will was expected to leave something to the poor; if a man dies inestate his natural heirs were direct to give a part of their inheritance to charity. Like his religious contemporaries he accepted slavery as a law of nature,, but did what he could to mitigate its burdens and its sting."

--Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 179.

The CEO’s charge should not be “increase shareholder value by any means necessary.” It should be “increase shareholder value by all appropriate means.” That precludes participating in slavery, and it precludes lobbying for unjust laws.

—Carney, Timothy P. February 2014. “Crony Capitalism vs. Market Morality.” Reason magazine.

That businesspeople buy low and sell high in a particularly alert and advantageous way does not make them bad, unless any trading is bad, unless when you yourself shop prudently you are bad, unless any tall poppy needs to be cut down, unless we wish to run our ethical lives on the sin of envy.
—Deirdre N. McClosky in The Bourgeois Virtues

What a loss to humanity it would have been if Jobs had dedicated the last 25 years of his life to figuring out how to give his billions away, instead of doing what he does best.

—Dan Pollatta writing in Harvard Business Review Blog (10:25 AM, September 2, 2011)

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of.

In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

—Confucius

I’m gonna make you rich…You could walk away with seven million bucks, maybe more. We’re not just talking ‘fuck you’ money anymore, we’re talking ‘fuck everybody’ money.

—Line from Barbarians at the Gate (1993)

Walking to work one day I wanted to listen to the news, so I popped into Radio Shack. I found a cute little green radio for $4.99. Pleased with my bargain, I stood in line to pay, but then started wondering: how could $4.99 cover the cost of extracting the raw materials, manufacturing the parts, assembling the radio, and getting it into my hands?

…

Four-ninety-nine? That wouldn't pay for the shelf space it took up until I came along, let alone the salary for the guy who helped me pick it out.

That's when I realized: I didn't pay for the radio. So who did?

A study currently underway for the United Nations is calculating the cost of pollution and other environmental damage caused by the 3,000 largest publicly held corporations in the world. The study, which will be published this summer, has found that the cost of environmental damage by these companies is $2.2 trillion, or more than one-third of their profits if they were held financially accountable. This includes greenhouse gas emissions, other pollution, and water degradation. The final amount is likely to increase once additional costs -- like toxic waste -- are incorporated.

…

Economists call that externalizing costs, and it's how corporations hide the true cost of making and selling cheap stuff -- costs that are never recorded on the balance sheets and consumers never see. As David Korten writes in When Corporations Rule the World, "Externalized costs don't go away -- they are simply ignored by those who benefit from making the decisions that result in others incurring them."

—Leonard, Annie. March 9, 2010. “The Story of Stuff: Externalized Costs and the $4.99 Radio.” The Huffington Post. Green. Accessed August 8, 2012 at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-leonard/the-story-of-stuff-extern_b_490351.html.

The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system.

—Milton Friedman

This business kills a part of life that is pretty essential. The thing is, I haven't identified what it kills. But it is something vital that is dead inside of me. I can feel it.

—Michael Burry, a financial speculator who profited tremendously by portending the 2008 financial crisis, quoted in The Big Short by Michael Lewis.

If you are thinking about a business decision you are significantly more likely to lie than if you were thinking from an ethical frame.

—Psychologist on the Planet Money podcast. “Why People Do Bad Things.” April 17, 2012.

Another problem was the low esteem in which trade and traders came to be held in the post-classical period, in much though by no means all of the Muslim world. The higher ranks of society were the military, the bureaucrats, and the religious establishment, and the effective political power was usually shared or disputed among these. With rare exceptions, notably the earlier period, merchants were held in low esteem, especially when, as often happened in late medieval and early modern times, those merchants were not Muslims but members of the religious minorities, Jews, and to an increasing extent, Christians, primarily of Eastern churches. The earlier respect accorded to merchants in the traditions of the Prophet seems to have been forgotten.

—Lewis and Churchill in Islam: The Religion and its People (page 108), explaining why Muslim nations have struggled economically in the modern era.

Ninth century China was even worse. The Chinese class system was divided as follows, with the highest class listed first.

1. The Gentleman / Noble: "...The Gentlemen are at the top of the hierarchy because they manage the affairs of society, so their social utility is at the most..."

2. Farmer / Peasant: "...because they produce the food which everyone needs to survive."

3. Artisan: "...because while they don't produce food, they make things that are of use to everybody."

—Kenneth Hammond (2004) in Lecture 14 of From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History. The Teaching Company.

Odysseus is insulted when he is asked is he a merchant, “mindful of the gains of his greed”; but he tells with pride how, on his return from Troy, his provisions having run low, he sacked the city of Ismarus and stored his ships with food; or how he ascended the river Aegyptus “to pillage the splendid fields, to carry off the women and little children, and to kill the men.”

—Will Durant. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 3: The Heroic Age. 1939.

The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.

—Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.

The success of the few, he explains, is always obtained at the expense of the many, and generally by means which the severe moralist cannot approve of. The rich peasants, for example, have gained their fortune and influence by demoralising and exploiting their weaker brethren, by committing all manner of illegalities, and by bribing the local authorities. Hence they are styled Miroyedy (Commune-devourers) or Kulaki (fists), or something equally uncomplimentary. Once this view is adopted, it follows logically that the Communal institutions, in so far as they form a barrier to the

activity of such persons, ought to be carefully preserved. This idea underlies nearly all the arguments in favour of the Commune, and explains why they are so popular. Russians of all classes have, in fact, a leaning towards socialistic notions, and very little sympathy with our belief in individual initiative and unrestricted competition.

—MacKenzie, Donald Wallace (1841-1919). Russia.

Everyone knows the old saw that companies can do well by doing good. But many companies do more good when they are doing harm, according to a July National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on corporate social responsibility...Kotchen and Moon found that it is bad business to be seen as an irresponsible company, but an image as a socially responsible company can to some extent be bought with public philanthropy.

—Katherine Mangu-Ward. December, 2011. “Bad Company.” Reason magazine.

...in England commerce is not looked down upon as being derogatory, as it is in France and Germany. Here men of good family and even of rank may become merchants without losing caste.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 41.

...In Thebes there used to be a law that one who had not abstained from the market for ten years could not share in office.

—Aristotle, approving of the degrading of business-people, as quoted in Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 41.

Consumers will purchase from your business, or employees will go the extra mile to contribute to your success, only if they believe that you care about their interests. The best way to establish that you care is to show that you can place their interests ahead of your own.

—Andrew Stark, in The Wall Street Journal. April 12, 2011. A13.

“Jobs” are deals between workers and employers, and so “creating” them out of unwilling parties is impossible. The state, though, can outlaw deals, and has.

—Deirdre McCloskey, in Reason magazine. November, 2011. Page 29.

As the late Joan Robinson, a Cambridge economist, once wrote, "the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all."
—The Economist Magazine, July 31, 2010, page 9

Kids didn’t like McDonald’s hamburgers at the time, so we wrapped burgers and fries in decorated boxes in the shapes of trains and alphabet blocks. Then we put them together in white sacks with games and puzzles printed on the sides.

—Joe Johnston, discussing his work in the advertising industry creating the ‘Fun Meal’, to which McDonald’s later added a toy and renamed it the ‘Happy Meal’. The Daily O’Collegian. September 8, 2011. Page 3.

But what was also “new on the scene,” and tracks the beginnings of economic growth and mortality reduction more precisely is the attribution of bourgeois dignity and liberty...It is seen in an early form around 1720 as a new dignity and liberty for traders and innovators...the English were beginning to learn from the Dutch the improving spirit of active, stirring, laborious men, such as will put their hand to the plow, try experiments, and give all their attention to what they are about.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 39.

What...carried the enlightenment forward, was a society-wide shift outward the admiring of bourgeois virtues, taking the enlightened attitude among the elite toward the creative destruction from new knowledge and multiplying it among apprentice printers in Philadelphia and instrument makers in Edinburgh.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 39.

I readily admit that the issue is tangled. I only suggest that two strands, without which the rope of modernity would have broken, were bourgeois dignity and liberty.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 39.

Had the Ottoman or the Quing empires or the Japanese Shogunate admired trade and innovation sufficiently to overcome their worries about the maintenance of state power—encouraging innovation and having a go rather than crushing it—then they, not the Europeans, would have come first.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity remarking why the Dutch, British, and Americans were the first to usher in the Industrial Revolution and accrue the riches thereof.. Chapter 39.

A big change in the common opinion about markets and innovation, I claim, caused the Industrial Revolution, and then the modern world. The change occurred during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in northwestern Europe. More or less suddenly the Dutch and British and then the Americans and the French began talking about the middle class, high or low—the “bourgeoisie”—as thought it were dignified and free. The rest was modern economic growth.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Preface.

Ethical (and unethical) talk runs the world. One-quarter of national income is earned from sweet talk in markets and management.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 1.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called “habits of the mind”—or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovations and other bourgeois virtues...

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 1

Adeimantus: Suppose now that a husbandman, or an artisan, brings some production to market, and he comes at a time when there is no one to exchange with him — is he to leave his calling and sit idle in the market-place?

Socrates: Not at all; he will find people there who, seeing the want, undertake the office of salesmen. In well-ordered States they are commonly those who are the weakest in bodily strength, and therefore of little use for any other purpose; their duty is to be in the market, and to give money in exchange for goods to those who desire to sell and to take money from those who desire to buy.

—Plato in Republic, Book 2.

When trade is slack, one must find out new markets. Yet he had refused ordination for conscience' sake. Well, he said, one does what one can for conscience, and what one must for bread.

—Isabel Paterson in The Fourth Queen

The Mongol elite’s intimate involvement with trade represent a market break with tradition. From China to Europe, traditional aristocrats generally disdained commercial enterprise as undignified, dirty, and often, immoral.

—Jack Weatherford in Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World. 2004. Page 225. Three Rivers Press: NY, NY.

The Mongols directly attacked the Chinese cultural prejudice that ranked merchants as merely a step above robbers by officially elevating their status ahead of all religions and professions, second only to government officials. In a further degradation of Confucian scholars, the Mongols reduced them from the highest level of traditional Chinese society to the ninth level, just below prostitutes but above beggars.

—Jack Weatherford in Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World. 2004. Page 225. Three Rivers Press: NY, NY.

But the truth is, Wal-Mart and its counterparts spread far more holiday-food cheer than do churches and public-service groups.

Scholars estimate that the presence of Wal-Mart in a community reduces food prices somewhere between 10% and 15%. That’s equivalent to shoppers receiving an additional 5.2 to 7.8 weeks of “free” food shopping. That Wal-Mart’s customer base is skewed toward lower-income shoppers reinforces the beneficent consequences of its price effect.

—Norman Van Cott writing in The Wall Street Journal. November 23, 2011.

In the interests of deeper understanding, here are ten things which—trust me—most of the Tory scum I hand around with think.

1. Free-marketeers resent the bank bailouts...

2. What has happened since 2008 is not capitalism...

3. If you want the rich to pay more, create a flatter and simpler tax system...

4. Those of us who believe in small government are not motivated by the desire to make the rich richer....We believe that economic freedom will enrich the country as a whole. Yes, the wealthy might become wealthier still, but we don't see that as an argument against raising living standards for the majority...

5. We are not against equality. We generally recognize the benefits in Scandinavian-style homogeneity: crime tends to be lower, people are less stressed etc. Our objection is not that egalitarianism is undesirable in itself, but that the policies required to enforce in involve a disproportionate loss of liberty and prosperity....

6. Nor, by the way, does state intervention seem to be an effective way to promote inequality....

7. Let’s tackle the idea that being on the Left means being on the side of ordinary people, while being on the Right means defending privileged elites. It’s hard to think of a single tax, or a single regulation, that doesn’t end up privileging some vested interest at the expense of the general population. The reason governments keep growing is because of what economists call ‘dispersed costs and concentrated gains’: people are generally more aware the benefits they receive than of the taxes they pay.

8. Capitalism, with all its imperfections, is the fairest scheme yet tried. In a system based on property rights and free contract, people succeed by providing an honest service to others. Bill Gates became rich by enriching hundreds of millions of us: I am typing these words using one of his programmes. He gained from the exchange (adding fractionally to his net worth), and so did I (adding to my convenience). In a state-run system, by contrast, third parties get to hand out the goodies.

9. Talking of fairness, let’s remember that the word doesn’t belong to any faction. How about parity between public and private sector pay? How about being fair to our children, whom we have freighted with a debt unprecedented in peacetime? How about being fair to the boy who leaves school at 16 and starts paying taxes to subsidise the one who goes to university? How about being fair to the unemployed, whom firms cannot afford to hire because of the social protection enjoyed by existing employees?

10. Let’s not forget ethics, either. There is virtue in deciding to do the right thing, but there is no virtue in being compelled. Choosing to give your money to charity is meritorious; paying tax is morally neutral. Evidence suggests that, as taxes rise, and the state squeezes out civic society, people give less to good causes.

—Daniel Hannan. “Memo to the Occupy protesters: here are ten things we evil capitalists really think.” Wall Street Journal. November 26, 2011. Editorial.

There’s no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it’s 10,000 feet down in a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.

—Matt Taibbi. November 24, 2011. “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Protests.” Rolling Stone.

But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it’s at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned “democracy,” tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.

—Matt Taibbi. November 24, 2011. “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Protests.” Rolling Stone.

In France, every son of an aristocrat is an aristocrat, and aristocrats do not work in France. Indeed, they lose their noble status if they engage in commerce or trade…

—Alan Charles Kors. 2001. Voltaire and the Triumph of the Enlightenment. Lecture 4: Philosophical Letters, Part II.

Unlike in France, where trade and commerce are scorned as common, in England, the commercial life and the diversity of religion itself have created a voluntary, peaceful, tolerant interaction, that enriches and betters mankind.

—Alan Charles Kors. 2001. Voltaire and the Triumph of the Enlightenment. Lecture 4: Philosophical Letters, Part II.

—Voltaire, quoted by Alan Charles Kors. 2001. Voltaire and the Triumph of the Enlightenment. Lecture 4: Philosophical Letters, Part II.

If you lend money to My people, to the poor among you, you are not to act as a creditor to him; you shall not charge him interest.

—Exodus 22:25 (New International Version)

Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary?

Who may live on your holy hill?

…who lends his money without usury and does not accept a bribe against the innocent.

He who does these things will never be shaken.

—Psalm 15 (New International Version)

Shouldn’t you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies? I and my brothers and my men are also lending the people money and grain. But let the exacting of usury stop! Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the usury you are charging them…

—Nehemiah 5:9 (New International Version)

Who has withdrawn his hand from the poor And not received usury or increase, But has executed my judgments And walked in My statutes—He shall not die for the iniquity of his father; He shall surely live!

—Ezekiel 18:17 (New King James Bible)

“In you they take bribes to shed blood; you take usury and increase; you have made profit from your neighbors by extortion and have forgotten Me,” says the Lord GOD.

—Ezekiel 18:13 (New King James Bible)

Do not charge your brother interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. You may charge a foreigner interest, but not a brother Israelite…

—Deuteronomy 23:19 (New International Version)

What should the rich man do when receiving a visit from his troubled neighbor? True, Jesus had said to give without expectation of return, but it seemed unrealistic to expect most Christians to do that. And even if they did, what sort of ongoing relationships would that create? St. Basil took the radical position. God had given us all things in common, and he had specifically instructed the rich to give their possessions to the poor. The communism of the Apostles—who pooled all their wealth, and took freely what they needed—was thus the only proper model for a truly Christian society.

—David Graeber in Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life.

And why do you worry about clothes?...So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things…Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself…

—Matthew 6:14 (New International Version)

…towns-people could assuage the guilt—purge the guilt—caused by their own greed and their own obsession with time. Medieval moralists condemned towns-people for being so concerned with money and profit—and, odd as this might seem to us today, [for whom] planning doesn’t seem like much of a sin…—Medieval moralists considered it bad for individuals to plan about the future, to care about the future too much. Because if you plan actively what you are going to be doing tomorrow or the next day and a year from now, you are showing insufficient trust in God…

—Philip Daileader. High Middle Ages. Lecture 10: Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan Movement. The Teaching Company.

Many held that one simply could not be both a merchant and a Christian…

—David Graeber in Debt: The First 5,000 Years

The Lord gave His own injunction quite plainly in the words, “from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.”

But what of the money lover? He sees before him a man under stress of necessity bent to the ground in supplication. He sees him hesitating at no act, no words, of humiliation. He sees him suffering undeserved misfortune, but he is merciless. He does not reckon that he is a fellow-creature. He does not give in to his entreaties. He stands stiff and sour. He is moved by no prayers; his resolution is broken by no tears….

…

With pretences of this kind and talk like this he fawns on the wretched victim, and induces him to swallow the bait. Then he binds him with a written security, adds loss of liberty to the trouble of his pressing poverty, and is off. The man who has made himself responsible for interest that he cannot pay has accepted voluntary slavery for life.

—Saint Basil. Sermon on usury given in 365 A.D. This sermon set the standard for the morality of usury for centuries.

…fathers forced to sell their children, debtors who hanged themselves out of shame. Usury, he observed, must be considered a form of violent robbery, even murder.

—David Graeber in Debt: The First 5,000 Years

WE LIVE IN A TIME when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.

As the Cold War ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige, and understandably so. No other mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of goods had proved as successful at generating affluence and prosperity. And yet even as growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market mechanisms in the operation of their economies, something else was happening. Market values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.

…

Today, that faith is in question. The financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the ability of markets to allocate risk efficiently. It also prompted a widespread sense that markets have become detached from morals, and that we need to somehow reconnect the two. But it’s not obvious what this would mean, or how we should go about it.

…

These uses of markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods were for the most part unheard-of 30 years ago. Today, we take them largely for granted.

For two reasons. One is about inequality, the other about corruption. First, consider inequality. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence—or the lack of it—matters. If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to afford yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities of income and wealth would matter less than they do today. But as money comes to buy more and more, the distribution of income and wealth looms larger.

The second reason we should hesitate to put everything up for sale is more difficult to describe. It is not about inequality and fairness but about the corrosive tendency of markets. Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction. Hiring foreign mercenaries to fight our wars might spare the lives of our citizens, but might also corrupt the meaning of citizenship.

—Michael J. Sandel. April 1, 2012. “What Isn’t For Sale?” The Atlantic.

Nothing sparks spasms of poor economic commentary like rising oil prices. From left to right, pundits and politicians outdo each other at accusing evildoers of hurting good people. This week, a Democratic congressional committee held a hearing on the issue of high gas prices and excessive oil speculation.

Speculators are easy targets. They seem to produce nothing. They merely buy and sell and hope for prices to move in directions that will bless them with big profits. In fact, though, speculators also bless the rest of us with significant benefits — although too few Americans understand this truth.

Speculators should be celebrated — not so much for their motives (which are no better or worse than normal) but for the socially beneficial, if largely invisible, consequences of their activities. Speculation makes resources more abundant when there is great scarcity by encouraging people to use those resources more sparingly when there is relative abundance.

—Donald J. Boudreaux. April 5, 2012. “Don’t curse the oil speculators.” Newsday.

Speculators anticipate shortages and buy up commodities early, thereby removing them from the market. This alerts consumers to the oncoming shortage, fulfilling the important financial market role of providing information and allowing them to reduce consumption as prices rise. Later, the speculator sells, ameliorating the shortage while making a profit.

Speculators anticipate and warn others about shortages—they do not cause shortages. As a result of their trades, price swings are less severe than they otherwise would have been. We do not blame doctors, police, or firemen for profiting from the misfortune of others because it is understood that they help a bad situation. Speculators deserve the same consideration.

—Joetta Forsyth. 2008. “Learning to Love Financial Market Barbarians.” Graziadio Business Review. 11(1).

People who argue that speculation is destabilizing seldom realize that this is largely equivalent to saying that speculators lose money, since speculation can be destabilizing in general only if speculators on the average sell when the currency (commodity) is low in price and buy when it is high.

—Milton Friedman. Essays in Positive Economics.

What the world hopes from the great creditor countries is no altruism, but only enlightened selfishness.

—Part of Ivar Kreuger’s speech to the New York Bond Club. Kreuger was the world’s leading financier of the late 1920’s, who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in world history. These remarks were made in 1930, just as the stock market bubble began to crash. Quote taken from: Partnoy, Frank. 2009. The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, the financial genius behind a century of Wall Street Scandals. PublicAffairs: NY, NY.

The basic Obama-liberal critique goes like this: Bain buys a company, loads it with debt and then sucks out cash before foisting the wounded business upon an unsuspecting buyer or a bankruptcy court. In the risk-taking world of private equity such a scenario can certainly happen, and it's true that Bain likes management fees and dividends as much as the next partnership.

But then how to explain the history of Bain Capital? Mr. Romney started the business in 1984. The company has since bought and sold many businesses and executed thousands of financing transactions.

If Bain's standard operating procedure were to hand the next owner of one of its companies a ticking bankruptcy package, how is Bain still finding buyers nearly three decades later? And who would agree to lend money to a company backed by Bain? Wouldn't word have gotten around by, say, 1987 that Bain's portfolio companies weren't creditworthy?

The liberal critique of private equity assumes that the financial industry is full of saps who have been eager to lose money across the table from Bain for 28 years. This is the same financial industry that the same liberal critics say is full of greedy schemers when it comes to padding their own pay or ripping off consumers. But financiers can't be both knaves and diabolical geniuses at the same time.

—The Wall Street Journal. May 20, 2012. “Bain Capitalism 101.” A14.

Wall Street never, like, wants to give up its profits. So if you say to Wall Street, “You can never do XYZ,” they’re just going to say, “Ok, well what do we do instead, to make sure we still make as much money as we did before?” It’s never an acceptable answer to say, “Alright, I guess we just won’t make as much money anymore because the laws have changed.” That’s never acceptable.

—Alexis Goldstein, a former Wall Street computer programmer who quit and joined the Occupy Wall Street movement. Interviewed by The Story podcast, “Walking Away From Wall Street.” May 24, 2012. NPR.

There’s this phrase on Wall Street called “ripping your clients face off,”…[it is] the idea that you give your client the worst deal possible…but the client thinks they got a bargain…this idea of putting one over on someone or hood-winking someone, or like, cheating someone…in such a good way that they think they got a good deal. That’s sort of what happens when the end goal is just about profits.

In justifying his attacks on Bain Capital, President Obama argues that "profit maximization" might be an appropriate goal for a private-equity firm, but not for more general public policy. This argument ignores one of the most basic premises of economics.

We economists assume that firms always maximize profits, and that profit maximization by firms (all firms, not just private-equity ones) is a very good thing. But this is not because profits are in themselves good. Rather, profit maximization is good because it leads directly to maximum benefits for consumers. Profits provide the incentive for firms to do what consumers want.

Consider what contributes to profit maximization. In simple terms, profit maximization means producing the products earning the highest returns, and producing these products at the lowest possible cost. Both are socially useful behaviors that benefit consumers.

Which products produce the highest returns? The answer is the products that consumers want and are currently underproduced. If there are excess returns (profits) to be earned in some market, that is because consumers are willing to pay more for those products than the current cost of production.

Profits are earned by producing more of these products—that is, by satisfying unmet consumer demands. Profit maximization means doing the best job of satisfying these unmet demands, and so providing benefits to consumers. If the unmet demand is for a currently nonexistent product that consumers will value when it is produced (Facebook, the iPhone, Google search), then of course even more profits can be earned.

Paul H. Rubin. May 24, 2012. "A Tutorial for the President on 'Profit Maximization.' The Wall Street Journal. A17.

…a majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of corporations—a significant shift from only twelve years ago, when nearly three-quarters held a favorable view.

—Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna. May 22, 2012. “Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not so Wild a Dream.” The Nation.

“Stockholders in the speculation economy want their profits now,”

—Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna. May 22, 2012. “Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not so Wild a Dream.” The Nation.

A topic that will be explored…is money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

Property

Then now let us consider what will be their way of life, if they are to realize our idea of them. In the first place, none of them should have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or store closed against any one who has a mind to enter; their provisions should be only such as are required by trained warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; they should agree to receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses of the year and no more; and they will go to mess and live together like soldiers in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of the dross which is current among men, and ought not to pollute the divine by any such earthly admixture; for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds, but their own is undefiled. And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or drink from them. And this will be their salvation, and they will be the saviours of the State.

But should they ever acquire homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, they will pass their whole life in much greater terror of internal than of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at hand. For all which reasons may we not say that thus shall our State be ordered, and that these shall be the regulations appointed by us for guardians concerning their houses and all other matters?

—Plato in The Republic

And there is another objection to the proposal. For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few

…

Next let us consider what should be our arrangements about property: should the citizens of the perfect state have their possessions in common or not?...when they till the ground for themselves the question of ownership will give a world of trouble. If they do not share equally enjoyments and toils, those who labor much and get little will necessarily complain of those who labor little and receive or consume much…

…how immeasurably greater is the pleasure, when a man feels a thing to be his own; for surely the love of self is a feeling implanted by nature and not given in vain, although selfishness is rightly censured; this, however, is not the mere love of self, but the love of self in excess, like the miser’s love of money; for all, or almost all, men love money and other such objects in a measure…

…And further, there is the greatest pleasure in doing a kindness or service to friends or guests or companions, which can only be rendered when a man has private property.

—Aristotle in Politics

Each member of the community gives himself to it, at the moment of its foundation, just as he is, with all the resources at his command, including the goods he possesses. This act does not make possession, in changing hands, change its nature, and become property in the hands of the Sovereign; but, as the forces of the city are incomparably greater than those of an individual, public possession is also, in fact, stronger and more irrevocable…For the State, in relation to its members, is master of all their boods by the social contract, which, within the State, is the basis of all rights…

—Rousseau in The Social Contract

In general, to establish the right of the first occupier over a plot of ground, the following conditions are necessary: first, the land must not yet be inhabited; secondly, a man must occupy only the amount he heeds for his subsistence; and, in the third place, possession must be taken, not by an empty ceremony, but by labour and cultivation, the only sign of proprietorship that should be respected by others, in default of a legal title.

—Rousseau in The Social Contract

Property, the dominion of man's needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs.

"Property is robbery," said the great French Anarchist, Proudhon. Yes, but without risk and danger to the robber. Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright, and has turned him loose a pauper and an outcast. Property has not even the time-worn excuse that man does not create enough to satisfy all needs. The A B C student of economics knows that the productivity of labor within the last few decades far exceeds normal demand a hundredfold. But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution? The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade…Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making.

—Emma Goldman in Anarchism and Other Essays.

The Amazon Doctrine: Above all else, align with customers. Win when they win. Win only when they win.

—Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, 2012.

SIR – There are plenty of reasons why liberalism has not flourished in modern India (“Liberal worries”, November 10th). The word “liberal” is understood by most Indians as denoting religious tolerance and a respect for human rights; its economic connotation is less well known. People who work in the media are predominantly from the centre-left and economic liberals rarely get a chance to join the debate. This was especially so at the height of the global financial crisis, which was explained, wrongly, by the Indian press as a consequence of economic liberalism.

There is also a deep distrust of businessmen, who are often thought of as rapacious and creating shoddy products and services (in some cases this is justified). But above all, the business class itself wants the public-sector leviathan to flourish. This may seem strange, but businessmen have a habit of running to the government for succour at the slightest hint of trouble. Politicians are only too happy to oblige and remind the business class what they owe to the party in power. It is not surprising that what has “flourished” in the past decade has been businesses of the rent-seeking, extractive kind.

—Thind, Rajiv. November 24, 2012. “Why no liberalism in India?” Letters to the editor. The Economist.

…we hire some high school kids. And they are lovely people. But usually it’s one of their first jobs, like maybe they’ve mowed the lawn for their neighbor or maybe they did some babysitting. But by and large we’re their first job. So, everything else that’s happened in their life has happened for their benefit. They’ve gone to summer camp–that was for their benefit. They’ve gone to school–that was for their benefit. We as parents certainly do everything we can to benefit our children. And then they come to me and–yeah, there are a lot of programs that go on in the summer. And that’s not what this is. This is: You are going to work, and at the end of the week I’m going to give you money; and I expect that because you are here, I will make more money. And that’s a concept that I’ve had to explain to them. And it comes in really hard. And I have to say: Why would I have you here if I wasn’t going to end up with more money? Why on earth would I have you show up every day? And they kind of start to get that this should be a mutually beneficial arrangement, not just that I shouldn’t come out even because I think of–capitalism as me making money for the aggravation of having you here. And then we get the college kids; they’ve kind of gotten that kind of concept a little better. But then I’ll say: What do you want to do when you are done with college? And they’ll say: Oh, I want to work for a non-profit. And that one makes me angry. First, it’s like, well, non-profit, that could be a hospital, that could be a–like you haven’t thought about this any more–that could be a land trust, it could be anything. ‘Non-profit’ is huge. You don’t have any more direction than that you want to work for a non-profit? But also, they are telling me that profit is bad. So, I say: Well, look around at all this stuff you see, the tractors, the greenhouses, the walk-in cooler–like all this stuff. Ralph and I could have taken that money and even if we put it in the bank in a savings account we’d have earned like a percent or something, even now. But we’ve done this, and we’re risking that–it may not work out; we may not make any money from this; we may not get back the money we put in. Don’t we deserve a little more than what we could get in a bank by doing something safe? And they say: Oh, well yeah, of course you do. And I say: Well, that’s profit. And that’s all that profit is. And: Ohhhh. And then the light dawns. But they come with no idea about how capitalism works, even though capitalism is the economic system of our country.

—Turner, Lisa [guest]. December 24, 2012. “Lisa Turner on Organic Farming.” EconTalk [podcast]. Russ Roberts [host]. EconTalk.org. Library of Economics and Liberty.

Arbitrage

They say that Thales, perceiving by his skill in astrology (astronomy) that there would be great plenty of olives that year, while it was yet winter, hired at a low price all the oil presses in Miletus and Chios, there being no one to bid against him. But when the season came for making oil, many persons wanting them, he all at once let them upon what terms he pleased; and raising a large sum of money by that means, convinced them that it was easy for philosophers to be rich if they chose it.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 3: The Heroic Age. Page 136. This story was told by Aristotle.

Government Sponsored Enterprises

Willem Buiter—shortly before becoming the chief economist of Citigroup—came much closer to the right approach than many progressive critics when he asked: “Is the reality…that large private firms make enormous private profits when the going is good and get bailed out and taken into temporary public ownership when the going gets bad, with the taxpayer taking the risk and the losses? If so, then why not keep these activities in permanent public ownership?”

—Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna. May 22, 2012. “Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not so Wild a Dream.” The Nation.

The first step toward public ownership is recognizing that it is not the radical departure most imagine it to be. Two of the most cost-effective health providers in the United States—one a far-reaching insurance system, Medicare; the other a direct hands-on healthcare delivery system, the Veterans Administration—are run by the government. So, too, the largest pension manager in the country is a public entity: the Social Security Administration.

The US Postal Service, which employs 645,000 men and women, is another public enterprise that is generally regarded as well run by most experts—despite the recession, a reduction in the volume of mail because of electronic communications and a highly unusual 2006 Congressional requirement that the USPS pre-fund its pension benefits for the next seventy-five years. Recent cost-saving proposals for closing many small-town post offices and reducing services have triggered a popular backlash against the possible loss of an institution the public still values.

Another public enterprise, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), is one of the largest energy companies in the nation. In fact, more than 25 percent of electricity in the United States is supplied by local public utilities and cooperatives. And, of course, though corporate influence has distorted a potentially powerful opportunity, the government owns timber, mineral, oil and other resources on public land covering almost 30 percent of the nation’s territory.

—Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna. May 22, 2012. “Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not so Wild a Dream.” The Nation.

Public enterprises do not spend large amounts on advertising or brokers’ fees to sell their products. They do not add a profit margin to every service they provide or article they sell. Nor do they pay exorbitant executive salaries. The Medicare administrator made a base salary of approximately $170,000 in 2010.

…state-owned enterprises in many areas are, or can be, as efficient as their private counterparts…. Also, public enterprises do not spend huge amounts of money undermining the political process through extensive pro-corporate campaign advertising and lobbying. And public corporations are open to public scrutiny, while private corporations keep most of their internal decision-making secret.

—Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna. May 22, 2012. “Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not so Wild a Dream.” The Nation.

Most advanced societies have found large-scale publicly controlled companies appropriate in key areas. Take energy: worldwide, publicly controlled corporations produce roughly 75 percent of all oil. Or transportation: high-speed rail systems are run by the government in France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey and South Korea. Public ownership of significant or controlling shares of airlines is common: France holds 16 percent of Air France-KLM; Sweden, Denmark and Norway hold a 50 percent stake in SAS; Israel, 35 percent of El Al; Singapore, 56 percent of Singapore Airlines (ranked as one of the world’s best). The European Aeronautics Defence and Space Company—producer of Airbus and other major planes and helicopters—is partly owned by the French and Spanish governments (as well as the city of Hamburg, Germany). Or banking: more than 200 public and semi-public banks, with another eighty-one funding agencies, account for a fifth of all bank assets in the European Union. Japan Post Bank is the world’s biggest public bank and one of that nation’s largest employers.

Brazil, an economic powerhouse, has more than 100 state-owned or -controlled enterprises, including major banks, utilities and a large oil company, Petrobras, renowned throughout the world for its deep-water exploration achievements. Much better and faster Internet service than ours is provided in many countries where public corporations exist side by side with private companies. (Public telecommunications companies are common around the world, including in Austria, Japan, Sweden, France, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium.) Although, after due consideration, other sectors would likely have to be added if the underlying corporate growth dynamic and the challenge of global warming are to be dealt with, such enterprises function successfully and profitably, again belying the usual claim that privately owned companies are efficient while public ones create boondoggles and waste.

—Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna. May 22, 2012. “Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not so Wild a Dream.” The Nation.

More importantly, it isn’t just East Asian governments that have successfully picked winners. In the second half of the twentieth century, the governments of countries such as France, Finland, Norway and Austria shaped and directed industrial development with great success through protection, subsidies and investments by SOEs. Even while it pretends that it does not, the US government has picked most of the country’s industrial winners since the Second World War through massive support for research and development (R&D). The computer, semiconductors, aircraft, internet and biotechnology industries have all been developed thanks to subsidized R&D from the US government. Even in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when government industrial policies were much less organized and effective than in the late twentieth century, virtually all of today’s rich countries used tariffs, subsidies, licensing, regulation and other policy measures to promote particular industries over others, with considerable degrees of success (see Thing 7). If governments can and do pick winners with such regularity, sometimes with spectacular results, you may wonder whether there is something wrong with the dominant economic theory that says that it cannot be done. Yes, I would say that there are many things wrong with the theory. First of all, the theory implicitly assumes that those who are closest to the situation will have the best information and thus make the best decision. This may sound plausible but, if proximity to the situation guaranteed a better decision, no business would ever make a wrong decision. Sometimes being too close to the situation can actually make it more, rather than less, difficult to see the situation objectively.

…

One obvious way for a government to ensure that it has good business information is to set up an SOE and run the business itself. Countries such as Singapore, France, Austria, Norway and Finland relied heavily on this solution. Second, a government can legally require that firms in industries that receive state support regularly report on some key aspects of their businesses. The Korean government did this very thoroughly in the 1970s, when it was providing a lot of financial support for several new industries, such as shipbuilding, steel and electronics. Yet another method is to rely on informal networks between government officials and business elites so that the officials develop a good understanding of business situations, although an exclusive reliance on this channel can lead to excessive ‘clubbiness’ or downright corruption. The French policy network, built around the graduates of ENA (École Nationale d’Administration), is the most famous example of this, showing both its positive and negative sides. Somewhere in between the two extremes of legal requirement and personal networks, the Japanese have developed the ‘deliberation councils’, where government officials and business leaders regularly exchange information through formal channels, in the presence of third-party observers from academia and the media. Moreover, dominant economic theory fails to recognize that there could be a clash between business interests and national interests. Even though businessmen may generally (but not necessarily, as I argued above) know their own affairs better than government officials and therefore be able to make decisions that best serve their companies’ interests, there is no guarantee that their decisions are going to be good for the national economy. So, for example, when it wanted to enter the textile industry in the 1960s, the managers of LG were doing the right thing for their company, but in pushing them to enter the electric cable industry, which enabled LG to become an electronics company, the Korean government was serving Korea’s national interest – and LG’s interest in the long run – better. In other words, the government picking winners may hurt some business interests but it may produce a better outcome from a social point of view (see Thing 18).

…

in between the two extremes of legal requirement and personal networks, the Japanese have developed the ‘deliberation councils’, where government officials and business leaders regularly exchange information through formal channels, in the presence of third-party observers from academia and the media. Moreover, dominant economic theory fails to recognize that there could be a clash between business interests and national interests. Even though businessmen may generally (but not necessarily, as I argued above) know their own affairs better than government officials and therefore be able to make decisions that best serve their companies’ interests, there is no guarantee that their decisions are going to be good for the national economy. So, for example, when it wanted to enter the textile industry in the 1960s, the managers of LG were doing the right thing for their company, but in pushing them to enter the electric cable industry, which enabled LG to become an electronics company, the Korean government was serving Korea’s national interest – and LG’s interest in the long run – better. In other words, the government picking winners may hurt some business interests

—Ha-Joon Chang. 2011. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Bloomsbury Publishing.

According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the centre-left think-tank in Washington, DC, between 1979 and 2006 (the latest year of available data), the top 1 per cent of earners in the US more than doubled their share of national income, from 10 per cent to 22.9 per cent. The top 0.1 per cent did even better, increasing their share by more than three times, from 3.5 per cent in 1979 to 11.6 per cent in 2006.2 This was mainly because of the astronomical increase in executive pay in the country, whose lack of justification is increasingly becoming obvious in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

—Ha-Joon Chang. 2011. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Bloomsbury Publishing.

All this upward redistribution of income might have been justified, had it led to accelerated growth. But the fact is that economic growth has actually slowed down since the start of the neo-liberal pro-rich reform in the 1980s. According to World Bank data, the world economy used to grow in per capita terms at over 3 per cent during the 1960s and 70s, while since the 1980s it has been growing at the rate of 1.4 per cent per year (1980–2009).

In short, since the 1980s, we have given the rich a bigger slice of our pie in the belief that they would create more wealth, making the pie bigger than otherwise possible in the long run. The rich got the bigger slice of the pie all right, but they have actually reduced the pace at which the pie is growing.

The problem is that concentrating income in the hands of the supposed investor, be it the capitalist class or Stalin’s central planning authority, does not lead to higher growth if the investor fails to invest more. When Stalin concentrated income in Gosplan, the planning authority, there was at least a guarantee that the concentrated income would be turned into investment (even though the productivity of the investment may have been adversely affected by factors such as the difficulty of planning and work incentive problems – see Thing 19). Capitalist economies do not have such a mechanism. Indeed, despite rising inequality since the 1980s, investment as a ratio of national output has fallen in all G7 economies (the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, Italy, France and Canada) and in most developing countries (see Things 2 and 6).

—Ha-Joon Chang. 2011. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Of course, trickle down is not a completely stupid idea. We cannot judge the impact of income redistribution only by its immediate effects, however good or bad they may look. When rich people have more money, they may use it to increase investment and growth, in which case the long-run effect of upward income redistribution may be the growth in the absolute size, although not necessarily the relative share, of income that everyone gets.

However, the trouble is that trickle down usually does not happen very much if left to the market. For example, once again according to the EPI, the top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 per cent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 per cent took 59 per cent. In contrast, in countries with a strong welfare state it is a lot easier to spread the benefits of extra growth that follows upward income redistribution (if it happens) through taxes and transfers. Indeed, before taxes and transfers, income distribution is actually more unequal in Belgium and Germany than in the US, while in Sweden and the Netherlands it is more or less the same as in the US.3 In other words, we need the electric pump of the welfare state to make the water at the top trickle down in any significant quantity.

Last but not least, there are many reasons to believe that downward income redistribution can help growth, if done in the right way at the right time. For example, in an economic downturn like today’s, the best way to boost the economy is to redistribute wealth downward, as poorer people tend to spend a higher proportion of their incomes. The economy-boosting effect of the extra billion dollar given to the lower-income households through increased welfare spending will be bigger than the same amount given to the rich through tax cuts. Moreover, if wages are not stuck at or below subsistence levels, additional income may encourage workers’ investment in education and health, which may raise their productivity and thus economic growth. In addition, greater income equality may promote social peace by reducing industrial strikes and crime, which may in turn encourage investment, as it reduces the danger of disruption to the production process and thus to the process of generating wealth. Many scholars believe that such a mechanism was at work during the Golden Age of Capitalism, when low income inequality coexisted with rapid growth.

Thus seen, there is no reason to presume that upward income redistribution will accelerate investment and growth. This has not happened in general. Even when there is more growth, the trickle down that occurs through the market mechanism is very limited, as seen in the above comparison of the US with other rich countries with a good welfare state.

Simply making the rich richer does not make the rest of us richer. If giving more to the rich is going to benefit the rest of the society, the rich have to be made to deliver higher investment and thus higher growth through policy measures (e.g., tax cuts for the rich individuals and corporations, conditional on investment), and then share the fruits of such growth through a mechanism such as the welfare state.

—Ha-Joon Chang. 2011. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Government Spending and Entitlements

Last October Indonesia’s government promised to provide all its citizens with health insurance by 2014. It is building the biggest “single-payer” national health scheme—where one government outfit collects the contributions and foots the bills—in the world. In just two years China has extended pension coverage to an additional 240m rural folk, far more than the total number of people covered by Social Security, America’s public-pension system. A few years ago about 80% of people in rural China had no health insurance. Now virtually everyone does. In India some 40m households benefit from a government scheme to provide up to 100 days’ work a year at the minimum wage, and the state has extended health insurance to some 110m poor people, more than double the number of uninsured in America.

If you take Germany’s introduction of pensions in the 1880s as the beginning and Britain’s launch of its National Health Service in 1948 as the apogee, the creation of Europe’s welfare states took more than half a century. Some Asian countries will build theirs in a decade. If they get things wrong, especially through unaffordable promises, they could wreck the world’s most dynamic economies. But if they create affordable safety nets, they will not just improve life for their own citizens but also become role models themselves.

—The Economist. September 8, 2012. “Asia’s next revolution.”

The taxpayers should keep only as much of their cultivated produce as suffices for their subsistence and the cultivation of their lands.

--Decree by a Persian emperor in third century BCE. Lauden, Rachel. 2013. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. University of California Press:

Berkeley, CA (USA). Page 62.

Alec Baldwin: [I had a friend who articulated the Libertarian philosophy] His take was the mantra of the Republican party was: I'm a winner, and I just don't want you to ruin my party...Do you believe that, in our society...the federal government…is attempting to...give something to the losers, to placate them...?

George Will: The welfare state, Alec, is a huge regressive transfer of wealth from the working young and middle aged to the retired elderly in the form of pensions and medical care, and because the elderly, after a lifetime of accumulation, are the wealthiest cohort of the country. The welfare state is a regressive transfer of wealth. The idea that the welfare state exists primarily to help the poor is refuted by a cursory reading of the federal budget...The transfer goes to the most muscular, the most organized interest. Big government is big because it has big ambitions. It knows how wealth and opportunity ought to be allocated. Big government is therefore—inevitably—responsive to big, powerful interest groups.

—Baldwin, Alec (host) and George Will (guest). September 24, 2012. “George Will.” Here’s The Thing with Alec Baldwin.

Most of us like to think of ourselves as helping the poor and doing other good things, and we like also to have our own income and real well-being improved. The politician who argues that you should do something which will benefit you, not because it will benefit you but because it is abstractly the good and just, gets more votes than the politician who points out the difficulties with that line of reasoning. All of us like to think that we are better, more altruistic, more charitable, than we actually are. But, although we have this desire, we don’t want to pay for it. We are willing to make a sacrifice of perhaps 5 percent of our real income in charitable aid to others. We would like to think of ourselves, however, as making much larger transfers without actually making them. One of the functions of the politician in our society is to meet this demand – the demand I suppose one can call a demand for hypocrisy but nevertheless a very human demand. He provides arguments that programs which benefit us personally are actually aimed at helping the poor, the national interest, a cure for cancer, etc.

—Tullock, Gordon. 1983.

Taxes and Public Debt

According to accepted legend, the original curve had been drawn on a paper napkin, possibly toilet paper, and some critics of deficient imagination held that the paper could have been better put to its intended use.

—John Kenneth Galbraith on the Laffer Curve (relationship between income tax rates and tax revenues) in A Tenured Professor (1990), page 76.

…every generation borrows and denounces those who lend.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 628. Refers to work in the High Middle Ages, before industrialization.

From so varied an assortment of dues—never all exacted from one family—it is impossible to calculate the total of a serf’s obligations. For late medieval Germany it is reckoned at two thirds of his produce.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 556. Quote regards Europe in the High Middle Ages.

Either the nation must destroy pubic credit or the public credit will destroy the nation.

—David Hume, as quoted in Adam Smith on page 235.

We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share...Such loopholes sometimes makes it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary—and that's crazy...Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver, or less?

—Ronald Reagan in 1985, quoted in: Dickinson, Tim. November 24, 2011. "The Party Of The Rich." Rolling Stone.

The Great Society put the state on growth hormones. Less widely appreciated, the era gave birth to a powerful new political force, the public-sector union. For the first time in American history there was an interest dedicated wholly to lobbying for a larger government and the taxes and debt to pay for it.

—Matthew Kaminski. “The New Tammany Hall.” The Wall Street Journal. November 26-27, 2011. A13.

It is often forgotten how many New Deal Democrats were skeptical about public-sector unions. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the idea of strikes by government workers “unthinkable and intolerable.”

—Matthew Kaminski. “The New Tammany Hall.” The Wall Street Journal. November 26-27, 2011. A13.

Don’t be scared by the high language of economists and Cabinet ministers...but think of politics at our own household level.

—Margaret Thatcher to Margaret Roberts as reported by Charles Moore. December 17-18, 2011. “What Would the Iron Lady Do?” The Wall Street Journal.

Robertson was allowed to spend no more than half a year—a hundred and eighty three days—in New York City. This exile was self-imposed. If he had paid New York City tax, which in the top bracket reaches a rate of 3.6% of taxable income, he could have spent as much time in the city as he wished.

…

This was nearly a full-time job. One of Robertson’s assistants, Julie Depperschmidt, scheduled his appointments and maintained a contemporaneous computerized record of his whereabouts, carefully distinguishing between “NYC days” and “non NYC days.”

—James B. Stewart discussing Julian H. Robertson’s attempts to not pay New York City taxes. March 19, 2012. The New Yorker. Pages 46-53.

The Tsar’s demands for money were insatiable…There was a tax on births, on marriages, on funerals, and on the registration of wills. There was a tax on wheat and tallow. Horses were taxed, and horses hides and horse collars. There was a hat tax and a tax on the wearing of leather boots. The beard tax was systematized and enforced, and a tax on mustaches was added. Ten percent was collected from all cab fares. Houses in Moscow were taxed, and beehives throughout Russia. There was a bed tax, a bath tax, an inn tax, a tax on kitchen chimneys and on the firewood that burned in them. Nuts, melons, cucumbers, were taxed. There was even a tax on drinking water.

—Robert K. Massie. Peter the Great. 1980. Ballantine Books.

He now taxes not only the windows of the great houses but even my modest number. I was obliged to brick one of them up.

—Edward Rutherfurd. 1987. Sarum. Page 774. Crown Publishers.

Antitrust and Market Power

Under antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does....This means that a businessman has no way of knowing in advance whether the action he takes is legal or illegal, whether he is guilty or innocent.

—Ayn Rand From Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

We draw the line at misconduct, not against wealth.

—Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, regarding the accusation that big companies were price-fixing. Quoted in: The Economist. June 27, 2015. “Lexington: Capitalism in America.” Page 26.

Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly. [...] Monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay

The interests of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufacturers, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the publick.

—Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations

We get hauled in front of the Congress for developing a product that’s free, that serves a billion people...I mean, it’s fine. It’s their job. But it’s not like we raised prices. We could lower the price from free to...lower than free?

—Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) on testifying before the Senate antitrust subcommittee. As quoted in Reason magazine (February, 2012; page 11).

No one knows the next chapter in the future of books, but lawyers in the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department claim to know precisely how this industry in transition must be structured and operated, down to the correct price for an e-book.

—L. Gordon Crovitz in The Wall Street Journal. “Steve Jobs, Price Fixer?” March 12, 2012. A13.

On balance, the [Standard Oil] trust wielded its monopolistic power to keep prices artificially low to forestall competition.

…

A very smart monopolist, Rockefeller kept prices low enough to retain control of the market and not so low as to wipe out all lingering competition.

—Ron Chernow in Titan, a biography of J. D. Rockefeller, Sr. Pages 258-259.

A big firm is not a bad firm if it earned its way to the top.

—L. Gordon Crovitz. November 29, 2010. “Do Monopolies Rule the Internet?” The Wall Street Journal.

It is very difficult at an abstract level to know what the effects of a merger or acquisition will be on competition within an industry. Firms may merge to create market power and increase prices, though they may also merge to create efficiencies that lower prices…market share is a very rough proxy for market power and essentially meaningless in a network industry.

—George L. Priest. September 6, 2011. “Washington’s Antitrust Timewarp.” The Wall Street Journal. A19.

…U.S. antitrust laws condemn practices that are “in restraint of trade,” which has been interpreted to mean harm to competition...

…It was uncontested both in the U.S. and in Europe that the proposed merger would create economic inefficiencies, lowering product costs to the benefit of consumers. In the U.S. this was reason to approve—if not applaud—the merger. But in Europe the cost savings would make the merged firms even more dominant. The EU blocked the merger, to the harm of U.S. and European consumers…

…it was found that the principal concern was Intel’s practice of giving “loyalty discounts” to repeat customers, presumably increasing Intel’s dominance in the microprocessor business.

Should a firm be punished for giving discounts?...

—George L. Priest. September 6, 2011. “Washington’s Antitrust Timewarp.” The Wall Street Journal. A19.

So in some cases the government enables incumbent producers like limousine companies to engage in collusive behavior and fix high prices, and in other cases it brings charges against book publishers for collusive behavior and fixing high prices, and in other cases it might find retailers like Safeway guilty of charging low prices and force them to charge higher prices? Welcome to the wacky world of antitrust.

—Mark J. Perry. April 13, 2012. “The Wacky World of Government Antitrust.” Carpe Diem blog.

To accommodate rent-seeking has become the modern function of antitrust. Why pretend otherwise?

—Holman W. Jenkins, Sr. June 9-10, 2012 (A13). “Google in the Crosshairs.” The Wall Street Journal.

I know, for example, from my own research that antitrust legislation in the U.S. (1) has been used chiefly to thwart, rather than to promote, competition, and, so, (2) has almost certainly been harmful (if not, thank goodness, calamitous); and (3) was intended not to reduce monopoly power – competition was vibrant and very much alive before passage of the Sherman Act – but to thwart it.

—Boudreax, Don. August 5, 2012. “Calling Deirdre McCloskey.” Café Hayek blog.

Confiscation, Inequality, & Wealth Redistribution

AMY GOODMAN: —that this got a little out of hand. But, Russell, in the headlines today, we talked about the Wal-Mart protesters around the United States, people in the Capitol who feed the senators, who just came back from break, calling for a $15 minimum wage, and this interesting study that found the six heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune make as much as the bottom 79 percent of black families in the United States combined.

RUSSELL BRAND: That’s a worrying statistic and an indication that you can’t claim to be the land of the free when that’s happening, not when people have got money just because they emerged from the correct vagina and having as much money as 70 percent of—well, what is it?—185 million Americans, but you’ve framed it racially, as well. It’s really, really quite worrying. I think there is sort of room for some kind of wealth distribution.

—Russell Brand [interviewee] and Amy Goodman [interviewer]. January 2, 2015. “Russell Brand on Revolution, Fighting Inequality, Addiction, Militarized Police & Noam Chomsky.” Democracy Now! Accessed January 6, 2015 at http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/2/russell_brand_on_revolution_fighting_inequality.

What we’ve been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down.

—Paul Piff. The Money Paradox. TED Radio Hour.26:25.

From the abstract of “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies,” published in Nature Human Behavior, April 7:

There is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public. . . . However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies. . . . Despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness. Drawing upon laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children, we argue that humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality. Both psychological research and decisions by policymakers would benefit from more clearly distinguishing inequality from unfairness.

The complaint by Americans that the United States is dominated by elites and powerful interest groups reflects the reality of increasing income and wealth inequality in the period from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Inequality per se has never been a big problem in American political culture, which emphasizes equality of opportunity rather than of outcomes. But the system remains legitimate only as long as people believe that by working hard and doing their best, they and their children have a fair shot at getting ahead, and that the wealthy got there playing by the rules.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY. Page 8.

Nan Terrie learned an expensive lesson last week about the importance of property rights. “Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment,” the 18-year-old protester told the New York Post. “I had my Mac stolen—that was like $5,500.” Why? Because she left it in a public place, amid a crowd demanding the redistribution of wealth. Imagine that.

Wall Street Journal. October 27, 2011. A18.

Focusing on infrastructure as the crucial support of entrepreneurial activity is like crediting the guy who built young Bill Gates’s garage with the start of Microsoft. Yes, Gates needed a roof over his head, and garages are useful. but it was Gates who had the ambition to do more in his garage than store his car and lawn-care products. Incalculably more important than his physical surroundings were his imagination and business sense.

—Rich Lowry at NRO responding to Elizabeth Warren’s claims that private entrepreneurs and business owners owe much of their success to the government.

It is plain, then, that those states are best instituted wherein the middle classes are a larger and more formidable part than either the rich or the poor…Whenever the number of those in the middle state has been too small, those who were more numerous, whether the rich or the poor, always overpowered them, and assumed to themselves the administration of public affairs…When either the rich get the better of the poor, or the poor of the rich, neither of them will establish a free state.

——Aristotle in Politics.

I’m for the poor man, all poor men, black and white, they all gotta have a chance. They gotta have a home, a job, and a decent education for their children. Every man a king: that's my slogan

—Huey Long (T. Harry Williams, Huey Long, p. 706).

We do not propose to say that there shall be no rich men. We do not ask to divide the wealth. We only propose that, when one man gets more than he and his children and children's children can spend or use in their lifetimes, that then we shall say that such person has his share. That means that a few million dollars is the limit to what any one man can own.—Huey Long (T. Harry Williams, Huey Long, p. 706).

—Huey Long. Share Our Wealth radio address. February 23, 1934.

Treat them just the same as anybody else, give them an opportunity to make a living, and to get an education

—Huey Long on his “Negro Policy” (not my words). T. Harry Williams. Huey Long. p. 704.

There is nobody in this country that got rich on his own. If you build a factory out there: good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You are safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and cease everything at your factory...because of the work the rest of us did. Look, if you built a factory and it turned into something terrific...god bless...keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a big hunk of that and pay forward to the next kid who comes along.

—Elizabeth Warren speaking publicly sometime in 2001. YouTube accessible at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htX2usfqMEs.

But there is an alternative view: that a soak-the-rich strategy is misguided. History suggests that low taxes on the rich encourage investment and growth.

—The Economist. Briefing: Taxing the wealthy. September 24, 2011. Page 83.

Why, then, are rare and expensive furnishings sought rather than those that are readily available and inexpensive? Because the good and noble things are misunderstood, and instead of pursuing things that really are good and noble, thoughtless people pursue things that only seem to be good, just as insane people confuse black things with white. Thoughtlessness is very close to insanity…raised in a strict environment, the ancient Spartans were thought to be and in fact were the best of the Greeks, and they made their very poverty more enviable than the king of Persia's wealth…Being sick harms the body only; living in luxury harms both the soul and body, by making the body weak and powerless and the soul undisciplined and cowardly. Surely luxurious living fosters injustice because it also fosters greed…No one can acquire many things without being unjust.

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality.

—American colonist John Randolph.

I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don’t pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It’s not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn’t that I blow five bucks at Wendy’s. It’s that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to. There’s a certain pull to live what bits of life you can while there’s money in your pocket, because no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing.

Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. It’s why you see people with four different babydaddies instead of one. You grab a bit of connection wherever you can to survive. You have no idea how strong the pull to feel worthwhile is. It’s more basic than food. You go to these people who make you feel lovely for an hour that one time, and that’s all you get. You’re probably not compatible with them for anything long-term, but right this minute they can make you feel powerful and valuable. It does not matter what will happen in a month. Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don’t plan long-term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.

—Comment made by a person in poverty on a website. Reprinted at: Thompson, Derek. November 22, 2013. “Your Brain on Poverty: Why Poor People Seem to Make Bad Decisions.” The Atlantic. Accessed November 26, 2013 at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-brain-on-poverty-why-poor-people-seem-to-make-bad-decisions/281780/.

Equality is unnatural; and where ability and subtlety are free, inequality must grow until it destroys itself in the indiscriminate poverty of social war; liberty and equality are not associates but enemies. The concentration of wealth begins by being inevitable, and ends by being fatal.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 112.

The rich pay a substantial share of taxes across the developed world, and this share has risen in recent decades....the share paid by the top 1% of earners in America rose from 28% in 1988 to 40% in 2006...As of 2007, the total earnings of the top 1% equalled 74% of all taxes paid, up from 24% in 1976...Very little of the rising share of tax payments from the rich can be traced to changes in rates. On the contrary, tax systems are far easier on top earners than was true a few decades ago.

—The Economist. Briefing: Taxing the wealthy. September 24, 2011. Page 83.

Asking Americans which class they belong to does not get you very far, since almost all Americans are sure that they belong to the middle. The last time the Pew Research Centre asked, in a poll in 2008, 91% of respondents put themselves in the upper-middle, middle, or lower-middle class.

—The Economist. Lexington: Classlessness in America. September 24, 2011. Page 44.

just 40.3% of those in the top 1% [of U.S. incomes] in 1996 remained there nine years later. But most didn’t fall far: 86.5% remained in the top 20%. Meanwhile, more than half of those in the bottom quintile in 1996 remained there nine years later.

—Carl Bialik. Wall Street Journal. November 12-13, 2011. A4.

Is it fair, Republicans might ask, for the top 1% of earners, who currently pay 40% of all federal income taxes, to pay more? Is it fair for them to pay that much while nearly half of all Americans pay no federal income tax at all? Is it the purpose of tax policy to express societal notions of "fairness", whatever they may be at the time, or is the purpose of tax policy to raise revenue—and if it is in fact the latter, is raising tax rates the best way to do it? It may not be: we argued last fall that "If the budget is a government's primary concern, then the evidence is that reforms which close loopholes and broaden the tax base are a more efficient way to bring in more money than higher taxes for the rich."

—The Economist. April 10, 2012. “That fair again unsay.”

When politicians say, "spread the wealth," translate that as "concentrate the power," because that is the only way they can spread the wealth. And once they get the power concentrated, they can do anything else they want to, as people have discovered — often to their horror — in countries around the world.

—Thomas Sowell

Class warfare thrives on ignorance about the sources of income. Listening to some of the talk about income differences, one would think that there's a pile of money meant to be shared equally among Americans. Rich people got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. Justice requires that they "give back." Or, some people talk about unequal income distribution as if there were a dealer of dollars. The reason some people have millions or billions of dollars while others have very few is the dollar dealer is a racist, sexist, a multinationalist or just plain mean. Economic justice requires a re-dealing of the dollars, income redistribution or spreading the wealth, where the ill-gotten gains of the few are returned to their rightful owners.

In a free society, for the most part, people with high incomes have demonstrated extraordinary ability to produce valuable services for — and therefore please — their fellow man. People voluntarily took money out of their pockets to purchase the products of Gates, Pfizer or IBM. High incomes reflect the democracy of the marketplace. The reason Gates is very wealthy is millions upon millions of people voluntarily reached into their pockets and handed over $300 or $400 for a Microsoft product. Those who think he has too much money are really registering disagreement with decisions made by millions of their fellow men."

—Walter Wiliams. “Should the Rich Be Condemned?” Syndicated column. November 23, 2011.

We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.

—Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941).

Humans naturally pursue status with ferocity: we all relentlessly, if unconsciously, try to raise our own standing by impressing peers, and naturally, if unconsciously, evaluate others in terms of their standing.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 109.

All known hunter-gatherer societies remain more or less egalitarian, not because their members lack the desire for higher status, but because none of them wants lower status and because they can act together to ensure that no one else establishes ascendancy...But in societies with agriculture, surpluses can be hoarded and disparities grow. Status differences can deepen to produce chiefdoms, kingdoms, and empires, until people slowly discover new routes to reverse dominance—riots, revolutions, represenentative government—in order to resist the steepest hierarchies.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 109.

I will provide you with a guide to the American inequality map...Academic inequality is socially acceptable...Ancestor inequality is not socially acceptable...Fitness inequality is acceptable...Moral fitness inequality is unacceptable...Church inequality is unacceptable...Income inequality is acceptable...Spending inequality is less acceptable...Technological inequality is acceptable...Cultural inequality is unacceptable...Status inequality is unacceptable...Travel inequality is acceptable...Supermarket inequality is unacceptable...

—David Brooks. “The Inequality Map.” The New York Times. November 10, 2011.

Job creators in America, basically, are on strike.

—John Boehner quoted in Harper’s Magazine (December 2011, page 8). This references Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Hellman disdained a system that made her fabulously rich while romanticizing one that made its citizens spectacularly poor.

—Michael Moynihan, reviewing the book, A Difficult Woman by Alice Kessler-Harris about the American communist, Stalinist, and writer Lillian Hellman. “When Stalinism Was in Vogue.” May 2, 2012. A13.

When everyone’s contribution is the same, the proportional outcome is equality. But in a free market system, where some work harder or are more talented or lucky, it will always be the case that some people make a greater contribution than others. They therefore end up taking home a larger share of the pie. Fairness as proportionality guaranteed that outcomes will not be equal. This, I believe, is one of the main reasons why modern leftists (but not classical liberals) are often hostile to capitalism itself, as were some at the OWS [Occupy Wall Street] protest.

—Jonathan Haidt. January 2012. “The Moral Foundations of Occupy Wall Street.” Reason magazine. Pages 33-39.

…egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

...if the protesters continue to focus on the gross inequality of outcomes in America, they will get nowhere. There is no equality foundation. Fairness means proportionality, and if Americans generally think that the rich got rich by working harder or by providing goods and services that were valued in a free market, then they won’t be angry, and they won’t support redistributionist policies. But if the OWS protesters can better articulate their case that the “1 percent” got its riches by cheating, rather than by providing something valuable, or that the 1 percent abuses its power and oppresses the 99 percent, then Occupy Wall Street will find itself standing on a very secure pair of moral foundations.

—Jonathan Haidt. January 2012. “The Moral Foundations of Occupy Wall Street.” Reason magazine. Pages 33-39.

Modern surveys confirm what Tocqueville sensed back then: Americans care much more about being able to move up the socioeconomic ladder than were we stand on it. We may be poor today, but as long as there’s a chance that we can be rich tomorrow, things are O.K.

—Rana Foroohar. “Whatever Happened To Upward Mobility?” Time magazine. November 14, 2011.

...for most people, it’s harder to get ahead than it’s ever been in the postwar era. Inequality in the U.S., always high compared with that in other developed countries, is rising. The 1% decried by OWS takes home 21% of the country’s income and accounts for 35% of its wealth.

—Rana Foroohar. “Whatever Happened To Upward Mobility?” Time magazine. November 14, 2011. Note: OWS stands for “Occupy Wall Street”, and the top 1% of America pays 39% of all income taxes (probably federal only, but maybe not), and the top 10% pay 66% of all income taxes.

Nor are we the world’s greatest opportunity society. The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project has found that if you were born in 1970 in the bottom one-fifth of the socioeconomic spectrum in the U.S., you had only about a 17% chance of making it into the upper two-fifths.

—Rana Foroohar. “Whatever Happened To Upward Mobility?” Time magazine. November 14, 2011.

Many conservatives, for example, would be inclined to focus on absolute mobility, which means the extent to which people are better off than their parents were at the same age. That’s a measure that focuses mostly on how much economic growth has occurred, and by that measure, the U.S. does fine. Two-thirds of 40-year-old Americans live in households with larger incomes, adjusted for inflation, than their parents had at the same age (though the gains are smaller than they were in the previous generation).

—Rana Foroohar. “Whatever Happened To Upward Mobility?” Time magazine. November 14, 2011.

…consider what we know from previous studies of trends in intergenerational income mobility. The bulk of the existing research shows either that mobility has increased over the long run or that it has changed little in either direction. That includes both studies that I know of examining changes in upward mobility from the bottom. It also includes six studies using measures of mobility not confined to movement up from the bottom; these find either no change or rising mobility. In contrast, only two papersfind a fall in mobility, each using non-directional measures. Notably, one of them shows an uptick in the mobility of the most recent two birth cohorts it examined, leaving in doubt the question of whether the longer-term decline it found would have persisted had the authors had more recent data. The other study finds somewhat mixed evidence, depending on the data source and whether children of single parents are included.

—Scott Winship. January 2, 2012. “The Presidents ’ Suspect Statistics.” National Review Online.

If it were learned that the car driven by the average American is 10 times more likely to burst into flames than the car driven by the 1%, what should the policy response be? Should it be to mandate that cars driven by the rick burst into flames more often?

…

Generalizing about the distribution of incomes is an academic specialty seemingly incapable of freeing itself from tendentiousness. Take a popular study by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two French-born researchers, claiming U.S. income inequality is higher than any time since the 1920’s.

Their result comes from choosing to look at income that leaves out transfers. Unlike the 1920’s, Americans today have the opportunity partly to live off Social Security and Medicare. They can decide to do without reportable income. Also left out of the calculation is the large share of compensation accounted for by untaxed health insurance.

…

For the record, so sensitive are the inequality generalizations to how you define income, and whether household size is taken into account, that the claimed shift toward greater inequality can be made easily to disappear, especially when consumption rather than income is measured.

—Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. April 18, 2012. “The Inequality Obsession.” The Wall Street Journal. A15.

Americans are much more likely than citizens of other nations to believe that they live in a meritocracy. But this self-image is a fantasy: as a report in The Times last week pointed out, America actually stands out as the advanced country in which it matters most who your parents were, the country in which those born on one of society’s lower rungs have the least chance of climbing to the top or even to the middle.

And if you ask why America is more class-bound in practice than the rest of the Western world, a large part of the reason is that our government falls down on the job of creating equal opportunity.

The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education.

Once they reach college age, those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to go to college — and vastly less likely to go to a top-tier school — than those luckier in their parentage. At the most selective, “Tier 1” schools, 74 percent of the entering class comes from the quarter of households that have the highest “socioeconomic status”; only 3 percent comes from the bottom quarter.

And if children from our society’s lower rungs do manage to make it into a good college, the lack of financial support makes them far more likely to drop out than the children of the affluent, even if they have as much or more native ability. One long-term study by the Department of Education found that students with high test scores but low-income parents were less likely to complete college than students with low scores but affluent parents — loosely speaking, that smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree.

—Paul Krugman. January 8, 2012. “America’s Unlevel Field.” The New York Times.

…There is in England an equality of taxation, where all stations of life pay. And one result is that where France is the home of impoverished peasants—hiding whatever surplus they might have in a year, lest it be taken in taxes—England is the home of the comfortable English yeoman, the farmer, the productive and free, who does not suffer that crushing burden of legal inequality and unjust taxation. England offers commerce an honorable status. In France the most important personage is the individual who awaits upon the king in the morning, holding his dressing-gown and knowing every moment the time of his next appearance. In England the merchant who sends his ships around the world, enriching, in Voltaire’s phrase, “his neighbors, nation, and mankind.” That is the person of honorable and respected status—as are men of letters and science, for this is a country that recognizes authentic utility.” In short, Voltaire’s letters from England…will celebrate the peacefulness and prosperity of a tolerant, secular, lawful, free, and commercial England.

—Alan Charles Kors. 2001. Voltaire and the Triumph of the Enlightenment. Lecture 4: Philosophical Letters, Part II.

...it is only the mob that seeks to reduce all humanity to one dead level, for it is only the mob that would gain by such leveling.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. December 24-25, 2011. C8.

From World War II until the 1970s, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population received about one-third of the nation’s income. Their share now is at least 50 percent, higher even than at the stock market peak in the 1920s. The top 1 percent alone receives over 20 percent of income and the top tenth of 1 percent receives 9 percent (compared to 2.5 percent during the 1970s). Wealth is even more concentrated. The top 1 percent of the population controls 35 percent of the wealth. The bottom 80 percent controls 13 percent (the bottom 40 percent less than 1 percent). Over the last fifty years wealth has shifted to the top 5 percent of the population; all groups below that have seen their shares decline.

—Barry Bennett. January / February, 2012. “Corporations or People?” The Humanist.

...even though the lower earners have a smaller share of income today than they did in 1990, their absolute income is higher. A smaller share of the larger national pie can still mean more income than the bigger slice of a smaller pie...The same Tax Foundation analysis showed that about 60 percent of household that were in the lowest income quintile in 1999 had moved to a higher quintile by 2007. About one-third of those in the lowest quintile moved to the middle quintile or higher. While it may be difficult to rise literally from rags to riches, there is still plenty of opportunity for Americans to climb up the income ladder...showed that two-thirds of 40-year-old Americans are in households with larger incomes than their parents had at the same age. That remains true even after controlling for the rising cost of living. And if anything, this finding understates the progress we have made. Household size has declined in recent decades meaning that incomes are now divided up between fewer family members, leaving each of them better off than the larger households of the past.

—reference lost...

...fewer people live today in the middle-class households with incomes between $35,000 and $105,000, while the percentage of households making less than $35,000 has remained the same. Where did the missing households go? They became richer. In the past three decades, the percentage of households making more than $105,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars doubled to 24% from 11%.

—Henry R. Nau. January 26, 2012. “Lessons From the Great Expansion.” The Wall Street Journal.

As long as the present trend towards increasing inequality lasts in America, and it is a trend that is increasing by all accounts, with shocking, alarming regularity, Marx remains valid as long as this trend continues. We cannot begin to fulfill the promise of our democratic ideal without addressing what Marx and Rousseau are both talking about, and that is the reality of inequality.

—Dennis Dalton. Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory. Lecture Ten: Marx’s Critique of Capitalism and the Solution of Communism. The Teaching Company. 1998.

If society were only relieved of the waste and expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social tables would contain an abundance for all…

—Emma Goldman in Anarchism and Other Essays.

men so often act in contradiction to their known interest; and in particular why they prefer any trivial advantage, that is present, to the maintenance of order in society, which so much depends on the observance of justice. The consequences of every breach of equity seem to lie very remote, and are not able to counter-ballance any immediate advantage, that may be reaped from it.

—Hume, David (2011-03-24). A Treatise of Human Nature (Kindle Locations 7763-7766). . Kindle Edition.

If the share of income coming from businesses, capital gains and dividends had remained at the levels before the tax rate changes of 1986, 1997 and 2003 respectively, the income of top 1% filers would have been 31% lower in 2007. The growth in income since 1979 for top 1% filers would have been only 2.5 times as large as the income growth of all taxpayers—not 3.6 times as large.

More businesses would have remained C-Corps and been taxed as corporations, fewer assets would have been sold and thus fewer capital gains would have been declared, and fewer dividends would have been paid. All of this would have lowered the income declared by the top 1%. Economic growth would have been lower and aggregate measured income of all taxpayers would have fallen, but the distribution of income would have been flatter.

…

Proposals to raise taxes on high-income Americans in the name of "fairness" not only threaten economic growth. The experience of nations with large governments shows that this argument is simply a red herring for a massive tax increase on middle-income Americans.

In the end, taxing is about feeding government, not redistributing wealth. What nation ever set off on the road to big government promising to tax middle-income workers, and what nation ever got big government without doing it?

—Phil Gramm and Steve McMillin. “The Real Causes of Income Inequality.” The Wall Street Journal. April 6, 2012. A13.

When intelligence and socio-economic background (SEB) are pitted against one another, intelligence is a more accurate predictor of future career success, he asserts. Although those from a wealthy family tended to start higher on the office totem pole with better entry-level wages, Prof. Gamzach’s research discovered a direct correlation between intelligence and an upward wage trajectory, defined as the rate at which an employee was rewarded with salary raises.

—Science Daily. April 5, 2012. “Intelligence is More Accurate Predictor of Future Career Success Than Socioeconomic Background, Study Suggests.”

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

—Bertrand Russell

According to a 2006 study, 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. This is a much higher rate than those of the allegedly class-stratified nations of Europe: Denmark’s level is only 25 percent, while terrible old Great Britain’s level is just 30 percent. Roughly 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth get to stay in the top two-fifths. Likewise, 65 percent of those born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths.

—Eric Alterman. June 11, 2012. “All the Media Money Can Buy.” The Nation.

I want to emphasize the importance of individual initiative in reducing poverty and promoting economic success. Young people can virtually assure that they and their families will avoid poverty if they follow three elementary rules for success—complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 and get married before having a baby. Based on an analysis of Census data, people who followed all three of these rules had only a 2% chance of being in poverty and a 72% chance of joining the middle class (defined as above $55,000 in 2010). These numbers were almost precisely reversed for people who violated all three rules, elevating their chance of being poor to 77% and reducing their chance of making the middle class to 4%.

Individual effort and good decisions about the big events in life are more important than government programs. Call it blaming the victim if you like, but decisions made by individuals are paramount in the fight to reduce poverty and increase opportunity in America. The nation's struggle to expand opportunity will continue to be an uphill battle if young people do not learn to make better decisions about their future.

—Ron Haskins testifying before the Senate Finance Committee on June 5, 2012. Quoted in The Wall Street Journal in Notable & Quotable on June 11, 2012 (A13).

He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well off as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favorable hearers.

—16^th century English Theologian Richard Hooker. From Will & Ariel Durant. 1961. The Age of Reason.

Social mobility is less easy in America than in other countries. For example, three-quarters of Danes born in the lowest-earning 20% of the population escape their plight in adulthood. Seven out of ten poor children in supposedly class-ridden Britain achieve the same feat. But fewer than six in ten Americans do so.

Similarly, with rags-to-riches stories. It is far less common for Americans from the bottom 20% in childhood to move into the top 20% in adulthood than it is in Denmark or in Britain. On the whole, America’s wealthy prosper while the average citizen struggles; the richest 1% of Americans gained 93% of the additional income created in 2010. The pay workers get has failed to move in line with productivity in the past 30 years. But Americans have yet to realise the extent of this tectonic shift. In a survey conducted in 2011 the average respondent thought that the richest fifth of the population had 60% of the wealth, not 85% as is the case. The respondents’ ideal income distribution would be

—The Economist. June 23, 2012. “An Ordinary Joe.” Page 84.

The study looked at mobility in two ways — “absolute” and “relative.” In terms of “absolute” mobility — whether families make more money in inflation-adjusted dollars than their parents — Americans are doing just fine. In all, 84 percent are earning more than their parents and half of them are accumulating greater wealth than their parents did at the same age, roughly in their 40s.

But the study showed that Americans in the past 40 years have had a harder time moving up and down between income classes — what the researchers called “relative mobility.” Forty-three percent of those raised by the bottom level of income earners were likely to be stuck there as adults, while 40 percent of the children from the highest-earning families were likely to remain high earners themselves.

—Gowen, Annie. July 9, 2012. “Most Americans earn more than parents, but only a third rise in income class, study says.” The Washington Post.

Putnam’s data verifies what many of us have seen anecdotally, that the children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in starkly different ways and have different opportunities. Decades ago, college-graduate parents and high-school-graduate parents invested similarly in their children. Recently, more affluent parents have invested much more in their children’s futures while less affluent parents have not.

They’ve invested more time. Over the past decades, college-educated parents have quadrupled the amount of time they spend reading “Goodnight Moon,” talking to their kids about their day and cheering them on from the sidelines. High-school-educated parents have increased child-care time, but only slightly.

…

It’s not only that richer kids have become more active. Poorer kids have become more pessimistic and detached. Social trust has fallen among all income groups, but, between 1975 and 1995, it plummeted among the poorest third of young Americans and has remained low ever since. As Putnam writes in notes prepared for the Aspen Ideas Festival: “It’s perfectly understandable that kids from working-class backgrounds have become cynical and even paranoid, for virtually all our major social institutions have failed them — family, friends, church, school and community.” As a result, poorer kids are less likely to participate in voluntary service work that might give them a sense of purpose and responsibility. Their test scores are lagging. Their opportunities are more limited.

—Brooks, David. July 9, 2012. “The Opportunity Gap.” The New York Times.

You wouldn't know this from President Obama's rhetoric, but our tax system, according to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), is incredibly progressive. Consider: The top 1% of income earners pay an average federal tax rate of 28.9%. (See the nearby table.) The average federal tax rate on the top 20% is 23.2%. The 20% of taxpayers earning between $50,100 and $73,999 pay an average 15.1%, and so on down the line. The CBO report includes payroll as well as income taxes paid.

There's also another way of looking at fairness, and that's the tax burden. Here, consider the top 20% of income earners (over $74,000). They make 50% of the nation's income but pay nearly 70% of all federal taxes.

The remaining 30% of the tax burden is borne by 80% of the taxpayers, those who make less than $74,000. In short, this group's share of taxes paid, 30%, is lower than the share of income they earn, 50%.

Yet President Obama says that "for some time now, when compared to the middle class," the wealthy "haven't been asked to do their fair share."

He's right that the system isn't fair, but not because the top 1% pay too little. It is because they pay too much.

—Fleischer, Ari. July 23, 2012. “The Latest News on Tax Fairness.” The Wall Street Journal. A13. The ‘federal” taxes here include both payroll and income taxes.

The Seris [a native ethnicity of Mexico that has preserved their traditional culture despite a population of only 650-1,000 people] maintain to this day a proud suspicion of outsiders—and a disdain for unshared individual wealth. “When the Seris become rich, they will cease to exist,” is a Seris saying. Having been nomadic, they tend to regard possessions as burdens. Traditionally, when a Seri died, he was buried with his few personal possessions. Nothing was passed down to relatives except stories, songs, legends, instructions.

—Rymer, Russ. July, 2012. “Vanishing Voices.” National Geographic magazine.

—Wessel, David. August 6, 2012. “The Numbers Inside a Hot-Button Issue.” The Wall Street Journal. A4.

—Blackhawk. 1955. The Autobiography of Black Hawk.

The study looked at tax returns for people with reported earnings of $50,000 or more from the year 2008 – the most recent year for which data was available. The report found that for people earning between $50,000 and $75,000, an average of 7.6 percent of discretionary income was donated to charity. For those earning $200,000 or more, just 4.2 percent of discretionary income was donated.

Turns out lower giving among the rich likely has much more to do with where they live and who they live near.

… when the rich are highly concentrated in wealthy enclaves, they're less likely to give as compared with the rich living in more economically diverse neighborhoods. The report found that in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of taxpayers reported earning $200,000 or more, the average giving was just 2.8 percent of discretionary income.

In other words, concentration of wealth is also isolation from the less fortunate.

—Berg, Nate. August 20, 2012. “Isolated and Under-Exposed: Why the Rich Don’t Give.” The Atlantic. Accessed August 22, 2012 at http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/08/isolated-and-under-exposed-why-rich-dont-give/3002/. This article cites the following study: Gose, Ben and Emily Gipple. August 19, 2012. “Rich Enclaves Are Not as Generous as the Wealthy Living Elsewhere.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Accessed August 22, 2012 at http://philanthropy.com/article/Rich-Enclaves-Are-Not-as/133595/.

During the whole range of life of commercial society, from the end of the Middle Ages to our day, the wealth of the rich merchant has been resented far more than the pomp of rulers.

—Jouvenel, de Bertrand. 1951. The Ethics of Redistribution.

—Weissmann, Jordan. September 19, 2012. “U.S. Income Inequality: It’s Worse Today Than It Was in 1774.” The Atlantic.com. Accessed September 19, 2012 at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/american-income-inequality-was-better-in-1774-than-it-is-today/262537/

Yes, the wealthy, most of whom got rich by risking capital and delivering something productive to the economy, tend to save more. But they don't shove it under the mattress, they invest it in the productive fabric of the economy. The president's rhetoric harps on the notion that millionaires and billionaires don't "need" the money from a tax cut. But think of it this way: They, like Henry Ford, have proven that they can invest the money productively—better than any government program—whether directly into companies or into stocks, private equity or venture capital that create long lasting jobs and expand the middle class.

Some would call this supply-side economics. President Obama on the campaign trail calls it "trickle-down snake oil," even "fairy dust." I like the term i-side economics—for investment and innovation and individual incentive—rather than g-side economics, as in "what has the government given me lately?"

Perversely, class warfare hurts the group it is alleged to help. For every dollar of stimulus or government spending paid for by the half of the population that pays taxes, you take away a dollar that might have been invested in creating higher-paying jobs. That's just dumb. Misallocating capital is a formula—a negative multiplier—for stagnation, not growth.

—Kessler, Andy. September 19, 2012. “The U.S. Needs More i-Side Economics.” The Wall Street Journal. A15.

President Obama says that "rebuilding a strong economy begins with rebuilding our middle class." He's got it backward. You can't grow an economy by paying teachers to eat at Denny's or overpaying workers on federal projects via the Davis-Bacon Act.

As in Henry Ford's day, it is workers' productivity that drives long-term wage gains, not workers' wages that drive growth. And almost always by selling something—a Model T or a Samsung Galaxy—cheaper than the current way of doing things.

With the right investment-side rather than handout policy, the economy will act like a coiled spring or a super ball—the rebound will be a huge bounce.

—Kessler, Andy. September 19, 2012. “The U.S. Needs More i-Side Economics.” The Wall Street Journal. A15.

Our recent study, "A New Measure of Consumption Inequality," found that the consumption gap across income groups has remained remarkably stable over time. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey, if you sort households according to their pretax income, in 2010 the bottom fifth accounted for 8.7% of overall consumption, the middle fifth for 17.1%, and the top fifth for about 38.6%. Go back 10 years to 2000—before two recessions, the Bush tax cuts, and continuing expansions of globalization and computerization—and the numbers are similar. The bottom fifth accounted for 8.9% of consumption, the middle fifth for 17.3%, and the top fifth for 37.3%.

While this stability is something to applaud, surely more important are the real gains in consumption by income groups over the past decade. From 2000 to 2010, consumption has climbed 14% for individuals in the bottom fifth of households, 6% for individuals in the middle fifth, and 14.3% for individuals in the top fifth when we account for changes in U.S. population and the size of households. This despite the dire economy at the end of the decade.

What about the standard of living over those years? The Department of Energy regularly surveys Americans and asks them to report on the characteristics of their homes, including the types of devices and appliances they have. If the standard left-wing narrative is correct, then a typical poor American would trade his current circumstances for those of the past in a heartbeat.

Yet the access of low-income Americans—those earning less than $20,000 in real 2009 dollars—to devices that are part of the "good life" has increased. The percentage of low-income households with a computer rose to 47.7% from 19.8% in 2001. The percentage of low-income homes with six or more rooms (excluding bathrooms) rose to 30% from 21.9% over the same period.

Appliances? The percentage of low-income homes with air-conditioning equipment rose to 83.5% from 65.8%, with dishwashers to 30.8% from 17.6%, with a washing machine to 62.4% from 57.2%, and with a clothes dryer to 56.5% from 44.9%.

The percentage of low-income households with microwave ovens grew to 92.4% from 74.9% between 2001 and 2009. Fully 75.5% of low-income Americans now have a cell phone, and over a quarter of those have access to the Internet through their phones.

We would hazard a guess that if you were to ask a typical low-income American in 2009 if he would like to trade his house for its 2001 version, he would tell you to take a hike. How then is he worse off in 2009?

The data suggest the following picture. Over time, Americans have constructed a vast safety net that has adequately served the poor and helped them—as well as the middle class—to maintain significant consumption growth despite the apparent stagnation of cash incomes. The notion that a society that has accomplished such a feat is rigged or fundamentally unjust is ludicrous.

It is true that the growth of the safety net has contributed to massive government deficits—and a larger government that likely undermines economic growth and job creation. It is an open question whether the nation will be able to reshape the net in order to sustain it, but reshape it we must. We might make significant progress in that regard if those on the left would stop seeking political gain by inflaming class hatreds with misleading statistics.

—Hassett, Kevin A. and Aparna Mathur. October 25, 2012. “Consumption and the Myths of Inequality.” The Wall Street Journal. A17.

Americans have an egalitarian approach to inequality: they want everyone to have an equal chance to become better-off than everyone else.

—Menand, Louis. December 17, 2012. “Today’s Assignment.” The New Yorker. The Talk of the Town.

…when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law–men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.

—Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged.

The Science, Philosophy, & Practice of Economics

There is no grand narrative, only little stories. But the need for grand narrative is so firmly ingrained in human thinking that the fruitless search for it will never end. This book is dedicated to those for whom a partial understanding of complex reality is better than the reassurance of false universal explanations.
—John Kay, last remark in Culture and Prosperity

All models are false but some are useful.

—George Box

I think there is a lot of peer-pressure in the academic community.

In his Mathematical Psychics, published in 1881, Edgeworth asserted that "the first principle of Economics is that every agent is actuated only by self-interest."' This view of man has been a persistent one in economic models, and the nature of economic theory seems to have been much influenced by this basic premise. In this essay I would like to examine some of the problems that have arisen from this conception of human beings.

I should mention that Edgeworth himself was quite aware that this so-called first principle of Economics was not a particularly realistic one. Indeed, he felt that "the concrete nineteenth century man is for the most part an impure egoist, a mixed utilitarian." This raises the interesting question as to why Edgeworth spent so much of his time and talent in developing a line of inquiry the first principle of which he believed to be false. The issue is not why abstractions should be employed in pursuing general economic questions—the nature of the inquiry makes this inevitable—but why would one choose an assumption which he himself believed to be not merely inaccurate in detail but fundamentally mistaken?

—Sen, Amartya K. 1977. “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory.” Philosophy and Public Affairs. 6(4):317-344.

Neoclassical economics consists of a highly idiosyncratic, protective, restrictive, lock-step methodology that, surprisingly, leaves its practitioners free to believe almost (but not quite) anything. The methodology studies intensively a narrow range of facts which it mercilessly pre- selects. It is an only partly scientific methodology without an at- tached ideology.

—Wiles, Peter. 1979-1980. “Ideology, Methodology, and Neoclassical Economics.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. 2(2):155-180.

The economic approach isn’t meant to describe the world as any one of us might want it to be, or fear that it is, or pray that it becomes – but rather to explain what actually is. Most of us want to fix or change the world in some fashion. But to change the world, you first have to understand it.

— Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in SuperFreakonomics (2009)

You need a story to replace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciples, my best tool is a narrative. Ideas come and go; stories say.
—Nasim Taleb, page xxxi in The Black Swam

...successions of anecdotes selected to fit a story do not constitute evidence.
—Nasim Taleb, page xxxii in The Black Swam

We can get no light upon the subject unless we begin with the clear perception that the object of social effort is the realization of ends to which human beings can reasonably attach value, that is to say, the realization of ethical ends.

—Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse in Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911, page 11). The Columbia University Press.

Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
—Thomas Huxley

What economics is good for, besides preventing really bad decisions and dumb policies, is providing a language and framework for thinking about complex matters in an organized and rigorous way . . .

— Russell Roberts in EconTalk (2009).

He also thought that Quesnay’s claims that the system of circular flow worked on mathematical principles were unjustified, and possibly dangerously mechanistic—questions of price and value were regulated by ‘higgling and barbaining’, not mathematical necessity.

— Nicholas Phillipson remarking on Adam Smith in Adam Smith, page 206.

The true task of economics appears to me to be quite different, especially in a modern mass democracy. Its unglamorous but all the more useful mission is to make the logic of things heard in the midst of the passions and interests of public life, to bring to light inconvenient facts and relationships, to weigh everything and assign it due place, to prick bubbles and expose illusions and confusions, and to counter political enthusiasm and its possible aberrations with economic reason and demagogy with truth.

—Wilhelm Ropke in A Humane Economy (1957).

People, and especially political people, are rarely grateful to be taught their limits. That is why economics is called the dismal science.
—Kip Esquires

If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia.
—Tyler Cowen

Writers are trained to create stories. Scientists are trained to create logical, thoughtful, and empirically consistent explanations. That explains why bestselling non-fiction are rarely authored by scientists.

—F. Bailey Norwood

No one has ever made rational sense of the wild gyrations in financial prices, such as stock prices...Over the years economists have tried to give a convincing explanation for aggregate stock price movements in terms of economic fundamentals. But no one has ever succeeded. They do not appear to be explicable by changes in interest rates, by subsequent dividends or earnings, or by anything else.

—Akerlof and Shiller in Animal Spirits.

There are macroeconomic questions, but only microeconomics answers.
—Steven Horwitz, Austrian Seminar Podcast: Monetary Equilibrium. 9/9/08

Taking three o the standard graduation courses in econometrics (as I for example did) produces usually not an economist thinking but an idiot savant trained to follow erroneous rules of inference.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 39.

Economic analysis cherishes the illusion that one good reason should be enough, but the determinants of complex processes are invariably plural and interrelated.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 39.

One can’t just drop the Sacred and Sociology (the S variables) in favor of an exclusive focus on the Profane and Profit and Price (P variables). That’s what economics has tried to do since Jeremy Bentham—with some successes and a lot of silliness. To do the science right you have to control for all the variables, not just pray that the S variables won’t interfere in a way correlated with the error term.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 39.

—Wilhelm Ropke. 1957. A Humane Economy.

[M]y life as an economist has been the source of much pleasure and satisfaction. It’s a fascinating discipline. What makes it most fascinating is that its fundamental principles are so simple that they can be written on one page, that anybody can understand them, and yet that very few do.

—Milton Friedman. 1985. “My Evolution as an Economist.” Lives of Laureates.

Public Goods and Externalities

“These folks talk about a free market,” says one education expert, “but they couldn’t exist without taxpayer dollars.”

—Stephanie Mencimer. “No Child Left Offline.” Mother Jones. November/December, 2011. Pages 43-46.

Public transit cutting routes and upping fares? Parks shuttering Little League fields? Bridges going unmaintained until they fall into rivers? Firefighters letting homes burn because the owner hasn’t paid a $75 fee? Cops watching a man drown because they can no longer afford water-rescue training? (Those last two? Really happened.) Do this long enough, and pretty soon the snake starts eating its own tail: We underfund public services, therefore public services don’t work, therefore we underfund them.

—Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffrey. “The Job Killers: Why are Republicans determined to snuff the recover?” Mother Jones. November/December, 2011. Pages 20-22.

Economics 101 tells us that an industry imposing large costs on third parties should be required to “internalize” those costs — that is, to pay for the damage it inflicts, treating that damage as a cost of production. Fracking might still be worth doing given those costs. But no industry should be held harmless from its impacts on the environment and the nation’s infrastructure.

—Paul Krugman. “Here Comes the Sun.” New York Times editorial. 11/6/2011.

The number of cases where economists have argued that the market is imperfect and therefore recommended that government should deal with the problem is very large. The British economist A.C. Pigou and the American Professor Paul Samuelson both made this error. They assumed that government reaches a perfect solution. No one really believes this, but economists frequently recommend government action simply because the private market creates externalities, and hence is not likely to function perfectly.

—Tullock, Gordon. 1976. The Vote Motive. Page 10.

In principle, none of capitalism’s problems is insurmountable, and economists have offered a variety of market-based solutions. A high global price for carbon would induce firms and individuals to internalize the cost of their polluting activities. Tax systems can be designed to provide a greater measure of redistribution of income without necessarily involving crippling distortions, by minimizing non-transparent tax expenditures and keeping marginal rates low. Effective pricing of health care, including the pricing of waiting times, could encourage a better balance between equality and efficiency. Financial systems could be better regulated, with stricter attention to excessive accumulations of debt.

—Kenneth Rogoff. “Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable ?” Project Syndicate. December 2, 2011.

The government’s other defense is that the health-care market does not exhibit textbook competition. No market does. The economic features relied upon by the government—externalities, imperfect competition, geographically distinct market, etc.—are characteristic of many markets.

—Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Vernon Smith. March 20, 2012. “Obamacare’s Flawed Economic Foundations.” The Wall Street Journal.

If the State wished to oversee individuals in all the operations through which they might potentially harm each other, this would amount to restricting almost all freedom of action. Once having set itself up as the citizens’ guardian, it would soon become their tyrant.

—Benjamin Constant. 1815. Principles of Politics Applicable to All Government. Page 230.

In our time of austerity, policy makers are reducing spending across the board. This makes it especially vital that the money we do spend achieves as much as possible. Cost-benefit analysis can seem cold—a hard-nosed, money-focused, GDP-is-God approach. But a world of scarce and competing resources requires it, and proper cost-benefit analysis encompasses much more than simple economic costs.

—Bjorn Lomborg in The Wall Street Journal. “An Economic Approach to the Environment.”

The destructive “grow or die” imperative of our market-driven system cannot be wished or regulated away. In addition to the overriding issue of global warming, countless studies have documented that limits to growth in such areas as energy, minerals, water and arable land (among others) are fast being reached. The energy corporations are desperately trying to crash through these limits with technological fixes such as fracking, tar sands exploitation and deep-water drilling, which are equally or more environmentally costly than traditional methods.

—Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna. May 22, 2012. “Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not so Wild a Dream.” The Nation.

And, again, even when private corporations are managed more efficiently than public ones, the massive economic costs they can impose on society make internal efficiency look trivial compared with the waste caused by economic recession, healthcare irrationalities, and the truly extraordinary costs associated with unrestricted growth that damages the environment and causes climate change.

—Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna. May 22, 2012. “Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not so Wild a Dream.” The Nation.

A public space is not an unowned space, but one in which the many spheres of ownership come to a negotiated boundary.

—Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Page 135.

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature.

Dear Mr. Ross:

In your segment “What happened to global warming being a hoax?” – aired during today’s 1pm hour on Washington, DC’s, WTOP radio – you played a clip of U.C.-Berkeley scientist Richard Muller saying that “all of this warming over the last 250, 260 years has been caused by green house gases emitted by humans.”

Being no physical scientist myself, I accept Mr. Muller’s claim. But contrary to most people’s reaction to this news, my reaction is “What a deal!”

In exchange for slightly warmer global temperatures, humanity gets off-the-charts benefits never before enjoyed by ordinary men and women – benefits that began to flow only 250, 260 years ago. In industrialized countries, these benefits include a near-tripling of life-expectancy; a growth in average real per-capita income to a level at least 30 times higher than it was a mere three centuries ago; an end to famine and plagues; abolition of the multi-millennial-old institution of slavery; widespread literacy; and an unprecedented expansion in women’s rights and opportunities – all these wonders, and more, from bourgeois commerce and industry powered in part by fossil fuels. Has humanity ever gotten so much at such a puny price?

Asked differently, who among us would choose to exchange modernity and its stupendous prosperity for whatever reduction in global temperature we’d enjoy had all the greenhouse gasses emitted over the past 250, 260 years never been released?

P.S. None of the above suggests that, at the margin, reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t desirable. They might or might not be, depending on the attendant costs and benefits. But historical perspective – which is utterly lacking amidst popular and media commentary on this question – is necessary. If the choice were between, on the one hand, all the commerce and industry and its attendant greenhouse-gas emissions over the past 250, 260 years, and, on the other hand, none of that industry and (hence) no industry-released greenhouse gasses over the past 250, 260 years, how many rational people would choose the latter?

—Boudreaux, Donald J. August 10, 2012. “Open Letter to CBS News Radio Commentator Dave Ross.” Posted at the Café Hayek website.

—Blackhawk. 1955. The Autobiography of Black Hawk.

"Carson's particular genius was in making science come so alive that the reader did not think of it as science," notes Mr. Souder. "Silent Spring" was only one of many such polemics, but it is the one that got read. This is an important point. All sorts of people were warning of potential dangers of synthetic chemicals, the science of which was only vaguely understood at the time. Six months before "Silent Spring," Knopf published "Our Synthetic Environment," about chemical toxicity in food and the environment. It sank like a rock.

…

But did Carson's message sink in? Yes and no. Pesticide use hasn't gone down. Today we use 5.1 billion pounds of it annually, compared with 637 million pounds in 1960, according to the EPA. But the chemicals are regulated to be safer and more specifically targeted, and they are arguably used with more care. And the pesticide-free organic foods movement is flourishing.

—Sterba, James P. September 1-2, 2012. “How Nature Made a Comeback.” The Wall Street Journal. C5. Review of book about Rachel Carson called, Silent Spring at 50.

The health of American children, like their education, should be recognized as a definite public responsibility.

—Harry Truman, quoted in: Lepore, Jill. September 24, 2012. “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business.” The New Yorker.

Regulation: Safety and Quality Standards

Food-related scandals, often exacerbated by official negligence or corruption, can cause major political embarrassment in China. In the approach to the Olympic games in Beijing in August 2008, the leadership's efforts to create an image of a safe and hygienic China led to the suppression of news about a widespread contamination of milk products with melamine, a chemical that can be toxic. By the time the central government admitted the problem in September that year, tends of thousands of babies had been affected and several had died.

Public anger over the incident hastened the passing of a food-safety law in 2009 which was intended to tighten standards, improve supervision and impose tougher penalties on violators. It appears to have done no more to alleviate public anxiety than did the execution in 2007 of a former head of the State Food and Drug Administration for taking bribes to certify products as safe.

—The Economist. “Food Safety in China: In the gutter.” October 28, 2011. Page 49.

Does China do capitalism better than the U.S.? We have to add one adjective. China does do a certain type of capitalism better than the U.S.: crony-capitalism. And I don’t think Americans want to excel in that category. Because in China, under that category of capitalism you’re not going to get clean air to breathe. You’re afraid to buy baby formula, because crony-capitalism cannot buy food safety. And if you are part of the elite, crony-capitalism serves you really well. Because…elites in China are now installing air filtering systems in their cars, in their homes—but what about ordinary people?

—Intelligence Squared Podcast. March 20, 2012. “Does China Do Capitalism Better Than America?” National Public Radio.

Denmark has banned Marmite, Rice Krispies, and Ovaltine, among other popular foods. The foods were banned because they have added vitamins or minerals, which are illegal in Denmark.

—Charles Oliver. January 2012. Reason magazine. Page 15.

For the last four years, Wesley Wood has supplemented his Social Security income by selling vegetables he grows from the front yard of his Parma, Ohio, home. But city officials have shut him down. The city's code says vegetables can be grown only for private use and any home business must be conducted "wholly within the dwelling."

—Charles Oliver. January 2012. Reason magazine. Page 15.

Neither Columbus nor Lewis and Clark would have imagined demanding 99.999 percent safety assurances as a precondition for their expeditions.

—Robert Zubrin. February, 2012. “How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth?”

Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. Examples range from the merely annoying to the delusional. Far from preventing abuses, complexity creates loopholes that the shrewd can abuse with impunity.

The other force that makes American laws complex is lobbying. The government’s drive to micromanage so many activities creates a huge incentive for interest groups to push for special favors. When a bill is hundreds of pages long, it is not hard for congressmen to slip in clauses that benefit their chums and campaign donors.

—The Economist. February 18, 2012. “Over-Regulated America.” Page 9.

We are worried we will have less money to spend. Of course, if we work less overtime, it would mean less money…We have just been told that we can only work a maximum of 36 hours a month of overtime. I tell you, a lot of us are unhappy with this. We think that 60 hours of overtime a month would be reasonable and that 36 hours would be too little.

—Chinese workers Wu Jun when she heard her employer (Foxconn) conceded to critics demands to cut overtime to its Chinese workers, even though they promised to keep compensation unchanged—a promise the employees thought dubious. Reuters. March 30, 2012. “Apple Supplier Foxconn cuts working hours, workers ask why.”

Regulation: Other

A friend and I met up at a new bookstore and café in the centre of town, which has only been open for a month. The establishment is in the center of an area filled with bars, and the owner decided the neighborhood could use a place for people to convene and talk without having to drink alcohol and listen to loud music. After we sat down, we asked the waitress for a coffee. She thanked us for our order and immediately turned and walked out the front door. My friend explained that the owner of the bookstore/café couldn’t get a license to provide coffee. She had tried to just buy a coffee machine and give the coffee away for free, thinking that lingering patrons would boost book sales. However, giving away coffee was illegal as well. Instead, the owner had to strike a deal with a bar across the street, whereby they make the coffee and the waitress spends all day shuttling between the bar and the bookstore/café. My friend also explained to me that books could not be purchased at the bookstore, as it was after 18h and it is illegal to sell books in Greece beyond that hour. I was in a bookstore/café that could neither sell books nor make coffee.

—Megan Green. Senior Economist at Roubini Global Economics. February 27, 2011.

The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating.
—Milton Friedman

There is no, nor has there ever been, any Republican position that is for no regulations. We are for [common-sense] regulations and always have been. What common-sense means is clear and uniform and predictably enforced. What Dodd-Frank does is it gives the authorities [discretion], which always results in regulatory-capture. Madoff was regulated.

—Mary Matalin on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. May 14, 2012.

With all the restaurants and the building entrances and the crosswalks and the subway and even the school in mid-town, it’s already very difficult to find a spot—but it gets worse. Recently, New York City started to selectively enforce an old law on the books that outlaws vending of merchandise from a metered spot, and that’s basically everywhere in Manhattan.

“Strictly speaking, following all the laws and regulatory constraints that are currently enforced at this moment, there really is not any place for a food truck to park.”

Which is crazy, right? The City of New York gives out 3,000 year-round permits for food trucks, but it has such a mess of laws that to use that permit on a truck, functionally means wherever you go, you are breaking the law.

—Planet Money podcast. May 8, 2012. “How To Make It In the Food Truck Business.” National Public Radio.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

Behavioral Economics and Paternalism

One night after , walking out on the terrace, the lights of Berkeley below, those of San Francisco aglow in the distance, they decided on the name—the Index of Irrational Expectations. Later, much developed and refined as to technique, it would be known and gain fame as IRAT.

—John Kenneth Galbraith in A Tenured Professor (1990), page 50.

*******As the book progresses, the main character in Galbraith’s story earns a tremendous wealth by predicting the irrationality of wonders. But would an IRAT really profit from human irrationality? Consider the following excerpt, from a non-fiction work*******

An entrepreneur with the insights of behavioral economics should be in a good position to profit from the mistakes we apparently make. Thus, it might not be a surprise to learn that Richard Thaler, one of the pioneers of behavioral economics, is a partner in the asset management company, Fuller & Thaler. The company makes investments based on the premise that, ―Investors make mental mistakes that can cause stocks to be mispriced. Fuller & Thaler‘s objective is to use our understanding of human decision making to find these mispriced stocks and earn superior returns.‖20 Note that this is the same Thaler who co-authored Nudge, which argues for regulators to use decision making biases to improve society‘s welfare. So, it is a little unclear whether Thaler believes our decision making problems represent an opportunity for him to extract money from us or and opportunity for him to improve our lives, but at least we know he‘s confident we can‘t choose well.

What do the data say? The returns associated with Fuller & Thaler‘s investments are proprietary, but we can take a look at J.P. Morgan‘s ―Undiscovered Managers Behavioral Growth Fund‖ (ticker symbol: UBRLX), for which Fuller & Thaler serve as sole advisors. In the last 10 year period, you would have been better off simply putting your money in the broad-based Russell 2500 growth index fund than the behavioral economists‘ fund (return of +0.47% vs. -0.44%). Such poor performance led an analyst writing for MorningStar to conclude that this mutual fund‘s distinctive approach may not be enough.

—Jayson Lusk in Food Police, working draft, forthcoming.

...For many years he has been questioning the size of the “equity premium”—the amount by which the return on common stock (equity) exceeds the return on bonds (debt). He believes that people exaggerate the riskiness of equities.

They should invest more of their savings, including their retirement savings, in common stock, since, as he noted in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper in 1993, college and university “faculty who had allocated all of their [retirement] funds to stock would have done better in virtually every time period, usually by a large margin,” and “those [who invest] in all-stock portfolios often do better by very large amounts” than investors in portfolios that contain debt as well as equities.

It has been his constant theme. For example, in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 1997 he called “the case for equities compelling” and said that “myopic loss aversion”—investors’ failure to aggregate returns over time (where they would see losses offset by gains)—prevents people from investing as much as they should in equities.

Invest all your money in stocks? People who followed that advice—advice based on the kind of myopia that bases predictions about the future on naive extrapolation from the past—find themselves in deep trouble.

Behavioral economists are right to point to the limitations of human cognition. But if they have the same cognitive limitations as consumers, should they be designing systems of consumer protection?

—Richard A. Posner. Wall Street Journal editorial. July 23, 2009. A12.

As Copernicus removed the earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological perch, Mr. Kahneman has shown that we are not the paragons of reason we assume ourselves to be.

—The Economist. “Human Decision-Making: No so smart now.” October 28, 2011. Page 98. Review of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

One learns more talking to the ignorant people about their own affairs, than in addressing oneself to the experts, who have nothing but theories, and who would be ashamed not to reply with ridiculous assertions on things about which they have no real knowledge. How I pity them, these poor experts! They never dare pronounce these three words, I don't know, which are so useful to the rest of us ignorant people, and which sometimes prevents us making dangerous decisions: for, if in doubt, it's better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing.
—Catherine the Great, from Catherine the Great by Virginia Rounding, Chapter 18, page 427.

It is a curious anomaly. State power has an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or honestly; yet when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any exercise of social power, the aid of the agent least qualified to give aid is immediately called for. Does social power mismanage banking-practice in this-or-that special instance — then let the State, which never has shown itself able to keep its own finances from sinking promptly into the slough of misfeasance, wastefulness and corruption, intervene to “supervise” or “regulate” the whole body of banking-practice, or even take it over entire.

—Albert Jay Nock. 1935. Our Enemy, The State.

Today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself. We see how silly the Ronald Reagan slogan was that government is the problem, not the solution...I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of his own ideas.

—Paul Samuelson (2009), as quoted in Mark J. Perry and Robert Dell in “How the Government Failure Caused the Great Recession,” The American, December 22, 2010.

I am often asked, "doesn't the financial crisis mean we need more regulation?" It's one of those maddening questions, because the answer is "that's the wrong question," which gets you nowhere.

For regulation is not "more" or "less," something you just pour into a cup until you've had enough like a good beer. Regulation is most of all "smart" or "dumb." Dumb regulations produce the opposite of their intended effects, have all sorts of unintended consequences, or get used for fully intended but pernicious consequences like driving out competition. Smart regulations don't.

The main lesson of the financial crisis is not that we did not have "enough" regulations — we had hundreds of thousands of pages of regulation. The lesson of the financial crisis is that most of those were "dumb" regulations. Their massive unintended consequences led to a fragile financial structure. Yes, we need financial regulation, but "smarter," not necessarily "more."

—John Cochrane. January 2, 2012. “Three Kinds of Regulation.” The Grumpy Economist.

THESE are thrilling days for behavioural research. Every week seems to yield a new discovery about how bad people are at making decisions. Humans, it turns out, are impressionable, emotional and irrational. We buy things we don’t need, often at arbitrary prices and for silly reasons. Studies show that when a store plays soothing music, shoppers will linger for longer and often spend more. If customers are in a good mood, they are more susceptible to persuasion. We believe price tends to indicate the value of things, not the other way around. And many people will squander valuable time to get something free.

—The Economist. Retail Therapy: How Ernest Dichtre, an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, revolutionised marketing. December 17, 2011. Begins page 119.

Self-control and the ability to regulate your emotions really is an indispensable aspect of the function of the brain that allows us to succeed…The new study shows it’s possible to identify people who have inherited a susceptibility to these sorts of problems…And it should help researchers figure out how to help susceptible people strengthen their self-control…Predetermination is not predestination.

—Jon Hamilton quoting Karen Ernsche. February 3, 2012. “Addicts’ Brains May Be Wired At Birth For Less Self-Control.” NPR.

If you look at the traits that predict success in almost anything—in school, at work, in your family, staying out of jail—the two things are intelligence and self-control. Psychologists still haven’t figured out much to do about intelligence, but they have rediscovered how to improve self-control.

—John Tierney, interviewed by Katherine Mangu-Ward in Reason, “Triumph of the Willpower,” March, 2012.

In one of his first experiments there, he studied the relationship between attitudes and behavior by seeing whether he could get children at a local school to like brown bread, which they avoided. He put half the kids through a weekend intervention in which they got a reward for saying they like brown bread. The other students simply listened to a presentation of images of different foods along with a voice-over of Bem saying, when a picture of brown bread appeared on a screen, “You like brown bread.”

To Bem’s surprise, both groups increased their consumption of brown bread, and by a similar amount, the following week.

—Yudhijit Bhattacharjee. March, 2012. “Paranormal Psychologist.” Discover magazine. An article about the psychologist Daryl Bem.

“You would be amazed to find how often we mislead ourselves, regardless of how smart we think we are, when we attempt to explain why we are behaving the way we do,” Dichter observed in 1960, in his book “The Strategy of Desire”. He held that marketplace decisions are driven by emotions and subconscious whims and fears, and often have little to do with the product itself. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Dichter saw human motivation as an “iceberg”, with two-thirds hidden from view, even to the decision-maker. “What people actually spend their money on in most instances are psychological differences, illusory brand images,” he explained.

—The Economist. Retail Therapy: How Ernest Dichtre, an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, revolutionised marketing. December 17, 2011. Begins page 119.

But these surveys were ultimately slapdash and speculative. Businesses were recognising the limits of quantitative studies (dismissively described as “nose counting”), which offered little genuine insight into how customers behaved. Asking shoppers why they bought particular products was like “asking people why they thought they were neurotic,” quipped Dichter.

—The Economist. Retail Therapy: How Ernest Dichtre, an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, revolutionised marketing. December 17, 2011. Begins page 119.

In fact, he believed, most people have no idea why they buy things. They might answer questions in an effort to be helpful (particularly in the early 20th century, when consumers were chuffed to be asked to share their thoughts). But these were attempts to make sense of decisions retrospectively. To understand what truly motivated people, Dichter said, it was necessary to get them to talk at length about their everyday habits. Instead of subjecting many people to quick questionnaires, he preferred a deep, psychoanalytical approach with fewer participants: “If you let somebody talk long enough, you can read between the lines to find out what he really means.”

—The Economist. Retail Therapy: How Ernest Dichtre, an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, revolutionised marketing. December 17, 2011. Begins page 119.

Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one. But as soon as mankind have attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion (a period long since reached in all nations with whom we need here concern ourselves), compulsion, either in the direct form or in that of pains and penalties for non-compliance, is no longer admissible as a means to their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others.

—Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. 1858.

I know, I know: People should be able to eat whatever they want, and government officials have no business passing nanny-state rules that meddle in basic notions of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, blah, blah, blah.

If only it were that simple. The harsh reality is that millions of Americans can't be trusted to look after their own well-being, and the rest of society gets stuck with the tab for soaring rates of diabetes, heart disease, strokes, cancer and other serious ailments.

—David Lazarus. May 14, 2012. Los Angeles Times. “It’s time to serve up some big incentives to curb obesity.”

The deeper story is that JC Penney is part of a backlash against the most tried-and-true pricing strategy in the business: the ubiquitous discount. Is Johnson crazy for abandoning daily deals, or are we, the consumers, crazy for falling for them?

…

"Consumers don't know what anything should cost," William Poundstone writes in Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value. "They walk the supermarket aisles in a half-conscious daze, judging prices from cues, helpful and otherwise." The rational customer is a myth. We're more likely to pay more attention to objects on our right. More likely to gravitate to the number 9. More likely to buy cheap indulgences at the check-out. What's wrong with us?

It's not that we're idiots so much as we're lazy. Choosing anything is hard work, and our brains don't like to work that hard. As a result, we are attracted to simple answers to our difficult questions. This is the foundation of most biases, and it's true for shopping. Which of these similar shirts gives me the best value? That's a ridiculously hard question. What shirt will I get the best deal on? That's easy: It's the one that says "25% OFF", probably. Discounts make shopping simple -- not just on our wallets, but also on our brains.
…
It's no wonder bargains can become addictions. They give us a sense of accomplishment. They make us feel smart and frugal. For experiential shoppers, they punctuate the shopping landscape like road signs. For time-oriented shoppers, they save time.

—Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. 1858.

Russ: You do want to nudge people a little bit toward what you think your version of the good life is.

Guest: I want to nudge people. I mean, people are being nudged the whole time. They are hardly aware of it. A lot of people talk about how you mustn't interfere with anyone's liberty to do this, that, or the other; and anything like that would be coercive, and yet they ignore the fact that the state already interferes in all kinds of ways. Even the American state does. What about the security state? The fact that more and more people are under surveillance? The fact that more and more goods are being prevented: there are lots of curbs on advertising, all kinds of things, on the grounds that the state believes that they are harmful. We're not allowed to indulge our free choice in pornography. The state already does do this. It already in certain areas does try to nudge people away from harm. We are suggesting that the nudging also include nudging them towards the good. Always starting from the principle that there's enough agreement that this should be done.

The first and last rule of prices is that nobody knows what anything is really worth. Shoppers are guided by shallow clues ("this is cheaper than that") and latent emotions ("it just feels like a good deal") rather than knowledge and deliberate thinking. Smart shopping might be an oxymoron. But smarter shopping? That's a noble goal.

—Thompson, Derek. November 21, 2012. “11 Simple Economic Lessons to Make You a Smarter Shopper on Black Friday.” The Atlantic. Accessed November 26, 2012 at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/11-simple-economic-lessons-to-make-you-a-smarter-shopper-on-black-friday/265449/.

Law and Governance

Political institutions are necessary and cannot be taken for granted. A market economy and high levels of wealth don’t magically appear when you “get government out of the way”; they rest on a hidden institutional foundation of property rights, rule of law, and basic political order.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY. Page 13.

How much more broadly the norm of appropriate actions extends than the rule of law!

—Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (4 BC –65 AD). On Anger. From Anger, Mercy, Revenge. 2010. The University of Chicago Press. Translated by Robert A. Kaster.

I have to convince people that there’s a fact that needs to be explained—namely, that violence has declined. And it has, as I demonstrate with 100 graphs and data sets. The reasons, I think, are multiple. One of them is the spread of government, the outsourcing of revenge to a more or less disinterested third party. That tends to ramp down your rates of vendetta and blood feud for all the reasons that we’re familiar with from The Sopranos and The Godfather....the next transition, after you have the government preventing people from committing violence against each other, you now have the problem of preventing the government from committing violence against its own peoples. And that was, basically, the advent of democracy and the various reforms of the Enlightenment.
—Steven Pinker in an interview with Ronald Bailey, answering the question of why violence has declined throughout history. February, 2012. “The Decline of Violence.” Reason magazine.

Pugachev: You’re gonna have my head, aren’t you?

Empress Catherine: I don’t know.

Pugachev: You’d be wise to, because if you don’t, I will have yours.

Empress Catherine: Is that what you do? If I kept you here or exiled you, you’d have my head? Why?

Pugachev: Is it right, that human souls should be bought and sold like animals?

Empress Catherine: No.

Pugachev: Is it right that millions should starve, so their masters could grow fat?

Empress Catherine: No.

Pugachev: Isn’t what you call your empire an abomination?

Empress Catherine: And what would you put in its place? You kill. You burn. You destroy. But what would you put in its place? What would you build?

Pugachev: Man is born equal, but is everywhere in chains.

Empress Catherine: Rousseau.

Pugachev: I don’t know who said it, lady, but it is God’s word. You ask me what I would build, I will tell you. I would build a new world where every man is free, where all men were equal, that’s what I would build.

Empress Catherine: On the ruins of the old?

Pugachev: To build a house you must first level the ground.

Empress Catherine: Oh no, you lay foundations.

—Lines from movie Catherine the Great (2000). A&E.

…the first system of compulsory state health insurance and old age pensions was introduced not in Britain but in Germany…Nor was it a creation of the left; rather the opposite. The aim of Otto von Bismarck’s social insurance legislation, as he himself put it in 1880, was to ‘engender in the great mass of the unpropertied the conservative state of mind that springs from the feeling of entitlement to a pension…A man who has a pension for his old age is…much easier to deal with than a man without that prospect…Whoever embraces this idea will come to power.’

—Niall Ferguson in The Ascent of Money (2008) page 199.

When each at least unto himself shall waken.

Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest’s thrill?

I cannot tell—but it the earth shall see!

I am an anarchist! Wherefore I will

Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!

—John Henry Mackay

[T]he essense of an effective constitution is that it is built on mistrust, not on faith.

—W. H. Hutt. 1966. “Fragile Constitutions.” New Individualist Review.

“ROPER: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

…

“MORE: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

…

“ROPER: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

…

“MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down (and you’re just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

. —Bolt, Robert. A Man For All Seasons. A play about Saint Thomas Moore.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 3: The Heroic Age. Page 135-6.

The notion that men lived originally in a state of nature, by violence and without laws, is due to Critias. Communism in its grossest form was recommended by Diogenes of Sinope.

—John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) in The History of Freedom in Antiquity.

The ancient writers saw very clearly that each principle of government standing alone is carried to excess and provokes a reaction. Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers. They therefore imagined that to restrain each element by combining it with the others would avert the natural process of self-destruction, and endow the State with perpetual youth.

—John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) in The History of Freedom in Antiquity.

You can cram all the nongovernmental organizations you want into a country, but if there is no rule of law and if the ruling class is predatory then your achievements won’t add up to much.

Furthermore, important issues always spark disagreement. Unless there is a healthy political process to resolve disputes, the ensuing hatred and conflict will destroy everything the altruists are trying to build.

There’s little social progress without political progress. Unfortunately, many of today’s young activists are really good at thinking locally and globally, but not as good at thinking nationally and regionally.

—David Brooks. April 12, 2012. “Sam Spade at Starbucks.” The New York Times.

Equality could be preserved only by Federalism; and it occurs more often amongst them than in the modern world. If the distribution of power among the several parts of the State is the most efficient restraint on monarchy, the distribution of power among several States is the best check on democracy. By multiplying centres of government and discussion it promotes the diffusion of political knowledge and the maintenance of healthy and independent opinion. It is the protectorate of minorities, and the consecration of self-government.

—John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) in The History of Freedom in Antiquity.

Trade

Let us take, by way of illustration, a man in the humble walks of life—a village carpenter, for instance—and observe the various services he renders to society, and receives from it; we shall not fail to be struck with the enormous disproportion that is apparent.

This man employs his day’s labor in planing boards, and making tables and chests of drawers. He complains of his condition; yet in truth what does he receive from society in exchange for his work?

First of all, on getting up in the morning, he dresses himself; and he has himself personally made none of the numerous articles of which his clothing consists.

Now, in order to put at his disposal this clothing…Americans must have produced cotton, Indians indigo, Frenchmen wool and flax, Brazilians hides; and all these materials must have been transported to various towns where they have been worked up, spun, woven, dyed, etc.

Then he breakfasts. In order to procure him the bread he eats every morning, land must have been cleared, enclosed, labored, manured, sown; the fruits of the soil must have been preserved with care from pillage, and security must have reigned among an innumerable multitude of people; the wheat must have been cut down, ground into flour, kneaded, and prepared; iron, steel, wood, stone, must have been converted by industry into instruments of labor; some men must have employed animal force, others water power, etc.; all matters of which each, taken singly, presupposes a mass of labor, whether we have regard to space or time, of incalculable amount.

In the course of the day this man will have occasion to use sugar, oil, and various other materials and utensils.

He sends his son to school, there to receive an education, which, although limited, nevertheless implies anterior study and research, and an extent of knowledge that startles the imagination.

He goes out. He finds the street paved and lighted.

A neighbor sues him. He finds advocates to plead his cause, judges to maintain his rights, officers of justice to put the sentence in execution; all which implies acquired knowledge, and, consequently, intelligence and means of subsistence.

He goes to church. It is a stupendous monument, and the book he carries thither is a monument, perhaps still more Stupendous, of human intelligence.

He is taught morals, he has his mind enlightened, his soul elevated; and in order to do this we must suppose that another man had previously frequented schools and libraries, consulted all the sources of human learning, and while so employed had been able to live without occupying himself directly with the wants of the body.

If our artisan undertakes a journey, he finds that, in order to save him time and exertion, other men have removed and levelled the soil, filled up valleys, hewed down mountains, united the banks of rivers, diminished friction, placed wheeled carriages on blocks of sandstone or bands of iron, and brought the force of animals and the power of steam into subjection to human wants.

It is impossible not to be struck with the measureless disproportion between the enjoyments which this man derives from society and what he could obtain by his own unassisted exertions. I venture to say that in a single day he consumes more than he could himself produce in ten centuries.

What renders the phenomenon still more strange is that all other men are in the same situation. Every individual member of society has absorbed millions of times more than he could himself produce; yet there is no mutual robbery. And, if we regard things more nearly, we perceive that the carpenter has paid, in services, for all the services others have rendered to him. If we bring the matter to a strict reckoning, we shall be convinced that he has received nothing he has not paid for by means of his modest industry; and that everyone who, at whatever interval of time or space, has been employed in his service, has received, or will receive, his remuneration.

The social mechanism, then, must be very ingenious and very powerful, since it leads to this singular result, that each man, even he whose lot is cast in the humblest condition, has more enjoyment in one day than he could himself produce in many ages.

—Bastiat, Frederic. Economic Harmonies. 1. Natural and Artificial Organization.

The first step in the economic revival was the removal of restraints on internal trade. Shortsighted governments had levied a hundred charges upon the transport and sale of goods—for entering ports, crossing bridges, using roads or rivers or canals, offering goods for purchase at markets or fairs. Feudal barons felt justified in exacting tolls on wares passing through their domains, as states do now; and some of them gave real protection and service to merchants by armed escorts and convenient hospitality. But the result of state and feudal interference was sixty-two toll stations on the Rhine, seventy-four on the Loire, thirty-five on the Elbe, seventy-seven on the Danube … ; a merchant paid sixty per cent of his cargo to carry it along the Rhine. Feudal wars, undisciplined soldiery, robber barons, and pirates on rivers and seas, made roads and waterways a martial risk to merchants and travelers.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 615. Refers to feudalism in the High Middle Ages, and the revival of commerce and trade after the Crusades.

About…60% of the value of U.S. imports in 2011 were raw materials, intermediary goods, and capital equipment.

—Daniel J. Ikenson. July 17, 2012. “Understanding Outsourcing.” Cato Daily Podcast.

Foreign commerce advances even faster than domestic trade, for the [ancient] Greek states have learned the advantages of an international division of labor, and each specializes in some product; the shieldmaker, for example, no longer goes from city to city at the call of those who need him, but makes his shields in his shop and sends them out to the markets of the classic world. In one century Athens moves from household economy – wherein each household makes nearly all that it needs – to urban economy – wherein each town makes nearly all that it needs – to international economy – wherein each state is dependent upon imports, and must make exports to pay for them….

[I]t is this trade that makes Athens rich, and provides, with the imperial tribute, the sinews of her cultural development. The merchants who accompany their goods to all quarters of the Mediterranean come back with changed perspective, and alert and open minds; they bring new ideas and ways, break down ancient taboos and sloth, and replace the familial conservatism of a rural aristocracy with the individualistic and progressive spirit of a mercantile civilization. Here in Athens East and West meet, and jar each other from their ruts. Old myths lose their grasp on the souls of men, leisure rises, inquiry is supported, science and philosophy grow. Athens became the most intensely alive city of her time.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 275.

About 90% of the 4 trillion dollar’s worth of direct investment abroad owned by Americans…is production for those economies…A lot of Americans have in mind this vision of a factory in the United States being taken down bolt for bolt…and being resurrected in Mexico or China to serve demand in the United States…that happens very little.

—Daniel J. Ikenson. July 17, 2012. “Understanding Outsourcing.” Cato Daily Podcast.

So just as the great land routes through Central Asia became economically important only once the Mongol emperors established a centralized monopoly of force along the way, a formal centralized control of water systems has proved the only credible solution once water systems extend over a wide enough area. The presence of some sixty independent tolls along the river Rhine at the beginning of the fifteenth century was a major obstacle to continental European trade; in England, where there was no such river tolls, trade flourished. The multiple depredations of warlords in contemporary Afghanistan may be an instance of the same phenomenon. Centralized control does not, however, guarantee efficient outcomes, as the sometimes disastrous environmental record of Soviet central planning should remind us.

—Seabright, Paul. 2004. In the Company of Strangers: A Modern History of Economic Life.

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it. Not only the prejudices of the publick, but what is much more unconquerable, the private interests of many individuals, irresistibly oppose it.

—Adam Smith quoted on page 231 of Adam Smith, by Nicholas Phillipson

Current American trade law assumes that the government can make the economy stronger by relieving every industrial straggler from the necessity of competing.

—Bovard, James. 1991. The Fair Trade Fraud. Page 216.

Seeing Crete grow rich on orderly trade, Mycenae learned that piracy—like its civilized offspring, tariff dues—can strangle commerce and internationalized poverty; it reformed, and allowed piracy to subside into trade.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 31.

Here too men had been lifted from barbarism to civilization by the passage from nomadic hunting to settled agriculture, by the replacement of stone tools with copper and bronze, by the conveniences of writing and the stimulus of trade.

—Durant, Will. 1939. History of Civilization. Part 2: The Life of Greece. Page 27.

The balance of produce and consumption may be constantly in favour of a nation, though what is called the balance of trade be generally against it. A nation may import to a greater value than it exports for half a century, perhaps, together; the gold and silver which comes into it during an this time may be all immediately sent out of it; its circulating coin may gradually decay, different sorts of paper money being substituted in its place, and even the debts, too, which it contracts in the principal nations with whom it deals, may be gradually increasing; and yet its real wealth, the exchangeable value of the annual produce of its lands and labour, may, during the same period, have been increasing in a much greater proportion. The state of our North American colonies, and of the trade which they carried on with Great Britain, before the commencement of the present disturbances, may serve as a proof that this is by no means an impossible supposition.

—Adam Smith. 1776. Wealth of Nations. Book IV, Chapter 3.

—Alan Charles Kors. 2001. Voltaire and the Triumph of the Enlightenment. Lecture 4: Philosophical Letters, Part II.

...in 1492, more than a century after the last khan ruled over China, Christopher Columbus convinced the monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand that he could reestablish sea contact and revive the lost commerce with the Mongol court of the Great Kahn.

—Jack Weatherford in Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World. 2004. Page 254. Three Rivers Press: NY, NY.

Trade, even when it supports choice and diverse achievement, homogenizes culture in the following sense: it gives individuals, regardless of their country, a similarly rich set of consumption opportunities. It makes countries or societies “commonly diverse,” as opposed to making them different from each other….

Cross-cultural trade does not eliminate differences altogether, but, rather, it liberates differences from the constraints of place.

—Cowen, Tyler in Creative Destruction (2002).

Outsourcing is essentially the same as importing a good from a foreign country. In the former, a company buys foreign labor services. In the latter, a company buys the good that embodies foreign inputs, particularly labor services. So, it makes no sense to be a free trader with respect to imports and exports of goods while opposing outsourcing. Opposing either is protectionism.

The central issue is why free trade is attractive. Suppose a Chinese company learns how to manufacture a computer at a cost below that for U.S. companies. In that case, the U.S. economy comes out ahead by importing the computer and shifting its labor and other inputs to producing other things—some of which will be sold to China. It's true that shifts in the composition of international trade will make specific companies and workers worse off, but free trade will benefit the overall economy.

An important part of the argument is that the resources previously used to manufacture computers in the U.S. will typically not remain idle after a shift to importing computers from China. Instead, the profit-oriented market will find (via Adam Smith's "invisible hand") productive alternative uses for these resources, thus contributing to growth.

—Barro, Robert J. August 15, 2012. “Ryan and the Fundamental Economic Debate.” The Wall Street Journal. A13.

From this standpoint, it was scary to hear President Obama's recent assessment of the GM bailout, in which he declared it a success and vowed to apply this policy broadly to U.S. manufacturing. This promise of expanded socialism is, to paraphrase the great 20th-century economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek, the Obama Road to Serfdom.

Drawing correct policy implications is hard because one naturally focuses on the jobs and production that are directly saved or lost when the government bails out GM or when Chinese imports expand. In contrast, it is impossible to detail where U.S. jobs and production would have been created or destroyed if GM had been allowed to fail or if trade with China were curtailed.

—Barro, Robert J. August 15, 2012. “Ryan and the Fundamental Economic Debate.” The Wall Street Journal. A13.

Obviously, the fostering of export industries would increase a country’s dependence on imports—unless exports were given away to foreigners, which is not customary. And importation is the only intelligible motive for fostering exports, as well as its natural consequence.

—Frank Knight. 1947. Freedom and Reform. Pages 294-295.

Even if you’ve just lost your job, there’s something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that’s elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born. If the world owes you compensation for enduring the downside of trade, what do you owe the world for enjoying the upside?

—Steven Landsburg. 2009. The Big Questions. Pages 195-196.

There is however a less obvious, but far more important difference between nationalism and familial favoritism: Despite its mighty evolutionary basis, almost everyone recognizes moral strictures against familial favoritism. Almost everyone knows that “It would help my son” is not a good reason to commit murder, break someone’s arm, or steal. Indeed, almost everyone knows that “It would help my son” is not a good reason for even petty offenses – like judging a Tae Kwon Do tournament unfairly because your son’s a contestant.

Nationalism, in contrast, is widely seen as an acceptable excuse for horrific crimes against outgroups. Do you plan to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent foreign civilians? Just say, “It will save American [German/Japanese/Russian/whatever] lives” – and other members of your tribe will nod their heads. Do you want to deprive millions of foreigners of the basic human rights to sell their labor to willing buyers, rent apartments from willing landlords, and buy groceries from willing merchants? Just say, “It’s necessary to protect American jobs” in a self-righteous tone, then bask in the admiration of your fellow citizens.

—Brian Caplan. December 25, 2011. “Patria, Parenti, Amici.” EconLog. (link)

The very process of trade creates wealth as goods move from persons who value them less to persons who value them more. Both parties in a voluntary exchange become better off. Furthermore, the opportunity to trade allows specialization and lowers the cost of inventing and innovating which further increases the wealth of society. One does not have to have a surplus to engage in trade because one could move from below to above subsistence simply by engaging in the wealth creating process of trading. If trade is possible, fewer resources would be required to maintain subsistence than in its absence. Ever since paleolithic times man has been improving his economic lot by trade. The gains from trade must be the cornerstone of serious study of man’s economic past.

—Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas. 1975. “The Role of Governments in Economic Growth in Early Modern Times: Comment.” Journal of Economic History.

In ancient Rome, senators lamented that local women used too many Indian luxuries, and in 77 A.D., Pliny the Elder proclaimed that India had become “the sink of the world’s gold.” In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese echoed this sentiment, complaining that too much of their silver from the New world was going to India; after the British arrived on the subcontinent, they made similar protests.

—Halpern, Jake. April 30, 2012. “The Secret of the Temple.” The New Yorker.

…there still prevails, even in nations well acquainted with commerce, a strong jealously with regard to the balance of trade, and a fear, that all their gold and silver may be leaving them.

—David Hume in On the Balance of Trade

The writings of Mr GEE struck the nation with an universal panic, when they saw it plainly demonstrated, by a detail of particulars, that the balance was against them for so considerable a sum as must leave them without a single shilling in five or six years.

—David Hume in On the Balance of Trade

Suppose four-fifths of all the money in Great Britain to be annihilated in one night, and the nation reduced to the same condition, with regard to specie, as in the reigns of the Harrys and Edwards, what would be the consequence? Must not the price of all labour and commodities sink in proportion, and everything be sold as cheap as they were in those ages? What nation could then dispute with us in any foreign market, or pretend to navigate or to sell manufactures at the same price, which to us would afford sufficient profit? In how little time, therefore, must this bring back the money which we had lost, and raise us to the level of all the neighboring nations? Where, after we have arrived we immediately lose the advantage of the cheapness of labor and commodities; and the farther flowing in of money is stopped by our fullness and repletion.

And, suppose, that all the money of Great Britain were multiplied fivefold in a night, must not the contrary effect follow? Must not all labor and commodities rise to such an exorbitant height, that no neighboring nations could afford to buy from us; while their commodities, on the other hand, became comparatively so cheap, that, in spite of all the laws which could be formed, they would be run in upon us, and our money flow out; till we fall to a level with foreigners, and lose that great superiority of riches, which had laid us under such disadvantages?

Now, it is evident, that the same causes, which would correct these exorbitant inequalities, were they to happen miraculously, must prevent their inequalities, were they to happen miraculously, must prevent their happening in the common course of nature, and must forever, in all neighboring nations, preserve money nearly proportional to the art and industry of each nation.

—David Hume in On the Balance of Trade

With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.
—Milton Friedman

From the dawn of the republic, the federal government has played a vital role in American economic life. Government promoted industrial development in the 18th century, transportation in the 19th, communications in the 20th and biotechnology today.

But the federal role has historically been sharply limited. The man who initiated that role, Alexander Hamilton, was a nationalist. His primary goal was to enhance national power and eminence, not to make individuals rich or equal.

This version of economic nationalism meant that he and the people who followed in his path — the Whigs, the early Republicans and the early progressives — focused on long-term structural development, not on providing jobs right now. They had their sights on the horizon, building the infrastructure, education and research facilities required for future greatness. This nationalism also led generations of leaders to assume that there is a rough harmony of interests between capital and labor. People in this tradition reject efforts to divide the country between haves and have-nots.

Finally, this nationalism meant that policy emphasized dynamism, and opportunity more than security, equality and comfort. While European governments in the 19th and early 20th centuries focused on protecting producers and workers, the U.S. government focused more on innovation and education.

Because of these priorities, and these restrictions on the federal role, the government could be energetic without ever becoming gigantic. Through the 19th century, the federal government consumed about 4 percent of the national gross domestic product in peacetime. Even through the New Deal, it consumed less than 10 percent.

Meanwhile, America prospered.

But this Hamiltonian approach has been largely abandoned. The abandonment came in three phases. First, the progressive era. The progressives were right to increase regulations to protect workers and consumers. But the late progressives had excessive faith in the power of government planners to rationalize national life. This was antithetical to the Hamiltonian tradition, which was much more skeptical about how much we can know and much more respectful toward the complexity of the world.

Second, the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt was right to energetically respond to the Depression. But the New Deal’s dictum — that people don’t eat in the long run; they eat every day — was eventually corrosive. Politicians since have paid less attention to long-term structures and more to how many jobs they “create” in a specific month. Americans have been corrupted by the allure of debt, sacrificing future development for the sake of present spending and tax cuts.

Third, the Great Society. Lyndon Johnson was right to use government to do more to protect Americans from the vicissitudes of capitalism. But he made a series of open-ended promises, especially on health care. He tried to bind voters to the Democratic Party with a web of middle-class subsidies.

In each case, a good impulse was taken to excess. A government that was energetic and limited was turned into one that is omnidirectional and fiscally unsustainable. A government that was trusted and oriented around long-term visions is now distrusted because it tries to pander to the voters’ every momentary desire. A government that devoted its resources toward future innovation and development now devotes its resources to health care for the middle-class elderly.

—David Brooks. May 28, 2012. “The Role of Uncle Sam.” The New York Times.

The Global Recovery Round should focus on manufacturing and services. Manufacturing represents around 55% of total trade. There is much to be gained: tariffs on cars, buses and bicycles are still high. Even low-tariff countries maintain a selection of high ones. In America ski boots attract a zero tariff, but golf shoes can face a 10% rate, and steel-toe-capped boots 37.5%. Services, which account for only 20% of world trade but are more important on a value-added basis, have hardly been liberalised at all.

If progress on agriculture is slower, so be it. Farm protectionism, which this newspaper was founded to oppose, still starves millions. New madnesses appear by the day: Russia has blocked the import of pigs from the EU because of a virus that affects cows and sheep. But an industry that makes up only 7% of world trade cannot hold everything else hostage.

—The Economist. September 8, 2012. “Goodbye Doha, hello Bali.”

Export bans are designed to protect consumers from the effects of high prices. From the point of view of a single nation, such a policy might seem to have the desired effect: as world prices spiral upwards, domestic prices are shielded from the full impact. But when many countries do the same thing—as now—so much food disappears from global markets that prices rocket more than they would have done if governments had left well alone. One study calculated that 45% of the huge increase in rice prices in 2006-08 was attributable to trade restrictions. So export bans exaggerate the very thing they seek to defend against.

…

Farm protection is like a weed: it grows everywhere and seems impossible to eradicate. This newspaper has been making the case against it since 1843, when we were founded to oppose Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws. Sadly we seem to have made too little progress. At the moment governments are making farming less efficient than it should be. They are increasing poverty. Their policies are otiose, since there are better ways to help the poor, such as direct cash transfers. And they are counterproductive, because they exacerbate the problems they seek to solve.

This latest spike in food prices will hurt the world’s worst-off. Governments that try to help them by restricting food trade are likely to make things worse still.

—The Economist. September 15, 2012. “The new Corn Laws.” Food and Trade.

It would be easy to lament the loss of culture [from free trade and globalization] ...Isn't it a shame that the Maya are watching Hollywood action movies? Isn't it a shame their native culture is being diluted by these cultural imports from the United States? And, I feel that way myself, to be honest, in some ways, but it's a [patronal] view. We can't protect the Maya from what they themselves want. If they think it will be a better life for them to adopt components of western culture, who are we to say, "No, that's just for us,...?

—Fischer, Edward. 2004. “Lecture Twenty-Four: The Janus Face of Globalization.” Peoples and Cultures of the World. The Teaching Company.

Specialization and Division-of-Labor

Just as the various trades are most highly developed in large cities, in the same way food at the palace is prepared in a far superior manner. In small towns the same man makes couches, doors, plows and tables, and often he even builds houses, and still he is thankful if only he can find enough work to support himself. And it is impossible for a man of many trades to do all of them well. In large cities, however, because many make demands on each trade, one alone is enough to support a man, and often less than one: for instance one man makes shoes for men, another for women, there are places even where one man earns a living just by mending shoes, another by cutting them out, another just by sewing the uppers together, while there is another who performs none of these operations but assembles the parts, Of necessity, he who pursues a very specialised task will do it best.

—Xenophon. Book VIII, ch, ii, 4[]-6, cited in The Ancient Economy by M. I. Finley. Penguin books 1992, p 135.

And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand: We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder, someone else a weaver — shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps some other purveyor to our bodily wants?

Quite right.

The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.

Clearly.

And how will they proceed? Will each bring the result of his labors into a common stock?— the individual husbandman, for example, producing for four, and laboring four times as long and as much as he need in the provision of food with which he supplies others as well as himself; or will he have nothing to do with others and not be at the trouble of producing for them, but provide for himself alone a fourth of the food in a fourth of the time, and in the remaining three-fourths of his time be employed in making a house or a coat or a pair of shoes, having no partnership with others, but supplying himself all his own wants?

Adeimantus thought that he should aim at producing food only and not at producing everything.

Probably, I replied, that would be the better way; and when I hear you say this, I am myself reminded that we are not all alike; there are diversities of natures among us which are adapted to different occupations.

Very true.

And will you have a work better done when the workman has many occupations, or when he has only one?

When he has only one.

—Plato in The Republic.

American Political Ideologies

Almost every American knows the traditional story of July Fourth—the soaring idealism of the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress's grim pledge to defy the world's most powerful nation with their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. But what else about revolutionary America might help us feel closer to those founders in their tricornered hats, fancy waistcoats and tight knee-breeches?

Those Americans, it turns out, had the highest per capita income in the civilized world of their time. They also paid the lowest taxes—and they were determined to keep it that way.

…

By 1776, the Atlantic Ocean had become what one historian has called "an information highway" across which poured books, magazines, newspapers and copies of the debates in Parliament. The latter were read by John Adams, George Washington, Robert Morris and other politically minded men. They concluded that the British were planning to tax the Americans into the kind of humiliation that Great Britain had inflicted on Ireland.

As eight years of war engulfed the continent, not a few of the rebels saw that the Revolution was a spiritual enterprise that would never really end. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Pennsylvanian who signed the Declaration of Independence, wrote that the war was only the first step in the Revolution's destiny to transform America and the world.

History confirmed his intuition. In the next hundred years, other nations and peoples would issue 200 similar declarations.

—Thomas Fleming. “What Life Was Like in 1776.” July 3, 2012. The Wall Street Journal. A15.

Indeed, the kinds of minimal or no-government societies envisioned by dreamers of the Left and Right are not fantasies; they actually exist in the contemporary developing world. Many parts of sub-Saharan Africa are a libertarian’s paradise.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY.

It’s also interesting to report that nearly everyone I met at the rally turned out to be far quirkier, politically, than any caricatured preconceptions might lead you to guess. While journalistic comparisons between the rise of the Tea Party and the rise of Occupy Wall Street—as two ends of the spectrum responding to economic collapse and elite betrayal—feel like clichéd false equivalency by this point, there's an unruly anarchistic feel to this crowd that reminds me of the time I spent in Zuccotti Park. There are serious political differences, to be sure, but their pitchforks are aimed at many of the same villains, and at times the most salient aspect of the divide feels cultural.

—Binelli, Mark. July 3-17, 2014. "Lone Star Crazy." The Rolling Stone. Page 57.

If, to paraphrase Baudelaire by way of The Usual Suspects, the devil's greatest trick was to convince the world he didn't exist, the modern GOP's greatest trick might have been convincing its electorate that he does, and that the federal government exists as some kind of infernal machine.

—Binelli, Mark. July 3-17, 2014. "Lone Star Crazy." The Rolling Stone. Page 54.

According to the experts who study political leanings, liberals and conservatives do not just see things differently. They are different—in their personalities and even their unconscious reactions to the world around them…

…

…conservatives are more attuned than liberals to assessing potential threats…

…conservatives …are more orderly and self-disciplined…[while liberals] are open and novelty-seeking.

…

…political views reside on a continuum that is mediated in part by universal human emotions such as fear.

…conservatives are fundamentally more anxious than liberals

…people of all political persuasions became more conservative in the wake of the terrorist attacks..

…found a way to bring conservatives and liberals together on global warming…[by reframining] climate change not as a challenge to government and industry but as “a threat to the American way of life.”

—Laber-Warren, Emily. September/October 2012. “Calling a Truce in the Political Wars.” Scientific American Mind.

Post-liberalism seeks to replace the classical liberalism of individual liberty, limited government, property rights and democratic sovereignty with a new liberalism that favors social rights, social goods, intrusive government and transnational law.

—Stephens, Bret. June 19, 2012. “The Decline of Democracy.” Global View column. The Wall Street Journal. A11.

Unfortunately, humanity is too often sacrificed in defense of ideology. This is absolutely wrong. Political systems should actually benefit human beings, but, like money, they can control us instead of work for us.

—Fourteenth Dalai Lama. 2002. How to Practice The Way to a Meaningful Life. Page 9.

My colleagues and I found that political liberals tend to rely primarily on the moral foundation of care/harm, followed by fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression. They are very concerned about victims of oppression, but they rarely make moral appeals based on loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, or sanctity/degradation. Social conservatives, in contrast, use all six foundations. They are less concerned than liberals about harm but much more concerned about the moral foundations that bind groups and nations together, i.e., loyalty (patriotism), authority (law and order, traditional families), and sanctity (the Bible, God, the flag as a sacred object). Libertarians, true to their name, value liberty more than anyone else, and they value it far more than any other foundation.

—Jonathan Haidt. January 2012. “The Moral Foundations of Occupy Wall Street.” Reason magazine. Pages 33-39.

“Think about America. We are less racist, sexist, and homophobic than we have ever been. But we do have one continuing problem. We don’t want to be around anyone who disagrees with us,” Mr. Clinton said. “We have got to pull this country together to push this country forward.”

—Clinton, Bill. Quoted in: Stoll, Ira. September 15, 2014. The Sun. New York.

Before Franklin Roosevelt, “liberal” described policies emphasizing liberty and individual rights. He, however, pioneered the politics of collective rights — of group entitlements. And his liberalism systematically developed policies not just to buy the allegiance of existing groups but to create groups that henceforth would be dependent on government.

Under FDR, liberalism became the politics of creating an electoral majority from a mosaic of client groups. Labor unions got special legal standing, farmers got crop supports, business people got tariff protection and other subsidies, the elderly got pensions, and so on and on.

Government no longer existed to protect natural rights but to confer special rights on favored cohorts. As Irving Kristol said, the New Deal preached not equal rights for all but equal privileges for all — for all, that is, who banded together to become wards of the government.

In the 1960s, public-employee unions were expanded to feast from quantitative liberalism (favors measured in quantities of money). And qualitative liberalism was born as environmentalists, feminists and others got government to regulate behavior in the service of social “diversity,” “meaningful” work, etc. Cost notes that with the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, a few government-approved minorities were given an entitlement to public offices: About 40 “majority-minority” congressional districts would henceforth be guaranteed to elect minority members.

Walter Mondale, conceding to Ronald Reagan after the 1984 election, listed the groups he thought government should assist: “the poor, the unemployed, the elderly, the handicapped, the helpless and the sad.” Yes, the sad.

—Will, George. August 29, 2012. “Voters, are you bluffing?” The Washington Post.

The thing that I truly believe is that the overwhelming majority of the country is not this conflict-driven group of ideologues. It just isn’t. And that ultimately always wins out. Because no matter what, the guy with the NRA bumper sticker and the Don’t Tread on Me flag is still going to pull over when he sees an accident and help out No Nukes guy, and vice-versa....So I’m always of the mindset that any asshole victory is short-lived. It just is. They lose. Assholes lose. They’re annoying. They cause momentary hardships. But they ultimately lose. And that’s a good thing.

—Jon Stewart in the Rolling Stone magazine on September 29, 2011.

Theories, when they have gained credence, become vested interests. The prestige and livelihood of schools and teachers are bound up in them; they tend toward enclosed doctrine, not open to fresh information.
—Isabel Paterson, in The God of the Machine, 1943.

To someone on the left, government is more like the adult supervision at a day care center. It sets the rules, provides structure, and prevents what otherwise would be dangerous behavior and chaos. I think of government as a monopoly offering lousy service and determined to maintain and extend its franchise come hell or high water. Imagine General Motors or Microsoft or Blue Cross or Comcast with no competition whatsoever for consumers to choose from, and not even the ability to opt out of driving or personal computing or health insurance or cable TV.

—Arnold Kling in EconLog (August 2, 2011)

Libertarians and socialists are motivated by the same problem: corruption. Because corruption generally requires political pull, libertarians believe you battle corruption by limiting government. Socialists believe political pull is mitigated by a better government, which for some reason is always a larger government.
—F. Bailey Norwood

For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal. Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.

And the takeover of half our political spectrum by the 0.01 percent is, I’d argue, also responsible for the degradation of our economic discourse, which has made any sensible discussion of what we should be doing impossible.

—Paul Krugman. May 3, 2012. “Plutocracy, Paralysis, Perplexity.” The New York Times.

Sadly, this too is reflective of the nation. At a moment when the wealthy flourish atop a sea of state subsidies (with the tacit compliance of many of the working poor), while the poor are barely protected by a frayed social safety net and often disengaged from the decision-making processes that structure their lives, confronting the root causes of poverty is particularly daunting and increasingly urgent.
—Sasha Abramsky. May 14, 2012. “The Other America 2012.” The Nation.

The fault of a colonial economy is that it is dishonest; it misrepresents reality. In practice, it is simply a way of keeping costs off the books of an exploitive interest.
—Wendell Berry. 1987. “Does a Community Have a Value?” Home Economics. North Point Press: San Francisco, CA.

To renounce the principle of democratic property, which is the only basis of democratic liberty, in exchange for specious notions of efficiency or the economics of the so-called free market is a tragic folly.
—Wendell Berry. 1987. “Does a Community Have a Value?” A Defense of the Family Farm. North Point Press: San Francisco, CA.

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.
—Bertrand Russell

A socialist maintains her faith in government planning despite the evidence that it doesn’t work to the benefit of the poor. A conservative maintains his faith that what’s good for the military-industrial complex is good for the country despite the evidence that it impoverishes and coarsens the people. I claim that a true liberalism, what Adam Smith called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” contrary to both the socialist and conservative ideologue, has the historical evidence on its side. Despite the elements of regulation and corporatism defacing it (and the welfare programs improving it), it has worked pretty well for the poor and for the people for two centuries. I reckon we should keep it—though tending better to its ethics.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Preface.

reason: When you say socialist—she believed that the means of production should be collectively owned by the state, etc.?

Smith: Oh, yes! But that was really common of people in the 1930’s.

—Vernon Smith being interviewed by Ronald Bailey. “We Don’t Face Any Good Options” Reason. December, 2011. Pages 44-49.

By now over 90 percent of Americans identify themselves in surveys as part of a quasi-gentlemanly “middle class,” and the phrase has stopped meaning much, except a general aspiration to a bourgeois life. It shows up in the terminology of American elections, in which “the middle class” means virtually everyone.

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 41.

Folks on the political right tend to favor an absolute measure [of incomes]...They focus on rising tides lifting all boats. Folks on the left tend to focus on relative mobility, and equality of opportunity.

—Erin Currier, manager of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project. Wall Street Journal. November 12-13, 2011. A4.

Mr. Siegal observes that public-sector unions have “become a vanguard movement within liberalism. And the reason for that is it’s the public sector that comes closest to the statist ideals of McGovern and post-McGovern liberals. And that is, there’s no connection between effort and reward. You’re guaranteed your job. You’re guaranteed your salary increase. There’s a kind of bureaucratic equality.

—Matthew Kaminski. “The New Tammany Hall.” The Wall Street Journal. November 26-27, 2011. A13.

Everyone believes our community of Americans can be happier, though they differ in the method. The Libertarian seeks the release of honest people from their metaphorical chains of regulation, and the Progressive seeks to chain the wrists of the corrupt. The Libertarian just wants the opportunity to succeed, and the Progressive believes this can only come about by denying this opportunity to others. This explains the mantra of individual liberty by Libertarians and the appeal to mob democracy by the Progressives.

—F. Bailey Norwood.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.

—James Madison.

I thought I was all alone, until I discovered Austrian economics.

—Ron Paul, quoted by Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker. February 27, 2012.

In research testing how well liberals and conservatives could predict the way that those of differing ideologies would respond to surveys on moral issues by having them pretend to take one side or the other…Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as "very liberal."

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed...Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it's dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience...Institutions emerge gradually as social facts, which we then respect and even sacralize, but if we strip these institutions of authority and treat them as arbitrary contrivances that exist only for our benefit, we render them less effective. We then expose ourselves to increased anomie and social disorder...Based on my own research, I [Haidt] had no choice but to agree with these conservative claims. As I continued to read the writings of conservative intellectuals...I began to see that they had attained a crucial insight into the sociology of morality that I had never encountered before. They understood the importance of what I'll call moral capital.

—Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind.

Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: Genetics explains between one-third and one-half of the variability among people in their political attitudes. Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less.

—Jonathan Haidt. May, 2012. Reason magazine. “Born This Way?”

—Mary Matalin on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. May 14, 2012.

To classical liberals—who can be parsed as Libertarians and Republicans—all individuals are given the same reverence and rights. Modern liberals—called Progressives or Democrats—allow an individual to acquire more or less power depending on their group affiliations. For modern liberals, individuals become more powerful when they are members of a union, the lower or middle class (in terms of income), or an ethnic minority. The reason for this disagreement has to do with preferences for how political and economic decisions are made. Classical liberals believe decisions and responsibilities are assigned to individuals, whereas modern liberals has a proclivity for group decision-making. One side believes workers deserve a wage equal to or greater than what they could negotiate elsewhere, and the other side believes workers deserve however much they can negotiate as a group, with the threat of strikes to enhance their negotiating power.

—F. Bailey Norwood

If you listened only to the chatter of this campaign season, you might assume that all our core political values revolve around the two institutions of the market and the state, big capital and big government. If you're on the right, you want the market to do its magic and have the state get out of the way. If you're on the left, you want the market to be held in check by the regulators and safety nets of the state.

But seeing the world through these easy oppositions blinds us to the growing prominence of a group of new organizations: fluid, collaborative networks working outside both the marketplace and the state to improve the world in inventive ways. Inspired in many cases by the decentralization of the Internet, the movement uses the peer network as its organizing principle, with no single individual or group "in charge."

In all these efforts you can see the emergence of a new political philosophy. It takes seriously Hayek's insight about the power of decentralized systems to outperform top-heavy bureaucracies, but it also believes that innovation and progress can come from forms of collaboration beyond the market. I like to call the members of this movement "the peer progressives."

—Johnson, Steven. September 22-23, 2012. “Peer Power, from Potholes to Patents.” The Wall Street Journal.

At a recent dinner in Washington, D.C., with representatives from major American manufacturing companies, I listened as the talk turned to how hard it is to find qualified applicants for jobs.

"What exactly are the skills you can't find?" I asked, imagining that openings for high-tech positions went begging because, as we hear so often, the training of the U.S. workforce doesn't match up well with current corporate needs.

One of the representatives looked sheepishly around the room and responded: "To be perfectly honest . . . we have a hard time finding people who can pass the drug test." Several other reps gave a knowing nod. Applicants were often so underqualified, they said, that simply finding someone who could properly answer the telephone was sometimes a challenge.

…

But considerable evidence suggests that many employers would be happy just to find job applicants who have the sort of "soft" skills that used to be almost taken for granted. In the Manpower Group's 2012 Talent Shortage Survey, nearly 20% of employers cited a lack of soft skills as a key reason they couldn't hire needed employees. "Interpersonal skills and enthusiasm/motivation" were among the most commonly identified soft skills that employers found lacking.

Employers also mention a lack of elementary command of the English language. A survey in April of human-resources professionals conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management and the AARP compared the skills gap between older workers who were nearing retirement and younger workers coming into the labor pool. More than half of the organizations surveyed reported that simple grammar and spelling were the top "basic" skills among older workers that are not readily present among younger workers.

The SHRM/AARP survey also found that "professionalism" or "work ethic" is the top "applied" skill that younger workers lack. This finding is bolstered by the Empire Manufacturing Survey for April, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It said that manufacturers were finding it harder to find punctual, reliable workers today than in 2007, "an interesting result given that New York State's unemployment rate was more than 4 percentage points lower in early 2007 than in early 2012."

—Schulz, Nick. September 20, 2012. “Hard Unemployment Truths About ‘Soft’ Skills.” The Wall Street Journal. A15.

I’m very looking forward to a Republican being back in office. When you’re rich, you want a Republican in office.

—Reason magazine. November 2012. Page 13.

Nobody makes rational decisions in public life. Voting is an irrational act. Choices are generally irrational based upon the data—we know that. People do not vote from their heads they vote from their stomachs and their hearts. Give them some emotional context…

—Political consultant interviewed on Planet Money podcast. September 28, 2012. “Episode 406: Making Economics Sexy.” National Public Radio.

American Progressive Politics

Put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert, and in five years there'd be a sand shortage.
—Milton Friedman

If we look at America, we find a country that is in quite a bit of psychological self-doubt at this moment. We find a country that has had much of its government, many of its leaders, besieged by irrationality, religiosity, they don't believe in evolution, they don’t believe in climate change, we cannot pass a simple measure in Congress to extend the national debt (which is not going to not happen): how can a government that is so paralyzed by its own inability to see reason be the custodian over that critical part of every economy that a government must preside over…

…

…while China, governed by engineers and technocrats tends to look at reason. There are no climate deniers in China. I have never spoken to a Chinese who doubted evolution. And yet the ranks of the political houses of Congress are replete with these people—and there making decisions which govern how we live and how we govern the American economy.

—Intelligence Squared Podcast. March 20, 2012. “Does China Do Capitalism Better Than America?” National Public Radio.

Anytime you see something growing and expanding and there are no rules, you need to regulate it.
—Joanna Doven, spokeswoman for Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, on a proposal to crack down on urban farming, quoted in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 1, 1020. (I do not identify with this statement)

Man is born free but is everywhere in debt. In the rich world, getting hold of your first credit card is a rite of passage far more important for your daily life than casting your first vote...And even if you shun the temptation of borrowing to indulge yourself, you are still saddled with your portion of the national debt.
—The Economist Magazine: June 26, 2010

In every state, people are free to feed others in their filthy, unregulated homes, it's only when money changes hands that ome cooks transform into a public health hazard.
—Katherine Mangu-Ward

There is no more persistent and influential faith in the world today than the faith in government spending.
—Henry Hazlitt in Economics in One Lesson

Corporations do not seek to consent to extract wealth from the people and the earth...and...no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments.
—A declaration offered by the Occupy Wall Street protests, as dictated in Reason magazine (Bailouts for Me, but Not for Thee by Matt Welch; December 2011). (Not a quote I identify with)

Like nearly all Greeks, Mr. Gianakouras was covered by a social-security fund, which paid 10,000 Euros ($13,600) for the hospital bill. There was one more thing: Mr. Gianakouras said he gave his surgeon “black money”—5,000 Euros—to perform the operation.

“If you don’t pay,” he said, “you don’t get anything done.”
—Charles Forelle reporting for The Wall Street Journal. November 12-13, 2011.

In the past it was easy for Western politicians and economic liberals to dismiss such outpourings of fury as a misguided fringe. In Seattle, for instance, the last big protests (against the World Trade Center, in 1999) looked mindless. If they had a goal, it was selfish—an attempt to impoverish the emerging world through protectionism.
—The Economist. “Rage against the machine.” October 22, 2011. Page 13.

Politicians, central bankers and businessmen regularly lament the extent of public ignorance about money, and with good reason. A society that expects most individuals to take responsibility for the management of their own expenditure and income after tax, that expects most adults to own their own homes and that leaves it to the individual to determine how much to save for retirement and whether or not to take out health insurance, is surely storing up trouble for the future by leaving its citizens so ill-equipped to make wise financial decisions.

—Niall Ferguson. 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

Humanist Manifesto I was written in 1933 at a time of great economic despair and reflects the spirit of the times. It has a mildly socialistic tone, because, as Kurt Vonnegut said of the time, capitalism has failed.

—Michael Werner writing in The Humanist. “How Humanists Get It Right” November-December, 2011. Page 39.

The biggest point of commonality between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party is opposition to the federal government’s 2008 bailout of the financial industry. “They have taken bailouts from taxypayers with impunity,” the Declaration complains. “They socialized their own losses on our taxpayer dollars and on our currency and dumped that onto us,” one Occupy Boston protestor told video journalist Garrett Quinn. But at the same time, activists are demanding free college educations, holding up, “Debt Is Slavery” signs, and asking the rest of us to socialize their losses into the higher education market. All to the applause of a left-of-center commentariat desperate for a Tea Party of its own.
—Matt Welch. December, 2011. “Bailouts for Me, but Not for Thee.” Reason Magazine.

In 1964, there were more than 2,000 personnel tests available to employers. But already an Illinois state official had ruled that a standard ability test used by Motorola was illegal because it was unfair to "disadvantaged groups.”

Thus a heavy burden of proof was placed on employers, including that of proving that any test that produced a "disparate impact" detrimental to certain minorities was a "business necessity" for various particular jobs. In 1972, Congress codified the Griggs misinterpretation of what Congress had done in 1964. And after a 1989 Supreme Court ruling partially undid Griggs, Congress in 1991 repudiated that 1989 ruling and essentially reimposed the burden of proof on employers.

Small wonder, then, that many employers, fearing endless litigation about multiple uncertainties, threw up their hands and, to avoid legal liability, threw out intelligence and aptitude tests for potential employees. Instead, they began requiring college degrees as indices of applicants' satisfactory intelligence and diligence.

This is, of course, just one reason college attendance increased from 5.8 million in 1970 to 17.5 million in 2005. But it probably had a, well, disparate impact by making employment more difficult for minorities.

—George Will. January 4, 2009. “The Toll of a Rights ‘Victory.’” The Washington Post. Opinions.

Unfortunately, this attack on canned tuna isn’t about science. It’s about fund raising, and Greenpeace has discovered a recipe for success: Target something that’s easily recognizable (like Tuna), make some scary claims in the media, parade around in funny costumes—and start raking in the donations. It’s a recipe that Greenpeace has perfected over the past two decades.

—Chris Lischewski, Shue Wing Chan, and In-Soo Cho. November 8, 2011. “Greenpeace Vs. the Tuna Sandwich.” The Wall Street Journal. A19. (I post this neither in support nor in opposition to Greenpeace, but because it reflects a sentiment many share about ostensibly altruistic organizations)

Now, hear me out before you judge what I am trying to say. There are some truths communicated in Gasland, there is no doubt about that. However, it seems that many of the facts purported by the documentary Gasland are not true—or, at least, questionable. But to me, strange as it may sound, that is okay. This is because I do not view documentaries primarily as information sources. In fact, I would argue that it is very difficult to produce a successful documentary without much of its facts being called into question. I like showing well-known documentaries in class: like Food Inc. andCapitalism: A Love Story, but I do not do so for the information they relay. I do so for the attention they earn and the discussion they encourage.

A documentary that is completely factual is, unfortunately, boring to most people—more importantly, it would not motivate the activist within us. Activism of any sort requires symbols, traditions, beliefs, experiences, and notions in which the activists can use to define their cause, enhance the uniformity of their beliefs, and reinforce their enthusiasm for promoting the common good. That is exactly what Gasland does, and it is important, because a moderate level of activism is healthy for a democracy. I promise you this: we need energy companies questioned about their actions constantly; we need regulation of any energy extraction; we need laws that allow us to sue companies if they are at fault for environmental damage. There is such thing as too much activism, of course, but Gasland helps to ensure we do not have too little.

—Bailey Norwood, speaking at the viewing of the documentary Gasland. Full remarks are available at Norwood’s blog Seeds, November 10, 2011.

...she says, the movement needs concrete demands. Any demands. The demand at which the group arrived—”Jobs for all,” meaning a public-works program providing 25 million union-wage jobs—was not her first choice. But McMillan’s will did not matter—she was a servant of “the workers.”

—Jeff Sharlet. November 24, 2011. “The Occupation.” Rolling Stone.

The European Dream, with its emphasis on collective responsibility and global consciousness...represents humanity’s best aspirations for a better tomorrow.

—Jeremy Rifkin. 2004. The European Dream.

Boeing declared victory, but fooled no one. For this sets a precedent; the federal government’s supposedly neutral representatives will threaten a company with serious harm if it doesn’t make concessions to unions. That gives firms a powerful incentive never to set foot in union-friendly states in the first place. Many will doubtless build their factories abroad, where the NLRB’s bureaucratic bruisers can’t threaten them.

—The Economist. Boeing Bullied. December 17, 2011. Page 115.

Because progressivism exists to justify a few people bossing around most people and because progressives believe that only government’s energy should flow unimpeded, they crave energy scarcities as an excuse for rationing—by them—that produces ever-more-minute government supervision of Americans’ behavior.

—George Will.

[they asked] how in the world, at the height of European civilization, at the moment in the twentieth century, when it looks like we have the most sophisticated kind of society, many democracies in Western Europe—with its concern for individualism and individual rights—...can turn into the most regressive barbarism that's ever been seen. What they mean is fascism in general, which was all over Europe…

So, the Frankfurt School is literally trying to say: how could it be that at the height of European civilization, at the height of what seems the most rational civilization in history…, could we see this most irrational barbarism develop? The anti-Semitism. The Holocaust. The camps. How could this happen here…? And they tried to find a deep answer.

…

They argued that since the time of Homer, all through Western civilization, the differentiation between the ego of the aristocracy from body, women, and slaves, had been the way of enlightenment. That is, progress, whatever good it brought, came at the price of the separation of the rational ego of those in power from the emotion from the body and from others.

...

What they have in mind is this: ... the notion of the self of the individual who seeks power (members of the aristocracy in the modern world, members of the capitalist bourgeois—whoever) must differentiate itself from the lower classes. Those in power must say: I am not like them.

Now, how do they do that? They have to repress in themselves...their own bodily impulses and those things they have in common with the lower classes...Between he or whoever is in power and those who are to be controlled, there has to be a differentiation of self-understanding. The ruler must think: I alone am in control of myself...

The more you base social order on reason alone, the more you discover that reason has nothing substantive to say morally...The more the modern scientific consciousness becomes sophisticated the more it believes in nothing. And when it believes in nothing, it is led to use other human beings as objects for any kind of pleasure.

Now the unhappy conclusion to this, and it is very unhappy, is...the conclusion is the enlightened self—the whole notion of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century...the belief that we are entering a new age where, if we get rid of superstition and perhaps to some extent tradition and aristocracy...and if instead we are going to enter an era where scientific search for truth is going to join with enlightened leadership and individual liberty...—...that whole enlightenment notion (freedom and power coming together)...this enlightenment self turns into the fascist self, capable of any act of subjugation of others.

The implication—and they say this explicitly, actually—is that while social freedom and the modern notion of the free society (individualism, democracy) is dependent on enlightened thought, enlightened thought must inevitably destroy itself in a new kind of barbarism.

—Lawrence Cahoone. Modern Intellectual Thought. Lecture 24: Existentialism and the Frankfurt School. The Teaching Company. 2010.

If changes in the labor market don't explain the development of the new lower class, what does? My own explanation is no secret. In my 1984 book "Losing Ground," I put the blame on our growing welfare state and the perverse incentives that it created. I also have argued that the increasing economic independence of women, who flooded into the labor market in the 1970s and 1980s, played an important role.

Simplifying somewhat, here's my reading of the relevant causes: Whether because of support from the state or earned income, women became much better able to support a child without a husband over the period of 1960 to 2010. As women needed men less, the social status that working-class men enjoyed if they supported families began to disappear. The sexual revolution exacerbated the situation, making it easy for men to get sex without bothering to get married. In such circumstances, it is not surprising that male fecklessness bloomed, especially in the working class.

…

The prerequisite for any eventual policy solution consists of a simple cultural change: It must once again be taken for granted that a male in the prime of life who isn't even looking for work is behaving badly. There can be exceptions for those who are genuinely unable to work or are house husbands. But reasonably healthy working-age males who aren't working or even looking for work, who live off their girlfriends, families or the state, must once again be openly regarded by their fellow citizens as lazy, irresponsible and unmanly. Whatever their social class, they are, for want of a better word, bums.

…

To bring about this cultural change, we must change the language that we use whenever the topic of feckless men comes up. Don't call them "demoralized." Call them whatever derogatory word you prefer. Equally important: Start treating the men who aren't feckless with respect. Recognize that the guy who works on your lawn every week is morally superior in this regard to your neighbor's college-educated son who won't take a "demeaning" job. Be willing to say so.

This shouldn't be such a hard thing to do. Most of us already believe that one of life's central moral obligations is to be a productive adult. The cultural shift that I advocate doesn't demand that we change our minds about anything; we just need to drop our nonjudgmentalism.

It is condescending to treat people who have less education or money as less morally accountable than we are. We should stop making excuses for them that we wouldn't make for ourselves. Respect those who deserve respect, and look down on those who deserve looking down on.

—Charles Murray. March 17-18, 2012. “Why Economics Can’t Explain Our Cultural Divide.” C3. The Wall Street Journal.

Theodore Roosevelt, America’s first progressive president, thought it was government’s duty to “look ahead and plan out the right kind of civilization.” TR looked ahead and saw a “timber famine” caused by railroads’ ravenous appetites for crossties that rotted. He did not foresee creosote, which preserves crossties. Imagine all the things government planners cannot anticipate when, in their defining hubris, they try to impose their static dream of the “right kind” of future.

—George Will. March 21, 2012. “The Inexorable March of Creative Destruction.” The Washington Post.

…the prevailing service religion underestimates the problem of disorder. Many of the activists talk as if the world can be healed if we could only insert more care, compassion and resources into it.

History is not kind to this assumption. Most poverty and suffering—whether in a country, a family or a person—flows from disorganization. A stable social order is an artificial accomplishment, the result of an accumulation of habits, hectoring, moral stricture and physical coercion. Once order is dissolved, it takes hard measures to restore it.

—David Brooks. April 12, 2012. “Sam Spade at Starbucks.” The New York Times.

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it

—Thomas Sowell. From BrainyQuote.com.

—Emily Ekins. Reason-Rupe: Public Opinion Survey. March 27, 2012. “87 Percent of Americans Agree With Conservative Supreme Court Justices on Broccoli Mandate.”

At tea at his house the year before, [FDR's Secretary of Labor Frances] Perkins has sat beside Justice Harlan Stone, and he gave her a tip. She had confided her fears that any great social insurance system would be rejected by his court. Not so, he said, and whispered back the solution: “The taxing power of the federal government my dear; the taxing power is sufficient for everything you want and need.” If the Social Security Act was formulated as a tax, and not government insurance, it could get through.

—Shales, Amity. 2007. The Forgotten Man.

Although elected by her Democratic colleagues as Senate majority leader soon after taking office, she wasn't in the best position to advance reforms. Most power in the legislature resides with committee heads. So in 2008 she stepped down as majority leader to spend her last two years in the Senate (she was term-limited in 2010) as chairman of the Education Committee, pushing reforms to increase teacher and school accountability.

…

Ms. Romero credits the CTA for its savvy and chutzpah. The union has killed or hijacked nearly every reform bill that has popped up in the legislature. In 2010 it even sank a bill to let high school teachers volunteer to be evaluated by students. "Nobody would see [the evaluation] except the teacher, and CTA fought it tooth and nail. They really were of the opinion that 'we run the place.' . . . Their basic argument was that it's the nose underneath the camel's tent. So you can't do anything, because once you do something," the lid on reform is "lifted. So they just kill it."

This year the unions torpedoed a bill (introduced by Democratic State Sen. Alex Padilla) that would have made it easier for districts to fire teachers who molest students. Same for legislation to strip pensions from teachers who have sexual relationships with students. The unions claimed the bills infringe on due process and First Amendment rights.

Ms. Romero did manage to get "one past them and it was a big one." In 2010, her last year in the Senate, she wrote the nation's first "parent trigger" law allowing parents to take over underperforming schools and transform them by gathering a majority of parent signatures.

Republican Minority Leader Bob Huff agreed to bring along GOP members, so she needed to round up only five Democrats. Ms. Romero enlisted Senate President Darrell Steinberg, whom she had mentored, to help her. They locked down the Senate in the dead of night to pass the bill.

The unions exacted revenge by bulldozing Ms. Romero's bid for state superintendent of schools later that year. They ran ads calling her a"dangerous" tool of "wealthy charter school advocates" and bankrolled her opponent, the reliably antireform Democrat Tom Torlakson. He won.

And the unions continue to fight furiously against the trigger law's implementation. Union members intimidated parents who attempted to take over McKinley Elementary in Compton two years ago, demanding that the parents bring photo IDs to the school; some of the parents were illegal immigrants.

—Finley, Allysia. September 1-2, 2012. “The Trials of a Democratic Reformer.” The Weekend Interview with Gloria Romero. The Wall Street Journal. A11.

…

But what about means-tested programs such as Medicaid, eligibility for which depends on status (such as poverty) rather than activity (such as work)? Do they increase dependence?

—Galston, William A. September 1-2, 2012. “They’re Part of the Civic Compact.” One of two articles addressing the question: are entitlement’s corrupting us? The Wall Street Journal. C1.

Don't mistake me, I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta "rage" in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically the only thing he's not raging against is the privileged elite he's groveling in front of for campaign contributions.

You see, the super rich must rationalize having more than they could ever spend while millions of children in the U.S. go to bed hungry every night. So, when they look themselves in the mirror, they convince themselves that "Those people are undeserving. They're . . . lesser." Some of these guys on the extreme right are more cynical than Paul Ryan, but he seems to really believe in this stuff. This unbridled rage against those who have the least is a cornerstone of the Romney-Ryan ticket.

—Tom Morello from the band Rage Against the Machine. August 16, 2012. “Tom Morello: ‘Paul Ryan iIs the Embodiment of the Machine Our Music Rages Against.’” Rolling Stone magazine. Accessed Setpember 6, 2012 at http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/tom-morello-paul-ryan-is-the-embodiment-of-the-machine-our-music-rages-against-20120816#ixzz25h8flW6Z

…the corporation is an institution—a unique structure and set of imperatives that direct the actions of people within it. It is also a legal institution, one whose existence and capacity to operate depend upon the law. The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others. As a result, I argue, the corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and society.

—Bakan, Joel. 2004. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Free Press: NY, NY.

[a rhetorical question]…what about making the media more responsive and democratic?...It’s kind of like asking how do we make corporations more democratic. Well, the only way to do that is to get rid of them.

—Chomsky, Noam. 1992. Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media [documentary]. Around 1:59.

The pace really picks up after Sinclair adopts an acronymic campaign slogan, “END POVERTY IN CALIFORNIA” (“It was pointed out that the initials of these words spelled ‘EPIC’”); picks a campaign emblem…in favor of the busy bee (“she not only works hard but has the means to defend herself”); explains a program of cooperative factories and farms that would implement his philosophy of “production for use” rather than for profit…

—Lepore, Jill. September 24, 2012. “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business.” The New Yorker.

Monopolies like Standard Oil and DuPont looked bad: they looked greedy and ruthless and, in the case of DuPont, which made munitions, sinister. They therefore hired advertising firms to sell the public on the idea of the large corporation, and, not incidentallyl, to advance pro-business legislation. It’s this kind of thing that [Upton] Sinclair was talking about when he said that American history was a battle between business and democracy, and, “So far,” he wrote, “Big Business has won every skirmish.”

—Lepore, Jill. September 24, 2012. “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business.” The New Yorker.

No single development has altered the workings of American democracy in the last century so much as political consulting, an industry unknown before Campaigns, Inc.

…

… “Our conception of practical politics is that if you have a sound enough case to convince the folks back home, you don’t have to buttonhole the Senator,” Baxter explained. Make it personal: candidates are easier to sell than issues. If our position doesn’t have an opposition, or if you candidate doesn’t have an opponent, invent one.

…

Attack, attack, attack. Whitaker said, You can’t wage a defense campaign and win!”

…

Fan flames. “We need more partisanship in this country,” Whitaker said. Never shy from controversy; instead, win the controversy.” The average American doesn’t want to be educated; he doesn’t want to improve his mind; he doesn’t even want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen,” Whitaker advised. “But there are two ways you can interest him in a campaign, and only two that we have ever found successful.” You can put on a fight (“he likes a good hot battle, with no punches pulled”), or you can put on a show (“he likes the movies; he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades”): “So if you can’t fight, PUT ON A SHOW! And if you put on a good show, Mr. and Mrs. American will turn out to see it.”

…

…They wrote a speakers’ manual, for anyone giving a speech in support of Warren; it included drafts of a “Six-Minute Talk” and a “Fifteen Minute Talk,” (Their stock advice: Try not to speak for more than fifteen minutes—people get bored—and never for more than half an hour).

…

Whitaker and Baxter went to Washington and persuaded a hundred congressman to let them read their constituent mail. At the start of the campaign, Whitaker reported, mail from voters “was running four and half to one in favor” of Truman’s [health care] plan. Whitaker and Baxter went to work. “Nine months later it was running four to one against.

…

…Not everyone was convinced that a lavishly paid advertising agency distributing 7.5 million copies of a pamphlet called “The Voluntary Way Is the Amercian Way” to doctors’ offices constitute a “grass roots” movement.

…

He had one more thing to say: there was “nothing in this bill that came any closer to socialism than the payments the American Medical Association makes to the advertising firm of Whitaker and Baxter to misrepresent my health program.

…

McWilliams, as Whitaker and Baxter must have very well understood, had played by different rules from theirs. He hadn’t been simple. He hadn’t attacked them. He had taken time to explain. He hadn’t invented an enemy. He hadn’t taken remarks out of context. He hadn’t made anything up. He hadn’t lied.

…True, they had lots of money to spend; but their opponents have not always been broke, either.” He talked about how much money unions had, for instance.

…

…By now (1960), Democrats were beginning to hire political-consulting firms, too. Everyone did. It was an arms race.

…

She was also asked, “Does political public relations actually transfer political power into the hands of those who exercise it?”

“It certainly could and has in some instances,” she said, carefully. “In this profession of leading men’s minds, this is the reason I feel it must be in the hands of the most ethical, principled people—people with real concern for the world around them, for people around them—or else it will erode into hands of people who have no regard for the world around them. It could be a very, very destructive thing.”

—Lepore, Jill. September 24, 2012. “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business.” The New Yorker.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

—Lincoln, Abraham. Quoted in: Roosevelt, Theodore. 1910. The New Nationalism. The Outlook Company: NY, NY.

Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. . . . Nor should this lead to a war upon the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; . . . property is desirable; is a positive good in the world.

— Lincoln, Abraham. Quoted in: Roosevelt, Theodore. 1910. The New Nationalism. The Outlook Company: NY, NY.

In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the Struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege.

—Roosevelt, Theodore. 1910. The New Nationalism. The Outlook Company: NY, NY.

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of free men to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.

—Roosevelt, Theodore. 1910. The New Nationalism. The Outlook Company: NY, NY.

Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable.

—Roosevelt, Theodore. 1910. The New Nationalism. The Outlook Company: NY, NY.

I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.

—Roosevelt, Theodore. 1910. The New Nationalism. The Outlook Company: NY, NY.

The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.

—Roosevelt, Theodore. 1910. The New Nationalism. The Outlook Company: NY, NY.

I do not wish to see the nation forced into the ownership of the railways if it can possibly be avoided, and the only alternative is thoroughgoing and effective regulation, which shall be based on a full knowledge of all the facts, including a physical valuation of property. This physical valuation is not needed, or, at least, is very rarely needed, for fixing rates; but it is needed as the basis of honest capitalization.

—Roosevelt, Theodore. 1910. The New Nationalism. The Outlook Company: NY, NY.

I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.

—Roosevelt, Theodore. 1910. The New Nationalism. The Outlook Company: NY, NY.

The duty of Congress is to provide a method by which the interest of the whole people shall be all that receives consideration.

—Roosevelt, Theodore. 1910. The New Nationalism. The Outlook Company: NY, NY.

Corruption, Morality, and Public Choice

The business of politics consists of a series of unsentimental transactions between those who need votes and those who have money…a world where every quid has its quo.

—Tyson, Don, quoted in: Ogle, Maureen. 2013. In Meat We Trust. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: NY, NY.

There isn’t a single policy decision that’s made in Washington, D.C. that isn’t influenced by money.

—Former lobbyist Jimmy Williams being interviewed on Planet Money. “Inside Washington’s Money Machine.” November 1, 2011.

Why try to persuade politicians when you can buy them?

—John Kenneth Galbraith in A Tenured Professor (1990), page 45.

As all this was happening, another matter abruptly demanded the Margins’ attention. It had its origin in a lingering suspicion that, to the distaste and even despair of all conservatives, continues to haunt the free enterprise system. It is the feeling that no one can get very rich in a very short time without crossing the ill-guarded border into chicane or outright crookedness. The spirit of Jay Gould, Daniel Drew or Gentleman Jim Fisk has never been fully exorcised from the American memory.

—John Kenneth Galbraith in A Tenured Professor (1990), page 133. (Not a quote I identify with)

But no promises would be exacted; it was in the American tradition that you didn’t buy votes. You raised money for statesmen in whose intentions you had full trust.

—John Kenneth Galbraith in A Tenured Professor (1990), pages 149-150.

“The real question is where this young bastard is getting that money. Where I come from, we happen to know that if something’s reallly big, it isn’t going to be honest. Let’s get on to that.”

—John Kenneth Galbraith in A Tenured Professor (1990), page 153. (Not a quote I identify with)

A new blockbuster report by the Institute for Policy Studies exposes how taxpayers subsidze executive compensation and reveals some of the worst offenders. Those subsidies add up to more than $14 billion a year. That equals 12 percent of the planned savings from the deficit deal’s “sequester” in a span of five years, or 211,732 times the annual cost of hiring an elementary school teacher, or $46 for each American. As co-author Scott Klinger says, “Every man, woman and child in America is buying a CEO a lunch.”

Equally disturbing: twenty-five companies paid their CEOs more in total compensation last year than they paid in taxes.

—Heuvel, Katrina Vanden. September 17, 2012. “Noted: Why Subsidize CEOs?” The Nation.

Nationwide, budget cuts have axed 627,000 public service jobs just since June 2009. Schools, health clinics, fire stations, parks, and recreation facilities—virtually no public service has gone unsqueezed. Tax dollars haven’t seemed this scarce in generations.

Yet tens of billions of these scarce tax dollars are getting diverted. These tax dollars are flowing from average Americans who depend on public services to the kingpins of America’s private sector. They’re subsidizing, directly and indirectly, the mega-million paychecks that go to the top executives at our nation’s biggest banks and corporations.

Exorbitant CEO pay packages have, of course, been outraging Americans for quite some time now. Every new annual CEO pay report seems to bring a rash of predictably angry editorials and calls for reform. But little overall has changed. Wages for average Americans continue to stagnate. Pay for top executives continues to soar.

One key reason why: Our nation’s tax code has become a powerful enabler of bloated CEO pay. Some tax rules on the books today essentially encourage corporations to compensate their executives at unconscionably higher multiples of what their average workers are paid.

Other rules let executives who run major corporations routinely reduce their corporate tax bills. The fewer dollars these corporations pay in taxes, the more robust their eventual earnings and the higher the “performance-based” pay for the CEOs who produce them.

In effect, we’re rewarding corporate executives for gaming the tax system. Our tax code is helping the CEOs of our nation’s most prosperous corporations pick Uncle Sam’s pocket.

Among our findings:

· Of last year’s 100 highest-paid U.S. corporate chief executives, 25 took home more in CEO pay than their companies paid in federal income taxes. Seven firms made the list in both 2011 and 2010.

· The CEOs of these 25 firms received $20.6 million in average total compensation last year. That’s a 24 percent increase over the average for last year’s list of 2010’s tax dodging executives.

· The four most direct tax subsidies for excessive executive pay cost taxpayers an estimated $14.4 billion per year—$46 for every American man, woman, and child. That amount could also cover the annual cost of hiring 211,732 elementary-school teachers or creating 241,593 clean-energy jobs.

· CEOs have benefited enormously from the Bush tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers. Last year, 57 CEOs saved more than $1 million on their personal income tax bills, thanks to these Bush-era cuts.

—Anderson, Sarah. Chuck Collins, Scott Klinger, and Sam Pizzigati. Executive Excess 2012: The CEO Hands in Uncle Sam’s Pocket. Institute for Policy Studies. Accessed September 5, 2012 at http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2012/.

“...When Americans exercise their property rights under free enterprise, nearly all of them do so for the common good. But now we see that some of them do it for the highly exceptional evil. This is a distinction which our free enterprise system must now make. Let us get on to the task of making it.”

—John Kenneth Galbraith in A Tenured Professor (1990), page 187.

The desire to pass resources on to kin is one of the most enduring constants in human politics.

—Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: NY, NY.

Neither culture nor geography can explain gaps between neighboring American and Mexcan cities, they argue, to say nothing of disparities between North and South Korea.

They offer instead a striking diagnosis: some governments get it wrong on purpose. Amid weak and accommodating institutions, there is little to discourage a leader from looting. Such environments channel society’s output towards a parasitic elite, discouraging investment and innovation. Extractive institutions are the historical norm. Inclusive institutions protect individual rights and encourage investment and effort. Where inclusive governments emerge, great wealth follows.

Britain, wellspring of the industrial revolution, is the chief proof of this theory.

—The Economist. “Creating economic wealth: The big why.” Review of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (2012).

WHO runs the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation? The Sicilian mafia? The People’s Liberation Army in China? The kleptocracy in the Kremlin? If you are a big business, all these are less grasping than America’s regulatory system. The formula is simple: find a large company that may (or may not) have done something wrong; threaten its managers with commercial ruin, preferably with criminal charges; force them to use their shareholders’ money to pay an enormous fine to drop the charges in a secret settlement (so nobody can check the details). Then repeat with another large company.

…

… But justice should not be based on extortion behind closed doors. The increasing criminalisation of corporate behaviour in America is bad for the rule of law and for capitalism …

…

… The drawbacks of America’s civil tort system are well known. What is new is the way that regulators and prosecutors are in effect conducting closed-door trials …

…

… To anyone who asks, “Surely these big firms wouldn’t pay out if they knew they were innocent?”, the answer is: oddly enough, they might. …

…

… The best thing would be for at least some of these cases to go to proper trial: then a few of the facts would spill out.

—The Economist. August 30, 2014. “The criminalization of American business.”

On the one side were Confucians, inspired by Mencius, who, when asked how a state should raise profits, replied, “Why must Your Majesty use the word profit? All I am concerned with are the good and the right. If Your Majesty says, ‘How can I profit my state?’ your officials will say, ‘How can I profit my family?’ and officers and common people will say, ‘How can I profit myself?’ Once superiors and inferiors are competing for profit, the state will be in danger.

—Mark Kurlansky in Salt: A World History.

"And the secret of him is," young Shockley had confided to Forest beforehand, "he likes to live well and he spends his money as fast as he makes it: he'll never pay off his debt to you."

—Edward Rutherfurd in Sarum: A Novel of England, and remarked upon by Bailey Norwood in Seeds: What opposition to usury really represents (October 6, 2011)

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert (MP: Or domestic energy resources),in five years there’d be a shortage of sand (MP: Oil, and high oil prices).
—Milton Friedman

Government failures are as pervasive as market failures due to monopoly or externalities, such as pollution, that arise because of ill-defined property rights. The potential for such failures grows as government grows.

—Boskin, Michael J. October 26, 2012. “The Anatomy of Government Failure.” The Wall Street Journal. A13.

...poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence. Only when borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channelled from the idle rich to the industrious poor.

—Niall Ferguson. 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

Having every American own a home is not the American dream. It's the dream of the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of Realtors.
—Don Boudreax

“It tells us, for example, that if we would like to have managers who engage less in earnings manipulation and insider trading, we should look for managers who are more ethical and suffer less from bounded rationality.” That’s not a trivial finding, he says, because the model also shows that choosing less ethical managers may be in the best interests of current shareholders, but not future ones.
—Ramy Elitzur interviewed about his research How Smart Managers Make Dumb Decisions and Why Shareholders Encourage Them. University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

The most radical revolutionary will become conservative the day after the revolution.
—Hannah Arendt

One of the basic premises of the Occupy movement is the idea that democracy exists for most Americans as little more than an unhappy choice between two sides of the same corporate coin.

—Jeff Sharlet. November 24, 2011. “The Occupation.” Rolling Stone.

From a rational perspective, joining a protest rally is like voting: a complete waste of time. The odds that your voice or your protest sign will make a difference are no better than the odds that your vote will change an election. Yet people do join protests, and people do vote. They do these things not to advance their rational self-interest but to express moral passions and moral identities.

—Jonathan Haidt. January 2012. “The Moral Foundations of Occupy Wall Street.” Reason magazine. Pages 33-39.

Raising taxes on high incomes, as Mr. Obama proposes, would only cut the deficit by about 6%, even assuming—wrongly —that those higher taxes wouldn’t slow the economy.

The much bigger fiscal drain from the wealthy is on the federal expenditure side of the budget ledger: tens of billions each year in grants, loans, subsidies, guarantees and benefits pocketed each year by wealthy Americans as individuals and firms.

We propose a new law: Let’s call it The Millionaire Subsidy Act. It would prohibit anyone with an annual income of over $1 million from receiving any government benefits. There’s a big advantage to cutting benefits to millionaires rather than raising their tax rates to 40% or 50%...

Let’s be clear on one point: We do not mean to demean the wealthy. The gratuitous bashing of rich people by the president and so many others in Washington is downright offensive. The United States is an affluent society because Americans reap rewards when they employ their talents, their innovative ideas, their entrepreneurial drive, and their sweat equity in ways that make products or provide services we all enjoy.

The Robber Barons today aren’t those who made fortunes by giving people what they want—whether they are Bill Gates, Michael Dell or LeBron James—but those legal bandits who make their fortunes by using political influence to plunder the Treasury.

—Stephen Moore and Walter E. Williams

Much of the economic history of Britain during the period under discussion here cannot be properly understood without realizing that after the middle of the eighteenth century redistributive activities, inimical to economic development, were on the retreat. The attacks on mercantilism – which was the formal manifestation of rent-seeking – by liberal economists were one front on which this battle was fought.

—Joel Mokyr (2009) in The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850.

We have a situation where we in essence invite corporations to buy their own tax rate, where they spend money on lobbying and they get their special deals, rather than just having one consistently applied competitive tax rate where everybody gets the same deal.

—Raquel Alexander from the University of Kansas, interviewed on Planet Money podcast (Jack Abramoff on Lobbying; December 20, 2011).

In the 1960s, he wrote an exposé for Newsday about urban planner Robert Moses's foolhardy plan to build a bridge across Long Island Sound from Rye, N.Y., to Oyster Bay, Long Island. Had the bridge been built, its gigantic piers would have interfered with the tide and caused water pollution, Mr. Caro argues. Although then-Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and State Assembly speaker Anthony Travia were both aware of the dangers, the assembly, under Moses's spell, initially voted in favor of the project "by something like 138 to 4."

That vote was a revelation to Mr. Caro. "Here's a guy who wasn't elected to anything, and he has more power than anyone else," he thought. "And you, Bob, think you're writing about political power, and you don't have any idea where he got this power."

His second great awakening occurred in 1965 while taking a class on urban planning at Harvard. The instructors were teaching the students that highways were built according to mathematical models: Urban planners measured factors like population density and commute time and picked their locations accordingly.

Still smarting from his encounter with Moses, Mr. Caro thought, "No, that's wrong. Highways get built where they're built because Robert Moses wants them built there."

—Brian Bolduc. May 5-6, 2012. “Robert Caro: Political Power—How to Get It and Use It.” The Wall Street Journal. A13.

Moreover, insofar as market failure theorists are right to focus on ‘incentive compatibility’, they fail to apply this analysis to their favored institutional alternatives. A consistent analysis of collective action and asymmetric information problems reveals that these are often more pronounced in a public sector environment than they are in a regime of ‘imperfect markets’.

—Mark Pennington. 2011. Robust Political Economy.

Jacob: Alex, you’ve been doing these pieces on lobbying for a while now, and what’s been illuminating to me is how much the Congress people themselves need these fundraisers. They need this constant flow of money to get reelected...

Alex: Yeh, you know a lot of people think of all these lobbyists, that they’re bum-rushing Congress, throwing money at them and trying to corrupt them with their money, but [lobbyist] Jimmy Williams says it’s the other way around: Congress people were constantly pestering him. They were constantly calling, and a lot of time it was Congressmen whose votes he didn’t even need.

—Planet Money podcast. “A Former Lobbyist Tells All.” January 27, 2012.

For much of recorded history, the arch-enemy of economic growth was not population pressure so much as predators, pirates, and parasites, often known euphemistically by economists as “rent-seekers,” who found it easier to pillage and plunder the work of others than to engage in economically productive activities themselves. Whether they were the King’s or the Bishop’s tax collectors, highwaymen, corrupt officials, greedy local monopolies, guilds that tightly controlled entry and production, or invading neighboring armies, aggressive rent-seeking often led to the end of the economic activity that brought about growth. In this way growth, in truly dialectical fashion, created the conditions that led to its own demise.

Wealthy towns such as Milan, Antwerp, and Magdeburg raised the envy and greed of strong neighbors, who besieged, sacked, and taxed them. Only a few areas with unusual geographical characteristics such as Venice or the maritime provinces of the Dutch Republic could avoid the worst of these savages, but even they had to devote a large proportion of their economic surplus to defense.

…

Britain was unusually luck in two respects…

British society because unusually good at restraining the greatest local bully of them all, namely the King. The principle that Britons would not be taxed unless they agreed to be, embodied in Article 4 of the Declaration of Rights of 1689…should be regarded as an important step toward constraining this one form of rent-seeking.

…

Much of the economic history of Britain during the period under discussion here cannot be properly understood without realizing that after the middle of the eighteenth century redistributive activities, inimical to economic development, were on the retreat. The attacks on mercantilism—which was the formal manifestation of rent-seeking—by liberal economists were one front on which this battle was fought.

—Joel Mokyr. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850. Pages 7-8.

Speaking before the United Auto Workers union in Washington, Obama, champion of the working man, challenged auto bailout "naysayers" to "come around" and admit that "standing by American workers was the right thing to do," as bailouts "saved" the auto industry. (You have to wonder whether downtrodden citizens appreciate just how close they came to having to roller-skate to work.)

"They're out there talking about you like you're some special interest that needs to be beaten down," Obama told cheering union members. And those who claim that bailouts were just a labor payback are simply peddling a "load of you-know-what."

I do know what, Mr. President.

Because actually, the United Auto Workers union is a special interest. Like other unions, the UAW regularly lobbies Congress, funds Democratic candidates across the country with millions, and advocates public policy that undercuts competition and free trade. And, as The New York Times recently reported, the UAW and other unions will "put their vast political organizations into motion behind Mr. Obama." (Nothing like a few strategic taxpayer "investments" to get labor inspired.)

…

But ponder this: The same week our greed-averse president sends a fundraising letter demonizing the Koch brothers—dubious self-starters and risk takers who employ about 70,000 people without bailouts and hand out billions in noncoerced charity—he is busy celebrating policy that forces taxpayers to be their brother's keeper, even though their brother continues to make terrible decisions free of consequence.

—David Harsanyi. February 29, 2012. “Obama’s Union Speech a ‘Load of You-Know-What.’” Syndicated columnist.

I’ve had conversations with Democrat givers out here in the Bay area, and I’ll tell you, you won’t believe the requests their getting [that is, requests of lobbyists from politicians]. The opening ante is a million dollars…that’s sort of the baseline. This is unprecedented. And, in fact, one thing that John [McCain] and I experienced was that sometimes the corporations that didn’t like this system would come to us and say, “You know, it’s not legalized bribery, it’s legalized extortion.” Because it’s not like the company CEO calls up and says, “Gee, I’d love to give you some money.” It’s usually the other way around. The politician or their agent who’s got the superpac: they’re the ones calling up and asking for the money…

—Russ Feingold. “Take the Money and Run for Office.” This American Life. National Public Radio. April 1, 2012.

Ganesh said that he gave the deity whatever money he could spare, which was sometimes as little as one rupee—roughly two cents. Everything in the temple, Ganesh said, came from devotees like him, and he added, “So of course it belongs to God!”.

Wouldn’t it be a good thing, I asked if the deity’s wealth were used to help people? By that logic, Ganesh said, valuable objects should also be removed from churches and mosques. Moreover, he insisted, the money would not “reach the right hands.”

…

“If the government takes hold of the temple’s wealth, they will loot it,” Ganesh concluded.

—Halpern, Jake. April 30, 2012. “The Secret of the Temple.” The New Yorker.

That corporations can undo the regulations affecting them has been demonstrated time and again.

—Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna. May 22, 2012. “Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not so Wild a Dream.” The Nation.

As Senator Dick Durbin observed, “The banks…are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they, frankly, own the place.”

—Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna. May 22, 2012. “Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not so Wild a Dream.” The Nation.

The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government's inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed. You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again. "It's like a scorched-earth policy," says Michael Greenberger, a former regulator who was heavily involved with the drafting of Dodd-Frank. "It requires constant combat. And it never, ever ends."

—Matt Taibbi. May 24, 2012. “The Slow, Painful Death of Dodd-Frank.” Rolling Stone magazine.

Official corruption, which would ruin a commonwealth, serves in Russia as a salutary relief from the pressure of absolutism.

—John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) in The History of Freedom in Antiquity.

—Ronald Bailey in Reason magazine (July, 2012) reviewing Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2012). Anything in quotes is from the book.

ERS concluded that conservation compliance reduced soil erosion on highly erodible cropland by 331 million tons a year — a 40 percent reduction between 1982 and 1997.44

Unfortunately, those gains were short-lived. Enforcement of conservation requirements weakened and in 1996 went off the rails altogether when Congress made an abortive push to phase out farm subsidies — and with them the conservation requirements. The phase-out of farm subsidies turned out to be a mirage, and Congress immediately returned to its old habits — plowing billions into farmers’ hands through ad hoc disaster payments and bringing all the farm subsidies back with a vengeance in the 2002 farm bill.

The only thing that turned out to be real was the phase-out of enforcement of conservation requirements. The result has been a decade of lost progress and mounting problems.

—Cox, Craig, Andrew Hug, and Nils Bruzelius. April 2011. Losing Ground. Environmental Working Group.

Bribery would be less of a problem if it wasn’t also a solid investment…Bribery offered an average return of 10-11 times the value of the bung paid out to win a contract, measured by the jump in stockmarket value when the contract was won. America’s Department of Justice found similarly high returns in cases it has produced.

—The Economist. June 2, 2012. “Corruption: You get who you pay for.” Page 89.

In a report to be released Tuesday by the Manhattan Institute, economist (and former senior Clinton Administration official) Rob Shapiro and co-author Douglas Dowson sort through the academic literature and find that "corporate political efforts generally have positive effects on a firm's market value and its shareholder returns."

...

Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Dowson looked at studies covering corporate political spending from 1974 to 2011, when most corporate political spending flowed through political action committees. Not surprisingly, the heaviest political spending was done by companies in industries that were heavily regulated, highly concentrated or when they received much of their revenue from government.

--The Wall Street Journal. June 18, 2012. "Political Spending Pays." A12.

Last but not least, Glass-Steagall helped restrain the political power of banks. Under the old regime, commercial banks, investment banks and insurance companies had different agendas, so their lobbying efforts tended to offset one another. But after the restrictions ended, the interests of all the major players were aligned. This gave the industry disproportionate power in shaping the political agenda. This excessive power has damaged not only the economy but the financial sector itself. One way to combat this excessive power, if only partially, is to bring Glass-Steagall back.

—Luigi Zingales defends Glass-Steagall. Marginal Revolution blog. June 11, 2012.

The white people brought whisky to our village, made our people drink, and cheated them out of their homes, guns and traps. This fraudulent system was carried to such an extent that I apprehended serious difficulties might occur, unless a stop was put to it. Consequently I visited all the whites and begged them not to sell my people whisky. One of them continued the practice openly; I took a party of my young men, went to his house, took out his barrel, broke in the head and poured out the whisky. I did this for fear some of 'the whites might get killed by my people when they were drunk.

Our people were treated very badly by the whites on many occasions. At one time a white man beat one of our women cruelly, for pulling a few suckers of corn out of his field to suck when she was hungry. At another time one of our young men was beat with clubs by two white men, for opening a fence which crossed our road to take his horse through. His shoulder blade was broken and his body badly braised, from the effects of which be soon after died.

—Blackhawk. 1955. The Autobiography of Black Hawk.

Don't count on widespread reform. The state's legislature is so heavily gerrymandered that, once elected, officials can act without fear of losing their seats. They regularly ignore calls for reforms, such as banning lawmakers from sending money to groups staffed by their relatives or political aides.

Only when New York legislators cross the line into actual corruption do they risk their political careers. But that's a temptation that many of them have found hard to resist.

—Malanga, Steven. September 1-2, 2012. “Where the Statehouse Often Leads to the Big House.” The Wall Street Journal. A11. About how government welfare programs created by L. B. Johnson’s Great Society and given to the state of New York to administer resulted largely in corruption and nepotism.

The combinations Act of 1799-1800 made it a capital offense for workers to organize, trade unionism and the movement for political reform were underground, and in the early 1800s the overwhelming majority of executions in the United Kingdom were for crimes against property. Naturally enough, it was those who had most to gain from such a view that did their most to propagate it.

—Restakis, John. 2010. Harmonizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers: NY, NY.

[People cannot buy health care across state lines because] the state legislatures like to keep this captive industry, so that when the acupuncture lobby comes to Springfield, IL and says, "We will show our gratitude to you if you will just...make it mandatory that acupuncture has to be covered in our state...so, the plans get more and more comprehensive and lavish and people are forced to buy things they don't want to buy...and up, up, up goes the cost of health insurance.

—Will, George (guest). September 24, 2012. “George Will.” Here’s The Thing with Alec Baldwin.

Were the officers of the army to oppose any reduction in the number of forces with the same zeal and unanimity with which master manufacturers set themselves against every law that is likely to increase the number of their rivals . . . ; were the former to animate their soldiers in the same manner as the latter enflame their workmen to attack with violence and outrage the proposers of any such regulation; [then] to attempt to reduce the army would be as dangerous as it has now become to attempt to diminish in any respect the [privileges] which our manufacturers have obtained. . . . [This state of affairs] has so much increased the number of some particular tribes of [lobbyists], that, like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature. The member who . . . has the authority enough to be able to thwart them . . . [cannot be protected] from the most infamous abuse and detraction, from personal insults, nor sometimes from real danger arising from the insolent outrage of furious and disappointed [businessmen and their employees].

—Adam Smith. Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 438 (orig. 1776)

Mr Das insists that liberal ideas offer the clearest answer to many of India’s woes. Corruption, for example, will not be beaten with a big, new authoritarian bureaucracy, as anti-graft protesters want. Instead discretionary powers must be wrested from dodgy bureaucrats and politicians, the state made smaller, and markets allowed, openly and freely, to allocate resources. That means making the state more efficient. Every Indian factory-owner must, Mr Das writes, on average, confront 17 different inspectors, each with the power to close his business. (In other words, they must be bribed.) His solutions to the slowdown in economic growth would include making it easier for companies to hire and fire and to make the buying and selling of land more transparent.

—The Economist. November 10, 2012. “Liberal Worries.”

The spoofing Golden Rule – those who have the gold, rule – suggests why governments are nasty tools for fixing social problems.

—McCloskey, Deirdre. 2006. The Bourgeois Virtues. Page 50.

But lighten up, Kermit, it’s lucrative being green. Al Gore (estimated net worth: $100 million) has invested in 14 renewable energy firms that have benefited from $2.5 billion in taxpayer benefits.

—Will, George. November 21, 2012. “For these things, we give thanks.” The Washington Post. Opinion.

Statism, Tyranny, and Forced Altruism

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
—H.L. Mencken

There is nothing inherently virtuous about government at the state and local level.

—William Marina in Reason magazine. November, 1976.

When you give government a powerful tool, the powerless will feel it first. Absolute power will be felt absolutely.

—Welch, Matt. February 2015. “It’s Not Just About Race, It’s About Power.” Reason magazine. Page 3.

It's no surprise that 35 Republican members of Congress are mad that an atheist group got the Air Force to take out the "God" part in an agency's motto. What's shocking is the implication that they think bragging about "other people's money" is perfectly fine. The old motto "really calls into question the integrity of the agency itself," says Jason Torpy, the atheist and military veteran who got the change made with a few unanswered emails. "Talk about the mismanagement of government funds."

—Elspeth Reeve. February 8, 2012. “People Are Mad at the Wrong Half of ‘Doing God’s Work with Other People’s Money.” The Atlantic Wire.

The panic-stricken and angry mob did not trust old-style republican politicians to govern effectively and called for Augustus to be appointed dictator. It besieged the Senate House and threatened to burn it down with the senators inside if they did not vote for the appointment.
—Everitt, Anthony. Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor. Chapter 15. Page 194 of paperback. 2007. Random House.

What I had done up till now is nothing. I am only at the beginning of the course I must run. I can no longer obey. I have tasted command, and I cannot give it up.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, spoken privately, as he reflected on his newfound status as a French hero and the public’s expectation that he would soon rule France as an autocrat.

Totalitarian states differ in every detail, but not in their nature and cause. And in regards to details, what difference do their differences make? What does it matter to the victims if the infallible leader claims messages from the supernatural or from an unperceivable dialectic?
—Leonard Peikoff, from the introduction of We The Living by Ayn Rand.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
—H.L. Mencken

Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?
—Ayn Rand in the author's foreword to We The Living.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.
—Ayn Rand

I had been nourished by reflecting on liberty. But I thrust it aside when it obstructed my path.

—Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte

Procopy had assumed that, just as the villagers in Russia can build a house in a day, so, with a strong leader and a titanic effort, a new order can be imposed from above. This belief is the perennial tragedy of Russia.

—Edward Rutherfurd in Russka: A Novel of Russia

Capitalism did nothing for me.

—Michael Moore at https ://www .youtube .com /watch ?v =tPBo _rjALA 0&feature =player _embedded. Moore’s $2 million vacation mansion is shown in the picture below.

History would be worthless to us if it did not teach us to keep on our guard against the natural intolerance of an orthodoxy wielding power.
—Will & Ariel Durant in The Age of Voltaire

Any power that government has to do something you like will invariably be used for something you abhor.

—Matt Welch. Reason magazine. May 2012. “Why Big Government is Offensive.”

Yes, the federal government is incompetent and corrupt—but we need more, not less of it.
—Jeffrey Sachs in The Price of Civilization, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal, October 1-2, 2011. C5. (I do not identify with this statement)

“The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with most unnecessary attention but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council and senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of man who have folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”

—Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).

I’m the constitution around here, now.

—Huey Long. Ken Burns’ America: Huey Long.

Rewards and punishments can cajole people into cooperating, but they are costly to implement. A theoretical study finds that, when participation in group activities is optional, punishing uncooperative behavior is the cheaper method.

—Simon Gachter (Nature, March 2012) summarizing research by Sasaki et. al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.

The subject was the unlimited power with which the great Catherine ruled her empire…I spoke of the surprise I felt at the blind obedience with which her will was fulfilled everywhere, of the eagerness and zeal with which all tried to please her.

“It is not as easy as you think,” she replied. “In the first place, my orders would not be carried out unless they were the kind of orders which could be carried out. You know with what prudence and circumspection I act in the promulgation of my laws. I examine the circumstances, I take advice, I consult the enlightened part of the people, and in this way I find out what sort of effect my laws will have. And when I am already convinced in advance of good approval, then I issue my orders, and have the pleasure of observing what you call blind obedience.

That is the foundation of unlimited power. But, believe me, they will not obey blindly when orders are not adapted to the opinion of the people.

—V. S. Popov describing a conversation he once had with Catherine the Great.

Now that Vice-President Biden's tax returns are coming under public scrutiny he's suddenly feeling a bit more charitable than the former, rather uncharitable Senator Joe Biden, whose tax returns probably received little attention, if they were even released at all. For example, back in 1999, Senator and Jill Biden made more than $200,000 and donated only $195 to charity that year, or less than $4 per week. That compares to average charitable giving of more than $5,000 for taxpayers reporting the same AGI as the Bidens that year. On average, taxpayers making $215,000 donated 2.58% of their AGI to charity, compared to the Bidens, who donated only 1/10 of 1% of their income to charity in 1999.

The Bidens are feeling a little more charitable of late, but are still giving far less than average, only $5,540 last year, compared to $9,544 on average for taxpayers in their income category. But they're making progress.....

—Mark Perry at Carpe Diem blog. “Change You Can Believe In, As Long As You’re Using Someone Else’s Money…”. April 13, 2012. Mjperry.blogspot.com.

Hearing that Alexander the Great had been at a loss about what to do next after his vast conquests, the princeps remarked: “I am suprised the king did not realize that a far harder task than winning an empire is putting it into order once you have it.”

—Augustus Caesar, as quoted in Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor by Anthony Everitt

Perhaps the most instructive aspect of Augustus’ approach to politics was his twin recognition that in the long run power was unsustainable without consent, and that consent could best be won by associating radical constitutional change with a traditional and moralizing ideology.

—Anthony Everitt in Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.
—Frank Herbert

Nothing is more essential to the welfare of a nation than the countercheck on government, by legitimate means. A mechanism without a brake, a motor without a cut-off, is built for self-destruction.
—Isabel Paterson in The God of the Machine

I think he came to the conclusion, uniquely among our politicians, that you could not do the good that he wanted to do, with the services that he wanted to deliver, and to free people from the exploitation as he wanted to: you cannot do that in a Democracy...so that, Long, in my judgment ultimately despaired of Democracy and turned to the rather dictatorial methods that he used in the later years of his life

—interviewee on the PBS special about Huey Long.

I represent the good citizens of Louisiana. We are tired of the rule in our state of a dictator. We feel that it is time for this dictatorial business to end. We feel that Huey P. Long has controlled our state long enough, and he does not have the interest of our people at heart. He is a selfish dictator, and we will fight and fight, and we want him dead politically but not dead physically.

—interviewee on the PBS special about Huey Long. Long was eventually assassinated.

You look around and you see what is happening, you can see the sudden social goods being done—being delivered—but this is true of all authoritarian states. Mussolini or Hitler, or anybody else...they all do that. You cannot have a tyranny without a paying-off for it.

—interviewee on the PBS special about Huey Long.

He became as close to a dictator as anyone in the United States. He stole. He used force against his opponents. He destroyed local government in the state of Louisiana. He motto was “everyman a king,” but only one man wore a crown.

—interviewee on the PBS special about Huey Long.

...you could say Mussolini made the trains run on time, Mussolini made the trains clean: are you for Mussolini?

—interviewee on the PBS special about Huey Long.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
—Bertrand Russell

The basic cause of totalitarianism is two ideas: men's rejection of reason in favor of faith, and of self-interest in favor of self-sacrifice. If this is a society's philosophical consensus, it will not be long before an all-powerful leader rises up to direct the faith and sacrifice that everyone has been extolling. His subjects cannot resist his takeover, neither by exercising their faculty of thought nor their passion for values, because these are the two priceless possessions they have given up. The end result is thought control, starvation, and mass slaughter.
—Leonard Peikoff, from the introduction of We The Living by Ayn Rand.

...genetics changes can’t explain short-term history. A glance at world trade statistics confirms that four decades of communist rule, designed to change human nature from individualistic to communitarian, failed to extinguish the habits needed for commerce from the Chinese personality.

—Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal. November 5-6, 2011.

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means, as De Tocqueville described it, “a new form of servitude.”

—Friedrich August von Hayek. 1948. Individualism and Economic Order. Page 16.

The single most damaging error of the modern age is the misperception of government as an agency of compassion. As a replacement for the "divine right of kings," this misperception has, for those in power, been an astonishing success. For the rest of mankind, it has frequently been a disaster beyond imagining. Government is nothing more than structured, widespread coercion, and the idea that it can implement compassion for us by force is simply a vile and cunning lie. It is cunning because people are primed and willing, even desperate, to believe it. It is vile because government allows, facilitates, and encourages mass murder, widespread torture, needless famine, and every form of tyranny. No other tool than coercive government does this.
—Glen Allport

There are two kinds of philanthropists. One wants to save the poor, and the other wants to be the savior of the poor. The most effective way to distinguish between the two is to observe whether the philanthropist wants to use his money or other people's money.
—F. Bailey Norwood

...so many people — so many decent people — believe in (or at least crave, child-like) secular salvation through secular saviors. It's no surprise, then, that persons unashamed to act deceitfully and disingenuously crawl out from under their rocks to pose as saviors.
—Don Boudreaux

Here it may be said that any time when finance is under attack through the political authority, it is an infallible sign that the political authority is already exercising too much power over the economic life of the nation through manipulation of finance, whether by exorbitant taxation, uncontrolled expenditure, unlimited borrowing, or currency depreciation.
—Isabel Paterson, in The God of the Machine, 1943.

I believe that he [King Henry VIII] doth as singulary favor me as any subject within this realm. Howbeit, ... if my head would win him a castle in France it should not fail to go.
—Thomas More, from A History of Humans by James C. Davis

A ruler with the ability to dispense large sums of money, but can only do so with the consent of the voters, may be more sensitive to the desires of the campaign contributors (most of whom are relatively wealthy) than the lower income citizens. The democratic ruler is thus tethered to the wealthy, whereas in a dictatorship, the wealthy are tethered to the ruler, allowing the dictatorship to respond to those who cannot fund campaigns—something he could not before do. This is why the poor often desire autocrats, while the wealthier classes espouse the benefits of democracy.

—Bailey Norwood in Seeds: Dictatorship of the Proletariat (October 6, 2011)

Whoever tells you to exist for the state is, or wants to be, the state.
—Anne Heller quoting Ayn Rand in Ayn Rand and the World She Made.

Those who are most zealous for social improvement will indeed be the last to minimize the evils that exist.

—Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse in Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911, page 2). The Columbia University Press.

There was probably never a time at which among civilized peoples there was so much diffused sensitiveness to any form of social ailment. If we were briefed to defend our own time, the line to take would surely be, not that its evils are few or small, but rather that every evil calls forth a strong and persistent effort to cure it.

—Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse in Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911, pages 2-3). The Columbia University Press.

In every civilized country there is an army of men and women at work, some trusting to voluntary effort and mutual aid, others pinning their faith to governments and agitating for legislative reforms, and yet others content for the time to investigate facts, examine into causes, and pave the way for a more assured progress in the future.

—Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse in Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911, page 3). The Columbia University Press.

Capitalism is organized crime.

—protest sign at the Occupy Wall Street protest. (Not a quote I identify with)

I found that no one could offer me a coherent explanation of why they hated Wall Street, and no one suggested a workable plan for regulation banks. (One fellow told me all we need to do is establish more small farms.)

—Jeff Greene describing his mingling with the Occupy Wall Street Protestors. “We Should Listen to the 99%.” Wall Street Journal. November 13, 2011. A17. (Not a quote I identify with)

They say they don't like my methods. Well, I don't like them either. I really don't like to have to do things the way I do. I'd much rather get up before the legislature and say, 'Now this is a good law and it's for the benefit of the people, and I'd like you to vote for it in the interest of the public welfare.' Only I know that laws ain't made that way. You've got to fight fire with fire.

—Huey Long (T Harry Williams, Huey Long, p. 748).

I used to get things done by saying please. Now I dynamite 'em out of my path."

—Huey Long

A man is not a dictator when he is given a commission from the people and carries it out

—Huey Long (T Harry Williams, Huey Long, p. 748).

It's all very well for us to laugh over Huey. But actually we have to remember all the time that he really is one the of two most dangerous men in the Country."

—Franklin Roosevelt to Rexford Tugewell. T. Harry Williams. Huey Long. p. 640.

He was a crook, but he had no money; a corrupt politician, but the cost of government is third-lowest in the country; a demagogue, but he kept his campaign promises; a hillbilly, but he had no racial prejudices; an ignoramus, but he ran a business administration; a dictator, but he broadened the suffrage; an opportunist, but he had ideals.

—Washington Columnist Drew Pearson’s proposed epitaph in response to false charges against Long (reprinted in "Huey Long’s Regime in Louisiana," Ingham County News, Mason, Mich., Feb. 20, 1936)

Political and religious power is a tick. It numbs your skin as its legs make contact and it plunges its head within you. Only after the tick feasted, increased the size of its body seven-fold, and detached itself from your body do you recognize the bite. You don't see the tick, you only see the infected skin after the tick has left. You never recognize the corrupting nature of power until it has consumed you thoroughly.

—F. Bailey Norwood, from Matrona's Four Children

Man's highest joy is in victory: to conquer one's enemies, to pursue them, to take what is theirs, to make their loved ones weep, to ride on their horses, and to embrace their wives and daughters.
—Genghis Khan, from A History of Humans by James C. Davis

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
—Napoleon Bonaparte

“There’s no work for us anymore—we’re out of work a year at a time,” he said. “It’s because of them”—he waved toward the financial district. “The people who are holding us back. The banks, the government, anyone who controls the money.”

Two middle-aged men had stopped in front of Moss and begun to argue with her in heavy Russian accents. “Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela is the ultimate destination of what you’re doing,” the first Russian said.

“My wife is midwife—she has a job,” the second man said.

“Congratulations, that’s great,” Moss said.

“You can get job, too.”

“I’d love one. Can’t find one.”

“This is waste of your time. Go look for job—put your time into that.”

“Bottom line: go to North Korea,” the first Russian said. “This is your final destination.”

—George Packer. December 5, 2011. “All The Angry People.” The New Yorker. Pages 32-38. Describes a conversation at the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York.

Why do liberals / progressives consistently demonize rich people and the earning of extraordinary profits, even if the income of most people is rising?

In economic issues, the central component of the progressive platform is force. Force employers to pay people a certain wage or don't hire them at all. Force investment firms into mortgage-backed securities and taxpayers to subsidize the homes of others. Force other taxpayers to pay for the education of my students. Force you to pay for the health care of other people.

However, at the same time people support large government plans to redistribute wealth, they dislike the notion of forcing people to do things. It makes us seem dictatorial. Consequently, they must be convinced that the people they are forcing are immoral, and that is why the very richest of people will usually be seen as corrupt to the progressive party members.

—F. Bailey Norwood. “The Political Purpose of Debasing Profits.” Seeds. December 6, 2011.

Yet the belief persisted among many Americans that the needy, new poor and old poor alike, were personally culpable for their plight, sinners against the social order, reprobates and ne’er-do-wells, spongers, and bums with no legitimate claim on the public’s sympathy or purse.

Local welfare administrators were sometimes among the most tenacious exponents of that view...In North Dakota, where a combination of drought, hail, grasshoppers, and collapsed markets had bankrupted nearly every farmer in the state, Hickok found the state relief committee dominated by officials who “think there is something wrong with a man who cannot make a living...”

—David M. Kennedy describing the Great Depression in Freedom From Fear. Chapter 6.

Some of the jobless never appeared on the relief rolls at all because they simply left the country. Thousands of immigrants forsook the fabled American land of promise and returned to their old countries. Some one hundred thousand American workers in 1931 applied for jobs in what appeared to be a newly promising land, Soviet Russia.

—David M. Kennedy describing the Great Depression in Freedom From Fear. Chapter 6.

For it is literally true that the “self-supporting” man or woman has become as extinct as the man of the stone age. Without the help of thousands of others, any one of us would die, naked and starved. Consider the bread upon our table, the clothes upon our backs, the luxuries that make life pleasant; how many men worked in sunlit fields, in dark mines, in the fierce heat of molten metal, and among the looms and wheels of countless factories, in order to create them for our use and enjoyment...In the final analysis, the progress of our civilization will be retarded if any large body of citizens falls behind.

—David M. Kennedy describing the Great Depression in Freedom From Fear.

He believed that government not only could, but should, achieve the subordination of private interests to collective interests, substitute cooperation for the mad scramble of selfish individualism.

—Moley describing FDR. David M. Kennedy describing the Great Depression in Freedom From Fear.

You can’t keep your costs in line if you have aviators that can go on a strike. And if you cannot tolerate a strike, because you will run out of money during a strike, then you give the union what it wants.

—Bob Crandall, former CEO of American Airlines, interviewed on the Planet Money podcast (The ‘Nasty Rotten’ Airline Business; December 9, 2011). This was an answer to the question of why airlines keep going bankrupt, unable to keep their costs low.

Fraternal feeling is possible in small groups, but when we try to regiment altruism on a national scale, the possibility of community is precisely what we give up.

—David Schmidtz and Robert E. Goodin. 1998. Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility.

I felt like I had created a monster here, because suddenly these people were turning on me, and I would hear, “You can make art because it’s not communal enough. It’s too individualistic.”

—Former member of the Black Bear commune. The “make art” referred to painting of landscapes.

…for Rousseau, the first evil…historically…which began the loss of innocence within the human race, was ownership. That was the beginning of inequality. Rousseau is a precursor to Marx. He believes that equality is the proper condition of society…he longs for a time government didn’t impose equality…[the second evil] was making individuals dependent on each other…people become, Rousseau believes, in the modern world, concerned with the status of what he called “the love of self as it is seen by others”, instead of manifesting simple healthy “love of self.” That is to say, for Rousseau, all human animals rightly have “love of self”…so the primitive man and woman loves self and so feeds him and wants to go on living—that’s healthy, that’s natural— …but “love of self as it is seen by others” is different…[it] is the desire for me to get other people to think highly of me: that becomes more important than anything else. This is what happens in modern, cosmopolitan, educated circles. ..

Rousseau added to his legacy with another book, which is politically the most important of his books: The Social Contract. In that book…Rousseau claimed that if we cannot return to the state of nature (which we can’t) we can at least organize society into a self-ruling community of equality, and rule as democratic equals—all serving not their private interests, but the general will, or what’s good for society as a whole. He imagined this as, in a somewhat romantic way, peasants under the oak tree, passing their laws with simple common sense…[he was saying] democratic equality can capture a lot of what was present in the ancient condition, the primitive condition…

Rousseau literally did believe…regarding peasants around the oak tree… “They’re not smart enough to be duped”…their wants are so simple you can’t bribe them and trick them into adopting policies that aren’t good for them.

Rousseau…helped to fuel the most radically progressive event of the century: The French Revolution of 1789. This is a bit ironic. The Social Contract inspired all younger political figures on the continent to make freedom their ideal…[Rousseau once wrote] “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.” So, Roussea’s plea for freedom and equality and democracy (and he did mean democracy in the direct sense)…this was taken to heart by everyone…

[as some people said]…There are two common notions of freedom in the West. One is that liberty is simply the absence of coercion. When am I free? When I am not in jail. When am I free? When you get out of my way and let me do what I want. The other [common notion] is that liberty and freedom is self-determination. I’m free when my self determines my actions, rather than something else determining my actions.

Now, these can certainly overlap…However, they can depart…It’s possible to follow one by not the other. We can illuminate this difference by asking a simple question: Is a rich drug addict free?...Poor junkies are presumably not free. They have a need for something that they don’t have and they have to commit crimes to get it. My case: I’m a junkie, that’s all I want, and I have unlimited access to it…So I experience no obstacles to getting what I want. Now, if freedom is simply the absence of coercion, we must say the rich junkie is free. But we may not want to say the rich junkie is free. Some of you may say, “That’s not really freedom, is it?” The question is: if we think he’s not free, what idea of freedom must we be implicitly using?...

Now, if you don’t think the rich junkie is free you are probably saying something like, “He’s not because he’s not himself—he’s under control of the drug.” But this implies that his openly expressed desire for the drug is not the real him, not his true self.

And indeed, historically, those who accept self-determination as the definition of freedom, rather than absence of obstacle, have to distinguish between a true or higher self and a false or lower self, so they can on occasion, “It looks like Cahoone is acting freely, but it’s not real freedom. His lower self is getting what it wants: that’s true…but his higher self has ceased to determine his actions, he’s acting out of his lower self. For this tradition, freedom is not just the absence of coercion. It’s whether the true or higher or good self acts, rather than the petty or vicious or immoral desires within me act.

…Rousseau not only accepted liberty as self-determination, he then identified a person’s true self , which anyone who starts with self-determination has to distinguish the true or false self…Rousseau took the self of identifying the true self with the community. My true self—my higher self—is identified with what’s best for the community. My lower, false self is selfish, petty, and filled with commercial interests. So the real me is the me that wants to do what is right for the whole community as well as myself. Therefore true freedom is the determination of oneself by one’s higher self—the self which is in effect the citizen that is identified with the good of the community.

What does this all lead to? It leads to a rather remarkable claim. It leads to Rousseau saying if a member—once they’ve engaged in a social contract and joined together to make a society with each other…—if they refuse to follow the general will that is what’s best for the community, then they must be he famously said, “Forced to be free. It is legitimate to coerce the individual to obey.”

But notice it’s more than that. It is not merely the case that when I disobey the community it’s legitimate to force me to obey: while you are forcing me to obey…”you are actually making me free.” So it’s not force. It’s not obedience. Because my true self is the community, all you have done is remind me what my true self is.

—Lawrence Cahoone. The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida. “The Enlightenment and Rousseau.” Lecture Six. The Teaching Company.

…one longs in reading your book to walk on all fours, but as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the possibility of resuming it.

—Voltaire reacting to writing by Rousseau

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country.
—Milton Friedman

In short, when the point is reached, through big favors or little ones, that large profits or small are obtained under a tyrant, there are found almost as many people to whom tyranny seems advantageous as those to whom liberty would seem desirable

—Etienne de la Boetie. 1552. The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Translated by Harry Kurz. Page 78.

We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or accumulate before the point where we are capable of rendering anyone any service. One what human foundation, then, could one seat the idea of [human] “rights”?

—Auguste Comte, the French philosopher who coined the term “sociology” and proposed a Religion of Society he called Positivism

This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don’t owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it’s a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

…this was how the Soviet Union used to justify forbidding their citizens from emigrating to other countries. The argument was always: The USSR created these people, the USSR raised and educated them, made them who they are. What right do they have to take the product of our investment and transfer it to another country, as if they didn’t owe us anything? Neither is this rhetoric restricted to socialist regimes. Nationalists appeal to exactly the same kind of arguments—especially in times of war. And all modern governments are nationalist to some degree.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

…you will not make people wiser and better by taking liberty of action from them. A man can only learn when he is free to act. It is the consequences of his own actions, and the consequences of these same actions as he sees them in other persons, that teach him. It is not by tying a man's hands that you shall make him skillful in any craft, especially that difficult one of living well and wisely.

—Auberon, Herbert. 1885. The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays.

It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands. There cannot be unselfishness and generosity, there cannot be prudence and self-denial…

—Auberon, Herbert. 1885. The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays.

Third, even if you believed that you could make men wise and good by depriving them of liberty of action, you have no right to do so. Who has given you a commission to decide what your brother man shall or shall not do? Who has given you charge of his life and his faculties and his happiness as well as of your own? Perhaps you think yourself wiser and better fitted to judge than he is; but so did all those of old days–kings, emperors, and heads of dominant churches–who possessed power, and never scrupled to compress and shape their fellow-men as they themselves thought best, by means of that power.

These rulers, whether of the past or present time, under whose mistakes the world has so terribly suffered, in many cases were not bad men; they were simply “clouded by their own conceit,” blinded by the unquestioned belief that some men may exercise power over other men. They did not see that the individual freedom of each man is the highest law of his existence, and they thought, often honestly enough, that it was in their power to give the mass of men happiness if they could only have the restraining, and molding, and fashioning of them after their own ideas and beliefs.

—Auberon, Herbert. 1885. The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays.

Perhaps at this point you will interrupt me to say, “Ah! but here is the whole difference. Today it is the people who govern themselves. It is no longer emperors and churches who decide and issue decrees. It is the majority of the people who impose restrictions on themselves, who approve the laws, and construct the systems they live under.”

—Auberon, Herbert. 1885. The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays.

The man who believes in strong governments, and looks with a favorable eye upon socialism, may now say to me, “It is this very question of force that justifies us in what we are doing. We want to diminish the use of force in the world. The rich unscrupulous man is in reality the man who uses force, and it is the exercise of force on his part that we are seeking to restrain by force on our part. The capitalist who uses force toward his work-people, compelling them to accept his terms, is as much to be restrained by force, in our opinion, as the man who helps himself by violence or fraud to the property of other people.”

To which argument I must reply that, notwithstanding your protestations against force, you are acting so as to establish force as the universal law of the world. When we propose to use force against the capitalist because he forces his work-people to accept certain terms, we are confusing the two meanings which belong to the word force. We are confusing together direct and indirect force. Where I directly force a man, I say to him, “You shall do a certain thing, whether you consent in yourself or not to do so.” Thus, if I tie a man's hands and empty his pockets, or if I pass a law saying that he shall not enter a public house, or that his child shall be vaccinated or educated, or that he himself shall only labor eight hours a day, or shall only labor for the state and not for a private employer, I am using direct force against him. I say to

him, “Whatever your own opinion is in these matters, whether you give or withhold your mental consent to the act that is in question, I require that the act shall be done.” But when a capitalist says, “I offer employment on such terms,” or a workman says, “I will only work on such terms,” neither of them is employing direct force against the other. The employer may be indirectly forced to accept the workman's offer, or the workman may be indirectly forced to accept the employer's offer; but before either does so, it is necessary that they should consent, as far as their own selves are concerned, to the act that is in question. And this distinction is of the most vital kind, since the world can and will get rid of direct compulsion; but it never can of indirect compulsion, however much the growth of better influences may humanize and modify it.

—Auberon, Herbert. 1885. The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays.

Someone is twisting the Catholic Church's teachings on caring for the poor, but it isn't Paul Ryan. His controversial budgetary ideas demonstrate that he has a better grasp of Catholic social thought than do many of the American Catholic bishops.

The culmination of centuries of theological and philosophical thought, the church's teachings cannot simply be satisfied by a government edict to "feed the poor." Commanding "Let there be light!" works fine for God, but for mortal beings, edicts don't carry the same punch.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has long supported government interference in the economy as a means to help the poor. But we suspect the bishops haven't fully thought this through: If God really did favor a top-down approach to poverty reduction, why wouldn't He establish a government with the power to wipe away poverty on demand instead of leaving things to chance and the possibility that someone like Mr. Ryan would come along and mess up His plans?

Perhaps we dehumanize the poor when we treat them as nothing more than problems to be solved, and we dehumanize the rich when we treat them as wallets to be picked.

Wealth and poverty are catalysts for bringing the rich and the poor together in community, and community is the hallmark of the church's mission on Earth. Government is not community. Government is one of community's tools, a coercive one we use when it is necessary to force people to behave in ways they would not otherwise behave voluntarily.

But that word—voluntarily—is key, and it's where Mr. Ryan's religious detractors go awry: Charity can only be charity when it is voluntary. Coerced acts, no matter how beneficial or well-intentioned, cannot be moral. If we force people to give to the poor, we have stripped away the moral component, reducing charity to mere income redistribution. And if one really is as good as the other, the Soviets demonstrated long ago that it can be done far more efficiently without the trappings of church and religion.

All people have the moral obligation to care for those who are less fortunate. But replacing morality with legality is the first step in replacing church, religion and conscience with government, politics and majority vote. Coercing people to feed the poor simply substitutes moral poverty for material poverty.

The bishops dance with the devil when they invite government to use its coercive power on their behalf, and there's no clearer example than the Affordable Care Act. They happily joined their moral authority to the government's legal authority by supporting mandatory health insurance. They should not have been surprised when the government used its reinforced power to require Catholic institutions to pay for insurance plans that cover abortions and birth control.

To paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien (a devoted Catholic), the government does not share power. Paul Ryan knows this. The bishops would be wise to listen to him.

—Davies, Antony and Kristina Antolin. August 18-19, 2012. “Paul Ryan’s Catholicism and the Poor.” The Wall Street Journal. A11.

There was a common assumption among the intelligentsia, searching as ever for a sense of belonging, that the war would bring about Russia’s spiritual renewal by forcing the individual to sacrifice himself for the good of the nation.

—Figes, Orlando. 1996. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (1892-1924). Penguin Books: NY, NY.

The great movement toward government has not come about as a result of people with evil intentions trying to do evil. The great growth of government has come about because of good people trying to do good. But the method by which they have tried to do good has been basically flawed. They have tried to do good with other people’s money. Doing good with other people’s money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else’s money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people’s money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force – sending a policeman to take the money from somebody’s pocket – is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.

—Friedman, Milton. 1978. Tax Limitation, Inflation, & the Role of Government.

Socialism and Communism

But pro-capitalists should also remember two things. The first is that most people do not distinguish between good and bad capitalism: they see a world in which the winners are unleashing a tide of uncertainty while reserving themselves luxury berths on the lifeboats

—The Economist. October 3, 2015. “Schumpeter: Capitalism and its discontents.” Page 71.

The failures of Communist economic policy had the most tragic consequences in agriculture, the basis of the economy of nearly all countries subjected to Communist rule. The confiscation of private property in land and the collectivization that ensued disrupted traditional rural routines, causing famines of unprecedented dimensions. This happened in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and North Korea; in each country millions died from man-made starvation. In Communist North Korea as late as the 1990s, a large proportion of children suffered from physical disabilities caused by malnutrition; in the second half of the 1990s, up to 2 million people are estimated to have died of starvation there. Its infant mortality rate is 88 per 1,000 live births, compared to South Korea’s 8, and the life expectancy for males 48.9 years, compared to South Korea’s 70.4. The GDP per capita in the north is $900; in the south, $13,700.

—Pipes, Richard. 2001. Communism: A History. Modern Library.

“As children, we were taught that he was evil—among the worst emperors of all. Doing a little research, I came to conclude that it’s not true. I consider Nero to be a good, even great emperor, and maybe the most beloved of the entire empire. He was a great reformer. The senators were rich, and they owned slaves. He took from them and gave to the poor. He was the first socialist!”

—Draper, Robert. September 2014. “Rethinking Nero.” National Geographic magazine. Page 110.

In the summer of 1918, Moscow launched a campaign to extract grain from the villages, which the peasants were unwilling to sell to the government at unrealistically low fixed prices… One response of the peasants, rich and poor alike, to this terror was to curtail the sown acreage so as to reduce the “surplus” subject to confiscation. At the same time, shortages of draft horses, mobilized for the civil war, lowered yields. As a consequence, cereal grain harvests declined from 78.2 million tons in 1913 to 48.2 million in 1920.

—Pipes, Richard. 2001. Communism: A History. The Modern Library: NY, NY.

The young democracy leaped at once to a semisocialistic state-managed economy. The commune minted its own currency, ordered and supervised public works, built roads, bridges, and canals, paved some city streets, organized the food supply, forbade forestalling, engrossing, or regarding, bought seller and buyer into direct contact at markets and fairs, examined weights and measures, inspected commodities, punished adulteration, controlled exports and imports, stored grain for lean years, provided grain at fair prices in emergencies, and regulated the prices of essential foods and beer. When it found that a price set too low discouraged the production of a desirable commodity, it allowed certain wholesale prices to seek their own level through competition, but established courts or “assizes” of bread and ale to keep the retail price of those necessities in constant relation with the cost of wheat or barley. Periodically it published a list of fair prices. It assumed that for every commodity there must be a “just price,” combining costs of materials and labor; the theory ignored supply and demand, and fluctuations in the value of currency.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 641.

War Communism was a disaster. In all areas, the economic strength of Russia fell below the 1914 level. Peasant farmers only grew for themselves, as they knew that any extra would be taken by the state. Therefore, the industrial cities were starved of food

— History Learning Site. “War Communism.” Accessed December 23, 2013 at http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/war_communism.htm.

We've tried stunted and cramped versions of libertarianism in the world, and we've tried versions of Marxism that were less stunted and cramped because they had all the levers of power. I am willing to match England, the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong, which are all approximately libertarian societies, against the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba any day.

—Ball, Molly. August 18, 2013. “America’s Libertarian Moment.” The Atlantic. Accessed August 20, 2013 at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/americas-libertarian-moment/278785/.

Gorbechev said that the role of the central planners in the economy should be reduced…central planners were fixing the prices of between 150,000 and 200,000 commodities…they’re setting the prices of pencils, the prices of coffee, the prices of capacitors—everything. Gorbechev thought this was excessive. He insisted that the central plan be revised so that only 1,500 essential commodities have their prices fixed and production quotes fixed by the state.

—Hamburg, Gary. The Rise and Fall of Soviet Communism [lecture]. Lecture 14. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

…if there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care for human beings.

—Mandela, Nelson. 2003. Quoted in: Welch, Matt. February 2014. “The Third Lesson of Nelson Mandela.” Reason magazine. Page 2.

… Wycliff deduced from his theology a theoretical communism and anarchism. Any person in a state of grace shares with ‘god the ownership of all goods; ideally everything should be held by the righteous in common.

—Durant, Will. 1957. The Reformation. The Story of Civilization. Page 32. Refers to England in the 14^th century theology of Wycliff.

He was not a born communist, but as he rose in its ranks the ANC moved towards Marxism and an alliance with the Soviets. Mandela kept portraits of Lenin and Stalin above his desk.

—The Wall Street Journal. December 6, 2013. “Nelson Mandela: A would-be Lenin who became Africa’s Vaclav Havel.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.
—Margaret Thatcher

Like many other gullible guests, Dirac had virtually no idea of the extent of the starvation and economic tribulations in the Soviet Union since the beginning of the Five Year Plan and the adoption of the collectivisation programme: people went round with string bags in their pockets on the off chance that they should come across a queue.

—Graham Farmelo in The Strangest Man

In 1933, the privations were at their worst: the Soviet diet included little milk and fruit, and only a fifth of the meat and fish consumed thirty years before. Almost the only people to eat well were state officials and visiting dignitaries, such as Dirac, who was almost certainly unaware of the cost of the collectivisation programme: about 14.5 million lives during the previous four years, a higher death toll than the Great War.

—Graham Farmelo in The Strangest Man

We barely have 10 years here. We will take it to 10 more and 10 more and 10 more to construct the new social virtues.

—Hugo Chavez as reported by Mary Anastasia O’Grady in The Wall Street Journal: “Chave’s 40-Year Plan to Conquer Vice.” December 5, 2011. A15.

Oh no, we’ve got to leave all that we can to the states. All the power shouldn’t be in the hands of the federal government. Look—just think what would happen if all the power was concentrated here, and Huey Long became president!

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in response to advisors who urged him to federalize the whole social insurance programs created by the New Deal. From David M. Kennedy. 1999. Freedom From Fear.

It is a standing topic of complaint that a man knows too little of himself. Be it so:

but is it so certain that the legislator must know more? It is plain, that of

individuals the legislator can know nothing: concerning those points of conduct

which depend upon the particular circumstances of each individual, it is plain,

therefore, that he can determine nothing to advantage.

—Jeremy Bentham. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. 1781.

It may be admitted that, so far as scientific knowledge is concerned, a body of

suitably chosen experts may be in the best position to command all the best

knowledge available…[Yet] scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge.

…[A] little reflection will show that there is…the knowledge of the particular

circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every

individual has some advantage over all others in that he possesses unique

information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made

only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active

cooperation.

—F. A. Hayek. The Use of Knowledge in Society. American Economic Review. 1945.

...that’s one of the toxic features of the deadly ideologies of the 20th century. Perhaps the best example is Mao’s Great Leap Forward, where it was a screwball idea for all kinds of reasons, but one of them was, as people were dying by the millions, he didn’t change his mind. It was stay the course, full speed ahead, I don’t care about reality.

—Steven Pinker in an interview with Ronald Bailey. February, 2012. “The Decline of Violence.” Reason magazine.

Double-digit inflation has been the Venezuelan norm for decades. An annual rate below 20% since 1987 has been the exception; this year the International Monetary Fund expects a 25% increase in the price level.

Of course Mr. Chávez does not blame the central bank for inflation. In his school of economics rising prices are caused by producers, suppliers and merchants, who control the availability of goods and continually charge more for their products so that they can have a fatter profit. The solution to this injustice against the consumer, according to chavismo, is price controls. When they don't work, the answer is more of the same.

—Mary Anastasia O’Grady. The Wall Street Journal: “Chave’s 40-Year Plan to Conquer Vice.” December 5, 2011. A15.

What is lost on the collectivists, on the other hand, is the prime importance of individual freedom for societies to flourish and economies to thrive. This is the core insight of true liberalism: All individual freedoms are part of an inseparable whole....Many cling to the hopes that the economy can be centrally planned. Education, health care, housing, money and banking, crime control, transportation, energy and far more follow the failed command-and-control model that has been repeatedly discredited. Some look to nationalist and statist solutions to trade imbalances and migration problems, instead of toward greater freedom.

—Mario Vargas Llosa. November 8, 2011. “Literature and the Search for Liberty.” The Wall Street Journal. A19.

After the Berlin Wall came down, the communist movement, the global leftist movement, was left in a bit of a quandary. They pretty much lost the economic argument. They needed somewhere else to go, and global warming has become the great proxy issue. It enables them to achieve many of the same aims as before but under a cloak of green righteousness.

—James Delingpole being interviewed by Paul Feine in Reason magazine (January 2012, page 17). (Note: except in regards to a few people, I do not identify with this statement.)

In an October 2010 essay for The American, Antos described the initial plan as being “based on academic theory with its roots in the Soviet Union.” Just as the Soviets made all economic decisions—how many tanks to build, how many jackets to sew, how much food to produce—through central planning, the RBRVS system is an effort to centrally plan medical prices. But as in the Soviet Union, those prices are not informed by market-based signals, which are generated by the interaction of supply, demand, and willingness-to-pay. In particular, the RBRVS system ignores how much value a patient receives from a service.

—Peter Suderman. January 2012. “Medicare Whac-A-Mole.” Reason magazine. Pages 41-49. The RBRVS refers to the resource-based relative value scale used to price services paid for by Medicare. It is a government method of setting prices, as opposed to market prices determined by the interactions between buyers and sellers.

JACOB GOLDSTEIN, BYLINE: This is the height of communism in China. Everyone here worked on the village's collective farm. The idea was people would work together for the common good.

KESTENBAUM: Yen Jingchang was a farmer back then. In this world, as he describes it, nobody owned anything.

YEN JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) I used oxen to farm but they weren't mine. They belonged to the group.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) Back then even a piece of straw belong to the group. Individuals didn't own anything.

GOLDSTEIN: At one meeting with Communist Party officials, a farmer asked: What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those? No, was the answer. Your teeth belong to the collective.

KESTENBAUM: There was no incentive to work hard, to get up early and pull weeds.

JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) Work hard and don't work hard, everyone gets the same, so people don't want to work.

GOLDSTEIN: In Xiogang there was never enough food. Yen Jingchang says he and the other farmers had to knock on doors and beg for food.

JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) We were farmers. We were supposed to produce food. To beg for food was not honorable. My face was burning.

—Xiaogang, interviewed by Planet Money Podcast. January 20, 2012. “The Secret Document That Transformed China.” On a collective/communist Chinese farm Xiaogant began the movement away from Communist China into a quasi-communist China with capitalistic features.

KESTENBAUM: With this document, they become, in a sense, the first capitalists of modern China. Yen Hongchang ends up hiding it in a piece of bamboo in the roof of his house.

GOLDSTEIN: Yen Jingchang remembers the first day he went out to farm after signing the contract.

Did you work harder than before?

JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) Of course I work harder. We all did because whatever I produce was mine. If you didn't work hard that's your loss. And we all secretly competed.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

HONGCHANG: (Through Translator) Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person. That got people working hard.

GOLDSTEIN: So it's the same land, the same tools, the same people. But just by changing the economic rules, by saying you get to keep some of what you grow, everything changes.

KESTENBAUM: The farmers are terrified of being found out. But by the end of the season it becomes impossible to keep things secret anymore, because they've had an enormous harvest. More food, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined.

(following from previous quote)

KESTENBAUM: Yen Hongchang says he started a couple businesses over the years, but the local Communist Party took them away from him once they became profitable. He says those new factories springing up around town, they're largely empty and haven't created many jobs.

...when Nora and her husband applied for foreign travel papers the Soviet government granted a permit with relatively little fuss. (Later it came to light that the government was all too willing to rid itself permanently of retired residents such as Nora and Fedor, who were collecting government pensions.

—Anne C. Heller. 2009. Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Page 294 of first edition.

Nora didn’t approve of America. She disliked American conveniences, which left her with nothing to do all day; she preferred her old routine of waiting in food lines and gossiping with her friends...One day, she went into a store to buy a tube of toothpaste and found herself overwhelmed by the number of brands and sizes and became angry when a clerk wasn’t willing to help her choose.

—Anne C. Heller. 2009. Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Page 294 of first edition.

You don’t have as many regulations in China as the U.S., that is true. Does that mean China does capitalism better? No. It means that if you want to move a village and build a road you can. It is not clear to me that that is capitalism at its most effective or even its most rapacious form. That’s the state doing what it wants to do for the benefit of the state. That’s the problem. You wanna talk about state intervention? We’ve got it in China. Look, the Chinese system is not just capitalistic its state-capitalism, and state-capitalism is a system where the state is the principal actor in the economy. And it uses markets ultimately for their own political gain. If it turns out that profit is useful for their political gain, they’ll go for it. If it turns out it isn’t, they’ll go against it. I mean, Facebook’s doing a pretty good IPO but they’re not in China—why?—because China doesn’t want Facebook in China. It would make a lot of money for China, but that’s not the point.

—Intelligence Squared Podcast. March 20, 2012. “Does China Do Capitalism Better Than America?” National Public Radio.

In the United States you do largely know what your officials are up to. Look, Solyndra was a disaster…but we found out about it. In China, they don’t want to tell you about Solyndra. They don’t have media that’s getting inside the dirty laundry of series Chinese officials…

—Intelligence Squared Podcast. March 20, 2012. “Does China Do Capitalism Better Than America?” National Public Radio.

These are the facts, if you are an entrepreneur in China. You cannot open a private, bank, you cannot get into telecom services…energy…international resources…fourteen other very important sectors because these are the sectors reserved for state-owned companies. You cannot get bank loans. You cannot secure property rights. If you get into a dispute with another entrepreneur, whether you win that dispute does not depend on whether you have a good case. It depends on whether you know the Communist Party secretary in charge of the legal system.

—Intelligence Squared Podcast. March 20, 2012. “Does China Do Capitalism Better Than America?” National Public Radio.

For all its formal commitment to the scientific method, Marxism violated its most basic feature, namely open-mindedness and a willingness to adjust theory to new evidence.

—Pipes, Richard. 2001. Communism: A History. Random House, Inc.

This is presumably also why in the immediate wake of great disasters—a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse—people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready communism…This is important, because it shows that we are not simply talking about cooperation. In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible. There is always an assumption that anyone who is not actually an enemy can be expected on the principle of “from each according to their abilities,” at least to an extent: for example, if one needs to figure out how to get somewhere, and the other knows the way.

—Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House: NY, NY.

[How a ship is piloted under democracy or rule by the masses:]

Socrates: Imagine then a fleet or a ship in which there is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is not much better. The sailors are quarrelling with one another about the steering — everyone is of opinion that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of navigation and cannot tell who taught him or when he learned, and will further assert that it cannot be taught, and they are ready to cut in pieces anyone who says the contrary. They throng about the captain, begging and praying him to commit the helm to them; and if at any time they do not prevail, but others are preferred to them, they kill the others or throw them overboard, and having first chained up the noble captain's senses with drink or some narcotic drug, they mutiny and take possession of the ship and make free with the stores; thus, eating and drinking, they proceed on their voyage in such manner as might be expected of them. Him who is their partisan and cleverly aids them in their plot for getting the ship out of the captain's hands into their own whether by force or persuasion, they compliment with the name of sailor, pilot, able seaman, and abuse the other sort of man, whom they call a good-for-nothing;…

[How the ship would be piloted by a trained navigator, and why the navigator will not be chosen by the masses:]

…but that the true pilot must pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art, if he intends to be really qualified for the command of a ship, and that he must and will be the steerer, whether other people like or not — the possibility of this union of authority with the steerer's art has never seriously entered into their thoughts or been made part of their calling. Now in vessels which are in a state of mutiny and by sailors who are mutineers, how will the true pilot be regarded? Will he not be called by them a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing?

Adeimantus: Of course, said Adeimantus.

Socrates: Then you will hardly need, I said, to hear the interpretation of the figure, which describes the true philosopher in his relation to the State; for you understand already.

Adeimantus: Certainly.

Socrates: Then suppose you now take this parable to the gentleman who is surprised at finding that philosophers have no honor in their cities; explain it to him and try to convince him that their having honor would be far more extraordinary.

Adeimantus: I will.

[Why the benevolent dictator who is most capable of ruling will never be asked to rule:]

Socrates: Say to him, that, in deeming the best votaries of philosophy to be useless to the rest of the world, he is right; but also tell him to attribute their uselessness to the fault of those who will not use them, and not to themselves. The pilot should not humbly beg the sailors to be commanded by him — that is not the order of nature; neither are "the wise to go to the doors of the rich"— the ingenious author of this saying told a lie — but the truth is, that, when a man is ill, whether he be rich or poor, to the physician he must go, and he who wants to be governed, to him who is able to govern. The ruler who is good for anything ought not to beg his subjects to be ruled by him; although the present governors of mankind are of a different stamp; they may be justly compared to the mutinous sailors, and the true helmsmen to those who are called by them goodfor-nothings and star-gazers.

Adeimantus: Precisely so, he said.

Socrates: For these reasons, and among men like these, philosophy, the noblest pursuit of all, is not likely to be much esteemed by those of the opposite faction; not that the greatest and most lasting injury is done to her by her opponents, but by her own professing followers, the same of whom you suppose the accuser to say that the greater number of them are arrant rogues, and the best are useless; in which opinion I agreed.

—Plato (424-349 BC) in The Republic. Book VI. A fictitious dialogue between Socrates and Adeimantus, which may have resembled an actual Socrates lecture.

The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no personalfeelings, no private affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is subordinated towards a single exclusive attachment, a single thought and a single passion—the revolution.

—excerpt from the Revolutionary Catechism written by Nechaev. From: Figes, Orlando. 1996. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (1892-1924). Penguin Books: NY, NY.

In everything he did, [Vladimir] Lenin’s ultimate purpose was the pursuit of power. Power for him was not a means—it was the end in itself. To paraphrase George Orwell, he did not establish a dictatorship to safeguard the revolution; he made a revolution to establish the dictatorship.

—Figes, Orlando. 1996. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (1892-1924). Penguin Books: NY, NY.

Now I saw real life more clearly and was terrified. I saw a boundless hatred of ideas and of people, of everything that was socially or intellectually higher than the crowd, of everything which bore the slightest trace of abundance, even of inanimate objects, which were the signs of some culture strange or inaccessible to the crowd. This feeling expressed hatred accumulated over the centuries, the bitterness of three years of war and the hysteria generated by the revolutionary leaders.

—General Deniken among ordinary Russians during the Russian Revolution. From: Figes, Orlando. 1996. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (1892-1924). Penguin Books: NY, NY.

Though the law now permits the transition from Communal to personal hereditary tenure, even the progressive enterprising peasants are slow to avail themselves of the permission; and the reason I once heard given for this conservative tendency is worth recording. A well-to-do peasant who had been in the habit of manuring his land better than his neighbours, and who was, consequently, a loser by the existing system, said to me: "Of course I want to keep the allotment I have got. But if the land is never again to be divided my grandchildren may be beggars. We must not sin against those who are to come after us." This unexpected reply gave me food for reflection. Surely those muzhiks who are so often accused of being brutally indifferent to moral obligations must have peculiar deep-rooted moral conceptions of their own which exercise a great influence on their daily life. A man who hesitates to sin against his grandchildren still unborn, though his conceptions of the meum and the tuum in the present may be occasionally a little confused, must possess somewhere deep down in his nature a secret fund of moral feeling of a very respectable kind. Even among the educated classes in Russia the way of looking at these matters is very different from ours. We should naturally feel inclined to applaud, encourage, and assist the peasants who show energy and initiative, and who try to rise above their fellows. To the Russian this seems at once inexpedient and immoral. The success of the few, he explains, is always obtained at the expense of the many, and generally by means which the severe moralist cannot approve of. The rich peasants, for example, have gained their fortune and influence by demoralising and exploiting their weaker brethren, by committing all manner of illegalities, and by bribing the local authorities. Hence they are styled Miroyedy (Commune-devourers) or Kulaki (fists), or something equally uncomplimentary. Once this view is adopted, it follows logically that the Communal institutions, in so far as they form a barrier to the

—MacKenzie, Donald Wallace (1841-1919). Russia.

For the vast majority of the Russian people the ending of all social privilege was the basic principle of the revolution. The Russians had a tradition of social levelling stretching back to the peasant commune. It was expressed in the opular notions of social justice which lay at the heart of the 1917 Revolution. The common belief of the Russian people that surplus wealth was immoral, that property was theft and that manual labour was the only real source of value owed much less to the doctrines of Marx that it did to the egalitarian customs of the village commune. These ideals of social justice had also become a part of that peculiar brand of Christianity which the Russian peasants had made their own. In the Russian peasant mind there was Christian virtue in poverty. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth!’ It was this which gave the revolution its quasi-religious status in the popular consciousness: the war on wealth was seen as a purgatory on the way to the gates of a heaven on earth.

—Figes, Orlando. 1996. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (1892-1924). Penguin Books: NY, NY.

All the people, whether rich or poor, should be provided for; every person should receive his fair and equal ration from a committee so that there is enough for everyone. Not only food but work and living space should be equally divided by committees; everything should be declared public property.

—A peasant-worker’s letter to the All-Russian Peasant Soviet in May 1917. Figes, Orlando. 1996. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (1892-1924). Penguin Books: NY, NY.

By giving institutional form to this war on privilege, the Bolsheviks were able to draw on the revolutionary energies of those numerous elements from the poor who derived pleasure from seeing the rich and mighty destroyed, regardless of whether it brought about any improvement in their own lot. If Soviet power could do little to relieve the misery of the poor, it could at least make the lives of the rich still more miserable than their own—and this was a cause of considerable psychological satisfaction.

—Figes, Orlando. 1996. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (1892-1924). Penguin Books: NY, NY.

Now I was simply a boorzhui, who was cursed, sometimes with malice, sometimes just in passing, but fortunately no one paid any attention to me. Now I saw real life more clearly and was terrified. I saw a boundless hatred of ideas and of people, of everything that was socially or intellectually higher than the crowd, of everything which bore the slightest trace of abundance, even of inanimate objects, which were the signs of some culture strange or inaccessible to the crowd. This feeling expressed hatred accumulated over the centuries, the bitterness of three years of war, and the hysteria generated by the revolutionary leaders.

—Figes, Orlando. 1996. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (1892-1924). Penguin Books: NY, NY.

No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.

—Churchill, Winston. 1945. Found in Larry White’s Clash of Economic Ideas.

—Holldobler, Bert and Edward O. Wilson. 1994. Journal to the Ants. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.

You can see with all this protest in Greece, Europe…I was in Spain, Greece, and I always ask the same question: Okay, what do you want? Apart from some purely moralistic answers, I didn’t get any good proposals. I get answers like, “Oh, money should serve, not people serving money.” My God! Hitler and everyone would have agreed with this I’m sure!

—BBC. Master’s of Money: Karl Marx.

We’ve all been the subjects of an experiment.

—A 58 year old Cuban, reflecting on the Revolution and Castro. Gorney, Cynthia. “Cuba’s New Now.” National Geographic. November, 2012.

“They’d come to check,” she said. “They would break your old bulbs, in front of you, to make sure you didn’t sneak any back into your lamps.” She smiled and looked over her glasses at me to make sure I was listening closely enough. She has one child, a son a decade younger than Eduardo—gone now, having bailed out on Cuba and obtained a therapy credential in Spain. “The idea was marvelous, to change all the lightbulbs,” she said. “The problem is how they did it.”

—A 58 year old Cuban, reflecting on the Revolution and Castro, and how it switched Cuba to fluorescent lightbulbs. Gorney, Cynthia. “Cuba’s New Now.” National Geographic. November, 2012.

The reader is probably aware that immediately after the Crimean War Russia was subjected to a series of sweeping reforms, including the emancipation of the serfs and the creation of a new system of local self-government, and he may naturally wonder how it came to pass that a curious, primitive institution like the rural Commune succeeded in weathering the bureaucratic hurricane. This strange phenomena I now proceed to explain, partly because the subject is in itself interesting, and partly because I hope thereby to throw some light on the peculiar intellectual condition of the Russian educated classes.

When it became evident, in 1857, that the serfs were about to be emancipated, it was at first pretty generally supposed that the rural Commune would be entirely abolished, or at least radically modified. At that time many Russians were enthusiastic, indiscriminate admirers of English institutions, and believed, in common with the orthodox school of political economists, that England had acquired her commercial and industrial superiority by adopting the principle of individual liberty and unrestricted competition, or, as French writers term it, the "laissez faire" principle. This principle is plainly inconsistent with the rural Commune, which compels the peasantry to possess land, prevents an enterprising peasant from acquiring the land of his less enterprising neighbours, and places very considerable restrictions on the freedom of action of the individual members. Accordingly it was assumed that the rural Commune, being inconsistent with the modern spirit of progress, would find no place in the new regime of liberty which was about to be inaugurated.

—MacKenzie, Donald Wallace (1841-1919). Russia.

These employees, like the rest of the Cubans who work for the state—currently about 80 percent of the country’s labor force—are not paid in CUCs. They’re paid in the other currency, the Cuban national peso. One national peso is worth 1/24 of a CUC, or just over four cents, and in socialist Cuba state salaries are fixed; the range as of mid-2012 was between about 250 and 900 pesos a month. Some workers now receive a CUC stimulus to augment their peso wages, and recent changes are lifting top-end salary limits and linking pay more to productivity than to preset increments. But it was Cubans who taught me the national comic line about public workplace philosophy: “They pretend to pay us, while we pretend to work.”

Forty CUCs in a state store, that is. Cubans maintain a robust black market—por la izquierda, they call it, “over to the left”—in which anything can be obtained. But the most surrealistic aspect of life in Cuba 2012 is the vigor with which the government, the same entity paying Cubans in pesos, sells goods to Cubans in CUCs. Retail stores, like pharmaceutical factories and nickel mines, are national enterprises, run by the state. Clerks often don’t bother specifying “CUC” on the pricing of merchandise either; if a thing whirs or glitters or comes in good packaging, Cubans know the currency in which it is being sold, and regardless of whatever the ghost of Che may be whispering in their ear, they want it.

—Gorney, Cynthia. “Cuba’s New Now.” National Geographic. November, 2012.

The taxi fleet, like the rest of the tourist industry, is replete with splendidly educated Cubans no longer practicing their professions because their years of study to be of service to the nation—in engineering, medicine, psychology—produced salaries in “the money that’s worthless,” as a kindly Cuban bank teller once remarked to me. The phenomenon is referred to as the “inverted pyramid.” Every Cuban who repeated that term to me did so in a tone of despair, as in: This, you see, is why the ambitious young keep leaving.

—Gorney, Cynthia. “Cuba’s New Now.” National Geographic. November, 2012.

There’s stealing too, which during the post-Soviet-collapse depression years emerged as a nationwide mechanism for family survival. The verb luchar, which means “fight,” also translates loosely in Cuba to “transfer workplace items into one’s personal possession, which the system impels us to do because our salaries won’t cover a lousy Bucanero.” The standard lucha involves eating, drinking, using, bartering, or selling the items in question. Reform campaigns pushed by Raúl Castro have produced scores of high-level corruption arrests, but one defining quality of any attractive workplace, still, is the nature of the lucha. (“If you can’t look around and find things you can take home or resell,” a woman in her 40s from a working-class neighborhood outside Havana told me firmly, “then it’s not a good job.”)

—Gorney, Cynthia. “Cuba’s New Now.” National Geographic. November, 2012.

“There is a widespread belief that crises occur in capitalism mostly. The word crisis is associated with the word capitalism. While if you look in a comparative way, you see that the largest economic and also human catastrophes happen in non-market systems, when there’s a heavy concentration of political power—Stalin, Mao, the Khmer Rouge, many other cases.”

Going back to the 19^th century, industrializing economies recovered best after a crisis with no or limited intervention. Yet Keynesians continue to insist that only the state can compensate for the flaws of the market, he says.

“This idea that markets tend to fall into self-perpetuating crises and only wise government can extract the country out of this crisis implicitly assumes that you have two kinds of people. Normal people who are operating in the markets, and better people who work for the state. They deny human nature.”

—Balcerowicz, Leszek [interviewee] and Matthew Kaminski [interviewer]. December 15-16, 2012. “The Anti-Bernanke.” The Wall Street Journal. A15.

Anarchism

Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society. Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails.

—Emma Goldman in Anarchism and Other Essays.

States are ready to cut each other’s throats [for] some heaps of sand. Entire hations become the dupes of avaricious businessmen, who beguile them with the hope of wealth, the fruit of which they gather only for themselves. Countries are depopulated, taxation is piled up, peoples are impoverished, to satisfy the greed of a small group.

—D’Holback. Source: Will Durant in The Story of Civiliation. Part IX. The Age of Voltaire. Page 707.

In fact, there is hardly a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary ONLY to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only… Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests.

—Emma Goldman in Anarchism and Other Essays.

Oligarchy (rule by the rich)

I will be an adversary of the people…and in the Council I will do it all the evil that I can.

—Oath taken by oligarchic clubs in ancient clubs, according to Aristotle. Source: Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 19. Page 465.

Fascism

Might is Right

Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it; we found it existing before, and shall leave it to exist forever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do.

—Thucydides (416 BC), an Athenian, explaining why Athens was demanding the Isle of Melos to become a subject state into the Athenian empire. From: Durant, Will. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 18: The Suicide of Greece. Page 443.

Unintended Consequences

Give a man a sheet of meal with a dint in it, he says, and ask him to flatten it out. What does he do? If he knows nothing of metal work, he takes a hammer and knocks the dint flat, only to find that it has reappeared elsewhere. He applies the hammer again at the new point with the same result, and so he goes on till he convinces himself that dints are not to be levelled out by this direct and easy method. So it is, urges Mr. Spencer, with society. We find some evil or evils which we seek to prevent by direct and forcible means, only to find, says this critic of social effort, that a corresponding evil appears somewhere else. We put down overt crime only to find that some form of secret vice is increasing. A temperance crusade suppresses drunkenness, and it is discovered that those who used to drink now find an outlet for excitement in gambling. Compensation for accidents is secured by law to workmen, and in consequence it is alleged that elderly workmen are refused situations. Workmen form trade unions only to maintain and improve the conditions of their work, and no sooner do they succeed than their employers imitate them and form federations by which the unions are overpowered...Mr. Spencer did well to call attention, that every change, however good in itself, provokes unforeseen reactions, and that if we are to achieve permanent and assured good we must as far as possible keep in view the life of society as a whole and seek not jealously to magnify our own little sectional interest at the expense of the others, but rather to correlate it with the work that others are doing and endeavor to induce in them the same spirit.

—Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse in Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911, page 5.). The Columbia University Press.

Justinian sought to enforce the views of the Church on divorce, and forbade it except when one of the parties wished to enter a convent or monastery. But this was too extreme a departure from existing custom and law; large sections of the public protested that it would increase the number of poisonings.

--Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 113.

Economists in Academia

“I’m going to be an economist, but I want to make my small contribution to the liberal agenda. Peace, a better break for the poor and the inner cities, greater equality in income distribution, government assuming its proper responsibilities. I haven’t got it fully worked out yet.”

“Most unwise,” said McCrimmon, adding with some emphasis, “most unwise. And certainly impractical.”

“Why, sir?”

“You simply won’t get tenure. Tenure was originally invented to protect radical professors, those who challenged the accepted order. But we don’t have such people anymore at the universities, and the reason is tenure. When the time comes to grant it nowadays, the radicals get screened out. That’s its principal function. It’s a very good system, really—keeps academic life at a decent level of tranquillity.”

“Suppose one waits until one has tenure to show one’s liberal tendencies?” Marvin felt obliged to make some response.”

“The only sensible course,” said McCrimmon. “But by then conformity will be a habit. You’ll no longer be a threat to the peace and comfort of our ivied walls. The system really works.”

—John Kenneth Galbraith in A Tenured Professor (1990), pages 38-39.

“Lectures,” said McCrimmon, “are our most flexible art form. Any idea, however slight, can be expanded to fill fifty-five minutes; any idea, however great, can be condensed to that time. And if no ideas are available, there can always be discussion. Discussion is the vacuum that fills a vacuum.”

—John Kenneth Galbraith in A Tenured Professor (1990), page 39.

He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought…No part of man’s nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.

—John Maynard Keynes in a biographical essay on Alfred Marshall in 1924. Quoted in The Economist. December 24, 2016. Page 63.

In sociology as in all sciences specialism is a necessity and it is also a danger. It is a necessity for the simple reason that human capacity is limited and it is not given to man to acquire sound knowledge and adequate skill in many departments at once. It is also a danger because social life is no more divisible into independent sections than the human body is divisible into independent organisms.

—Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse in Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911, page 5.). The Columbia University Press.

There are few branches of learning as devoid of history’s light as economics. Economists are rarely informed by it.

—Jonathan R. T. Hughes. 1977. The Government Habit.

Simple. Be twice as productive and four times as nice as your colleagues.

—James Q. Wilson answering Arthur C. Brook’s question of how an open conservative should operate within a liberal academia.

"I tell you the truth," he said, "this poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on."
—Jesus Christ in Luke 21:3-4, discussing the declining marginal utility of money.

I think there is a lot of peer pressure in the academic community. So, you’re not going to write a paper that says outrageous things … because you are kept in check by colleagues.

—Zingales, Luigi [guest]. October 20, 2014. “Luigi Zingales on Incentives and the Potential Capture of Economists by Special Interests.” EconTalk.org. Host: Russell Roberts.

The only institution that really counts is trust.
—Matt Ridley, during interview in Reason Magazine, Feb 09

If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.
—Emerson Pugh

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
—Harry Kissinger

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
—Niels Bohr

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
—Bertrand Russell

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
—Buckminster Fuller

Economies of Scale & Manufacturing

Sure I have to get up at 5 a.m. and keep on the go for 12 hours. But there’s constantly something different to do—fixing fences, cutting brush, milking, planting, studying computer records, making business decisions, and so on. That’s a lot better than tightening the same nut on the same part on an assembly line all day long.

—Dairy farmer Fred W. Marshall quotes in: Billard, Jules B. February 1970. “The Revolution in American Agriculture.” National Geographic. Page 171.

The scale of the craftsman’s operations was limited by the market for which he produced, which was usually his town; but he was not dependent upon the fluctuations of a general market, or the mood of distant investors or purchasers;; he did not know the economic paranoia of alternative exaltations and depressions.

—Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. The Story of Civilization. Page 636.

This is what manufacturing will be like in the future. Ask a factory today to make you a single hammer to your own design and you will be presented with a bill for thousands of dollars. The makers would have to produce a mould, cast the head, machine it to a suitable finish, turn a wooden handle and then assemble the parts. To do that for one hammer would be prohibitively expensive. If you are producing thousands of hammers, each one of them will be much cheaper, thanks to economies of scale. For a 3D printer, though, economies of scale matter much less. Its software can be endlessly tweaked and it can make just about anything. The cost of setting up the machine is the same whether it makes one thing or as many things as can fit inside the machine; like a two-dimensional office printer that pushes out one letter or many different ones until the ink cartridge and paper need replacing, it will keep going, at about the same cost for each item.
—The Economist. April 21, 2012. Special Report: Manufacturing and Innovation.

For the female part of the population the winter used to be a busy time, for it was during these four or five months that the spinning and weaving had to be done, but now the big factories, with their cheap methods of production, are rapidly killing the home industries, and the young girls are not learning to work at the jenny and the loom as their mothers and grandmothers did.

—MacKenzie, Donald Wallace (1841-1919). Russia.

Factories are becoming vastly more efficient, thanks to automated milling machines that can swap their own tools, cut in multiple directions and “feel” if something is going wrong, together with robots equipped with vision and other sensing systems. Nissan’s British factory in Sunderland, opened in 1986, is now one of the most productive in Europe. In 1999 it built 271,157 cars with 4,594 people. Last year it made 480,485 vehicles—more than any other car factory in Britain, ever—with just 5,462 people.

“You can’t make some of this modern stuff using old manual tools,” says Colin Smith, director of engineering and technology for Rolls-Royce, a British company that makes jet engines and other power systems. “The days of huge factories full of lots of people are not there any more.”

Manufacturing makes up only about 11% of America’s GDP, but it is responsible for 68% of domestic spending on research and development.

Despite China’s rapid rise, America remains a formidable production power. Its manufacturing output in dollar terms is now about the same as China’s, but it achieves this with only 10% of the workforce deployed by China…
—The Economist. April 21, 2012. Special Report: Manufacturing and Innovation.

Big chains thrive because they provide goods and services of greater variety, better quality, and lower cost than would otherwise be available. Size is the key. It gives them buying power, lets them centralize common functions, and allows them to adopt and diffuse innovations faster than they could if they were a bunch of small, independent operations.

—Gawande, Atul. August 13 & 20, 2012. “Big Med.” The New Yorker.

We can bristle at the idea of chains and mass production, with their homogeneity, predictability, and constant genuflection to the value-for-money god. Then you spend a bad night in a “quaint” “one of a kind’ bed-and-breakfast that turns out to have a manic, halitoxic innkeeper who can’t keep the hot water running , and it’s right back to the Hyatt.

—Gawande, Atul. August 13 & 20, 2012. “Big Med.” The New Yorker.

Essentially, we’re moving from a Jeffersonian ideal of small guilds and independent craftsmen to a Hamiltonian recognition of the advantages that size and centralized control can bring.

Yet it seems strange to pin our hopes on chains. We have no guarantee that Big Medicine will serve the social good. Whatever the industry, an increase in size and control creates the conditions for monopoly, which could do the opposite of what we want: suppress innovation and drive up costs over time. In the past, certainly, health-care systems that pursued size and market power were better at raising prices than at lowering them.

—Gawande, Atul. August 13 & 20, 2012. “Big Med.” The New Yorker.

Supply and Demand

All of these [Scientology] organizations were bleeding money. Perhaps it was time to try a different approach. They should create a company…This new organizations—a clinic of sorts—would see clients…shrewdly Hubbard anticipated that the more they charged the more popular they might become. Hubbard told O’Brien he’d seen it happen. Charge enough, and we’d be swamped.

—Reitman, Janet. 2011. Inside Scientology. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: NY, NY. In audiobook the quote comes from 9:30 minutes in Chapter 4.

Education

This idea that the goal of the university is to generate new knowledge is a 19^th century idea. The Medieval university transmitted ancient knowledge.

—Goldman, Steven L. Great Scientific Ideas That Changed the World. Lecture 28: Institutions Empower Innovation. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.

History is messy and life is absurd. Let’s teach that.

—F. Bailey Norwood.

The university is the place where people begin seriously to question the conditions of their existence and raise the issue of whether they can be committed to the society they have been born into.

—Mario Savio in a speech titled An End to History. Quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly. Summer 2011. Page 94.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

—Gandhi, Mahatma. Quoted in: Effendi, Rena and Tom O’Neill. July 2015. “In the Footsteps of Gandhi.” National Geographic.

Engines were made for men, not men for engines … Expert knowledge, however indispensiable, is no substitute for a generous and comprehending outlook upon the human story with all its sadness and with all its unquenchable hope.

—Winston Churchill. Quoted in: Peterson, Kyle. June 13-14, 2015. “Liberal Arts for Conservative Minds: The Weekend Interview with Larry P. Arnn. A9.

[Regarding his first consulting job]…[My boss] gave me a big stack of data…[and said]…we need to figure out how to help them get their drugs approved faster…I turned to him and said, so what do you want me to do? And he said we are not paying you all this money for me to tell you what to do. You’re just supposed to figure it out. Of all the things I learned [in consulting] that was one of the most important: that you actually are supposed to think…If you reflect back [to college] we never ask kids to really think. The secret to getting good grades in college is to memorize a bunch of stuff. The idea that now I had to have an original thought was shocking.

—Levitt, Steven (interviewee). November 21, 2012. “I Consult, Therefore I Am.” Freakonomics [podcast]. Stephen Dubner [interviewer]. National Public Radio.

Since the highest virtue is intelligence, the pre-eminent duty of the state is not to train the citizens to military excellence, but to educate them for the right use of peace.

——Aristotle in Politics.

I did the only thing I really knew, which was to run regressions. And so I spent a week and I ran all these regressions…when I showed it to [my boss] he explained to me very gently that the only mechanism we have for communicating with clients was what we now call PowerPoint. You had two choices, essentially. You had a big bar and a little bar on one slide, and that was one way of communicating to clients. Or you would have an x-axis and a y-axis, and he made it clear to me that regressions played zero part in what we would ever be doing or showing to clients.

—Levitt, Steven (interviewee). November 21, 2012. “I Consult, Therefore I Am.” Freakonomics [podcast]. Stephen Dubner [interviewer]. National Public Radio.

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
—Thomas H. Huxley

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.
—David Lodge

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
— Aristotle

(1) The story goes that IMusonius the philosopher used to say this about praise: "Suppose that a philosopher urges, warns, persuades, rebukes, or expands upon some theme or other of his doctrines, and , his listeners babble commonplace, ordinary words of praise off the top / of their mindless heads. Suppose, too, that they shout or gesture be- / cause they are moved, swayed, and delighted by the loveliness of his^ expressions, and by the rhythms of his words—by certain trills, as it were, of his oration. Then you can be certain that the speaker is wasting his breath and the listeners are not learning anything. They are not hearing a philosopher speak; they are instead listening to a flutist play."

He said also: "The mind of someone listening to a philosopher, so long as what is said is useful and wholesome and so long as it conveys remedies for errors and vices, is too engrossed to have time for wild and extravagant praise.

Any listener who isn't completely decadent ought to shudder during a philosopher's discourse and be shamed into silence. He ought, by turns, to repent, rejoice, be amazed, (4) and show differing expressions and changing feelings to go along with how the philosopher's presentation has affected him and his understanding of the part of his mind which is healthy and the part which is sick."

(5) He also used to say that admiration can give rise to great praise, but that the greatest admiration gives rise not to words, but to silence.

(6) "Therefore," he said, "the wisest of poets, in his Odyssey, has the people listening to Ulysses, as he finished giving the very brilliant account of his labors, respond not by jumping up, shouting, and making lots of noise, but by falling silent as if stupefied and struck dumb by words which delighted their ears and arrested their power of speech:

Thus he spoke, and they all stayed softly in silence,

and they were held by a magic spell in the shadowy hall."⁸¹

[Gellius 5.1: That the philosopher Musonius criticized and condemned a philosopher's being praised by those who shout and gesture in their praise as he is giving a discourse.]

—Rufus, Musonius (30-100 AD) Musonius Rufus. Translated by Cynthia King. Self-Published and available at Amazon.

School is about learning, all right. But it's learning to work a system, learning self-discipline, learning to deal with other people, learning to pay attention, learning what you like to do, what you don't like to do, what you do well, what you do badly.
—Harvey Mackay in Pushing the Envelope

Education is a curiously alchemic process. Its vicissitudes are hard to isolate. Why do some students retain what they learned in a course for years, while others lose it through the other ear over their summer breaks? Is the fact that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to revolutionize the tech industry a sign that their Harvard educations worked, or that they failed? The answer matters, because the mechanism by which conveyed knowledge blooms into an education is the standard by which MOOCs will either enrich teaching in this country or deplete it.

—Heller, Nathan. May 20, 2012. “Laptop U.” The New Yorker. Pages 80-91.

…indeed, the faculty of uniting the sciences and focusing them on the central problems of life, is precisely the criterion of the true philosopher.

—Durant, Will. 1917. Philosophy and the Social Problem. The Macmillan Company.

The purpose of higher education is to detach us for a time from the life of action, but only so that we may later return to it with a better perspective. To be put for a goodly time upon one’s own resources, to butter one’s own bread for a while,—that is an almost indispensable prerequisite to greatness. Out of such a test men come with the scars of many wounds; but to those who are not fools every scar is the mark of a lesson learned.

—Durant, Will. 1917. Philosophy and the Social Problem. The Macmillan Company.

—Robinson, Ken. TED talk. November 3, 2009. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue9sAoFcyOU.

…The [Harvard] law and medical faculties gave their degrees to any man who had paid three term bills covering eighteen months and had not been irregular in attending lectures…written examinations are impossible in the [Harvard] Medical School. A majority of the students cannot write well enough…

—A. Nevins. 1962. The Origins of the Land-Grant Colleges and State Universities: A Brief Account of the Morrill Act of 1862 and Its Results. Washington: Civil War Centennial Commission.

What surprises me most about people’s skills is how poor their writing and grammar are, even for college graduates. If we can’t get the basics right, there is a real problem.

—Sharef, Eleonora, co-founder of HireArt. Quoted May 29, 2013 by Thomas Friedman in the NY times.

I know of a large, publicly held company that would never hire an A student as a salesperson, because anyone whose grades conformed so closely to the conventional wisdom was sure to lack a quality the company values much more than rote knoweldge: creativity.
—Harvey Mackay in Pushing the Envelope

Without an explicit assumption that learning will require hard work, we risk having children assume that they will pass their classes with ease—and thus when they begin to experience failure, they are at risk for making attributions that may undermine their later engagement with school.

—David C. Geary in Scientific American Mind. "Primal Brain in the Modern Classroom." September/October, 2011. Pages 45-49.

You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.
—Sam Levenson

The traditional ideal of the guru or the teacher requires the teacher not only to have mastered the variety of subject matters included in the curriculum, but also, and more important, to have such insight and superior awareness as to be always cognizant of his pupils innermost needs as well as master of the exactly the appropriate ways of satisfying them.

—Karl Potter in Presupppositions of India’s Philosophies

Education should impart the following values, in ascending order of importance.

1. Artha: the value of wealth and property. These are important, and are of some value, but have the least value.

2. Kama: sensual—especially sexual—pleasure.

3. Dharma: religion and a sense of righteousness

4. Moksha: spiritual liberation, whereby the perception of the unity of everything is acquired by acquiring freedom from illusion, fear, and ignorance.

—taken from Dennis Dalton. Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory. Lecture One: The Hindu Vision of Life. The Teaching Company. 1998.

Our research suggests that on average—counting salaries, benefits and job security—teachers receive about 52% more than they could in private business.
—Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine. November 8, 2011. “Public School Teachers Aren’t Underpaid.” The Wall Street Journal. A19. (I post this neither in support nor in opposition to school teacher unions)

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
—Leonardo da Vinci

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

—Confucius

Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.

—Motto written over the entrance to Plato’s academy. Patrick Grim. Lecture 9. Questions of Value. The Teaching Company.

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
—Malcolm Forbes

If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia.
—Tyler Cowen

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students.
—John Ciardi

...engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me. I am terrified by the eternal silence of those infinite spaces.
—Blaise Pascal, describing his feelings after learning what Galileo saw after making the first telescope and turning it to the night sky, from A History of Humans by James C. Davis

Honestly, I feel like nothing I've learned in the classroom will help me do what I want to do in the end. I think it's the people I meet, the friends I make, that really matter.

—anonymous college student interviewed in College Life Through the Eyes of Students.

...undergrads study only 13 hours per week, on average, or less than two hours per day in a typical semester. That's half as much as their peers studied in the early 1960s.

—Miller-McCune magazine, April 2011

Moral education, and reasoning about ethical problems and trying to build character in the students, used to be a much more prominent part of the undergraduate education. Back in the time of the ancient Greeks, it was the most important aim of higher education.

—Derek Bok, interviewed in the April 2011 edition of Miller-McCune magazine.

Few people outside of higher education understand how little control professors actually have over what students can learn.

—Thomas H. Benton in “A Perfect Story of Undergraduate Education.” Chronicle of Higher Education. February 20, 2011.

Increasingly, time-pressured college teachers ask themselves, “What grade will ensure no complaint from the student, or worse, a quasi-legal battle over whether the instructions for an assignment were clear enough?” So, the number of A-range grades keeps going up, and the motivation for students to excel keeps going down.

—Thomas H. Benton in “A Perfect Story of Undergraduate Education.” Chronicle of Higher Education. February 20, 2011.

You can’t eat books.

—phrase village elders in Russia used to defend the traditional culture of the village, who was often illiterate. Figes, Orlando. 1996. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (1892-1924). Penguin Books: NY, NY.

Failing a lot of students is a serious risk, financially, for the college and the professor.

—Thomas H. Benton in “A Perfect Story of Undergraduate Education.” Chronicle of Higher Education. February 20, 2011.

So you get into this kind of tacit agreement: The students don't make trouble, and the professors don't demand enough work.

—Derek Bok, interviewed in the April 2011 edition of Miller-McCune magazine.

Peter Thiel describes higher education as a “giant selection mechanism” and estimates that only 10% of the value of a college degree comes from actual learning, and 50% of the value comes from selection (getting into a selective university) and 40% comes from signalling (graduating from a selective college becomes known to employers.

—Mark Perry writing in Carpe Diem. “Peter Thiel on Higher Education Bubble. Aptitude Tests for Employers Instead of College Degrees? November 13, 2011.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
—Isaac Newton , from A History of Humans by James C. Davis

Reality isn't like anything. It's Reality. Reality itself is inconceivable — it won't go into a conceptual package. But it doesn't need to . We already see it. We simply need to stop trying to take hold of it. Whatever you hold to, let it go. Step into this moment. Come back to just this. It takes some effort. But come back, come back, come back to just this. Just see what you've been ignoring for so long.
—Steven Hagen in Buddhism Is Not What You Think, page 252.

And so it is with many realms of modern life; the chasm separating our folk knowledge and the vast store of humankind’s cultural, scientific and technological legacy is widening at an accelerated pace. Because some of this expertise is now critical to thriving in contemporary life, we rely on schools to ensure that all members of society possess core skills and information.

—David C. Geary in Scientific American Mind. "Primal Brain in the Modern Classroom." September/October, 2011. Pages 45-49.

As for the “practical” majors...they might not be as useful as once thought. In a recent work called “Academically Adrift”, these authors tracked the progress of more than 2,300 undergraduates at two dozen U.S. universities. They found that more than a third of seniors leave campus having shown no improvement in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, or written communications over four years. Worse, the majors and programs often thought most practical—education, business and communications—prove to be the least productive.

—William McGurn in his Wall Street Journal column Main Street. November 1, 2011. A10.

A problem is, we’re talking as if all universities are like Stanford, and Harvard, and places like that. Very few kids go to those colleges. Most of them are at West-poo-dant State, or its equivalent, and those are places where you are getting courses that teach economics with magazine articles, that teach Shakespeare by having kids watch movies of Shakespeare’s plays but you don’t ask them to read them. I’m not talking anecdotes, I’m talking surveys about the percentages of kids who graduate from college unable to write grammatical sentences, where critical thinking doesn’t enter the realm of college life in those places.

—Debater on Intelligence Squared. October 12, 2011. Motion: Too Many Kids Go To College.

We seek no price, O king. We ask only a fit place for teaching and quick minds to teach, and besides these food and clothing…

—Answer to Charlemagne’s question to two teachers regarding what price they require to take a teaching post. From Richard Winston in Charlemagne (1960).

Eight years ago, leaders of the University of Texas set out to measure something few in higher education had thought to question — how much their students learn before graduation…An unsettling answer emerged: arguably, not very much…That conclusion is based on results from a 90-minute essay test given to freshmen and seniors that aims to gauge gains in critical thinking and communication skills…In a landmark study published last year, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa used the test to measure collegiate learning in the nation. Using data drawn from a sampling of public and private colleges, they shook the academic world with a finding that 36 percent of students made no significant learning gains from freshman to senior year.

—Daniel de Vise. March 14, 2012. “Trying to assess learning gives colleges their own test anxiety.” The Washington Post. Online in Education section.

For another, curriculums are evolving. Many new programs are a third shorter than the traditional two-year norm. Even at top-tier schools, first-year students spend fewer hours in class than in the past, as field trips, student consulting projects, international excursions, CEO visits, club events, and more crowd the calendar. It's great to see students get their shoes dusty with real-world forays, but I fear they are losing the ability to read a balance sheet or parse the kind of complex data they'd get in case-study coursework.

…

And teaching methods have changed. More and more MBA instruction is now done by young PhDs with little or no business experience, whose career tracks are driven by publishing narrowly focused articles in academic journals. Accreditation of business faculty is based on advanced degrees, research publications, and understanding the theory of learning. What doesn't seem to count is experience in studying or, better yet, managing organizations in complex situations.

The MBA degree has slipped in quality. Many professors point out they cannot give the same exams they did 20 years ago because the students could not pass them. Adding to the problem is the perverse, mutually reinforcing dynamic of students seeking high grades and professors wanting better teaching evaluations. Too many students are distracted and disengaged. The situation is somewhat like the one American industrial companies faced in the 1970s and '80s when product quality slipped but was covered up by marketing and moving up-market.

—Thomas Hout. HBR Blog Network. Harvard Business Review (online). March 12, 2012. “MBAs Should Take Competency Tests.”

The biggest complaint [by employers and educators of a business major]: The undergraduate degrees focus too much on the nuts and bolts of finance and accounting and don’t develop enough critical thinking and problem-solving skills through long essays, in-class debates and other hallmarks of liberal-arts courses.

—Melissa Korn. “Wealth or Waste? Rethinking The Value of a Business Major.” The Wall Street Journal. April 6, 2012. B1.

Your time in fraternity basements was well spent. The same goes for the time you spent playing intramural sports, working on the school newspaper or just hanging with friends. Research tells us that one of the most important causal factors associated with happiness and well-being is your meaningful connections with other human beings. Look around today. Certainly one benchmark of your postgraduation success should be how many of these people are still your close friends in 10 or 20 years.

—Charles Wheelan. “10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You.” The Wall Street Journal. April 28-29, 2012. C3.

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.

—Lao Tsu.

I teach my students. I teach them very specific things. But I know that when I talk to them years later they don’t remember anything that I taught them. I mean I can ask them the most simple questions about the material we covered and they have no recollection whatsoever.

—Levitt, Steven. July 29, 2012. “Freakonomics Goes to College.” Freakonomics podcast.

The best course I ever took at college was a…course in Shakespearian literature…I learned more about political communications in that one semester from a Catholic nun than I learned in any political science course. It made me aware of the power of language and how telling a story—a political campaign is a story about big issues, but you have to…create a story-line…

—Rove, Karl. July 29, 2012. “Freakonomics Goes to College.” Freakonomics podcast.

Guest: Absolutely. So when you sort of say: Why is it different now than in the past? The theory that I think has some merit for this is the fact that highly educated people can make very productive use of new, cheap, sophisticated capital equipment such as information technologies. So, you give a college graduate, fax machines and cell phones and personal computers with advanced software—it makes them incredibly productive. A lot of those machines and technologies are taking the place of—

Russ: lower skilled—

Guest: Yeah. My favorite story for this is you look at say the ports of New York and New Jersey. In 1950, I think about roughly 10,000 guys—longshoremen. Big strong guys. Guys with strong backs worked there. Pick up a box, put it on the ship; take a box and take it off the ship. That was the technology for offloading.

Russ:Today any person touches anything, except who operates the crane.

Guest: Yeah.

Russ: Forklift.

Guest: Today, I think about maybe under 1000 people. So there's been a drop of a factor of 10 drop in employment. They are all college grads operating [the cranes]. These union guys, the 6'1", 250 pound guys who could pick up anything, they are not around anymore. Unskilled labor lost that job to capital goods [college graduates and machines].

—Roberts, Russell [host] and Lee Ohanian [guest]. August 20, 2012. “Ohanian on the Great Recession and the Labor Market [podcast].” EconTalk. Library of Economics and Liberty: econlib.org.

It’s clear to me that college is a good choice for many. It’s much less clear to me why. I do the best that I can when I teach, but it’s not clear that anything I teach the kids is gonna make them better businesspeople or better members of the economy or more productive…and then I think about my own experience…I went to college with a bunch of really smart people, so maybe it’s all peer effects, in which case we can just get the professors out. Maybe that’s a big part of it; maybe it’s expectations, so maybe the important thing is that I demonstrate to my students is not that demand curves slope down and supply curves slope up, but that I expect them to go on and do great things. I’m not really sure what it is…I just know there are effects.

—Wolfers, Justin (interviewee, quoted) and Stephen J. Dubner (host). August 15, 2012. “Freakonomics Goes to College, Part 2.” Freakonomics Radio. WNYC and American Public Radio.

One thing is clear is that the market puts a tremendous reward on education, so that the best estimates that economists have are that each extra year of education that you get is worth about maybe an eight percent [incremental increase] to your earnings each year for the rest of your life.

—Levitt, Steven (interviewee, quoted) and Stephen J. Dubner (host). August 15, 2012. “Freakonomics Goes to College, Part 2.” Freakonomics Radio. WNYC and American Public Radio.

What I hope people take away from college, and I think the better ones do, is an openness to other people other ideas…

—Murphy, Joe (interviewee, quoted) and Stephen J. Dubner (host). August 15, 2012. “Freakonomics Goes to College, Part 2.” Freakonomics Radio. WNYC and American Public Radio.

College is very expensive and people are insisting on some measure to prove to their … $40,000 investment is worth it…I can understand that…but in reality I don’t think there is a way to quantify the value of college…I think you have to look at quality of life issues…to me, ignorance breeds hatred, and if you can get people knowledge they’ll be less hatred, more understanding—that’s my theory.

—Murphy, Joe (interviewee, quoted) and Stephen J. Dubner (host). August 15, 2012. “Freakonomics Goes to College, Part 2.” Freakonomics Radio. WNYC and American Public Radio.

One of the first things that did change me was OJ Simpson. I watched these [stories] about DNA—I’d never heard of DNA before…the Philly newspaper would do these long articles on what DNA is…I started reading on how, like, science is breaking us all down and how we all have the same DNA except for one strand, except for like this one strand that makes us get caught for doing crimes, and then like we’ll have these old strands that prove we used to be Neanderthals and gorillas together…I was like, “Okay, I can see this.”

Cause one thing I was always taught was science proved the [Skinhead] movement right, cause we are different and “science” had proved that…certain people get certain diseases, because of your ethnic background, our skulls are shaped a little bit different…our makeup is a little bit different, so… “science” had always backed-up my [racist] beliefs before: well, their science. And now [real science is proving the Skinhead’s science wrong to me].

So I started to open my mind to other things…like how there’s only two different types of humans: women and men [not white humans, black humans, etc.].

—Frank Meenik (interviewee, quoted) and Phoebe Judge (host). August 15, 2012. “Anatomy of a Skinhead.” The Story. American Public Radio.

"If you don't classify abstractions, if you're not used to using logic, you can't really master the modern world," Flynn says. "Alexander Luria, a Soviet psychologist, did some wonderful interviews with peasants in rural Russia in the 1920s. He would say to them, 'Where there is always snow, bears are always white. There is always snow at the North Pole. What color are the bears there?' They would say they had never seen anything but brown bears. They didn't think of a hypothetical question as meaningful."

—Folger, Tim. September, 2012. "Can We Keep Getting Smarter?" Scientific American.

In brief, political independence is alive and well, at least among students.

Nowadays, the pressure for conformism comes more from the faculty, which tips Democratic like the Titanic in its final throes. Programs that once upheld the value if not the practice of intellectual diversity tend to function more like unions, trying to keep their membership in line. Some professors make a habit of insulting Republican candidates and conservative ideas with the smirking assurance of talk-show hosts, unaware that their laugh lines reap from some students the contempt that they sow.

The increased political conformism at universities may be traced in part to the redefinition of diversity that accompanied the introduction of group preferences, aka "affirmative action." Schools instituting this policy never acknowledged that it conflicted with competing commitments to equal consideration "irrespective of race, religion, or gender," or that at least half the country questioned its wisdom.

In part the policy has become a joke, with claimants to 1/32nd Cherokee heritage gaining preferential treatment as minority hires. What is not a joke is that the meaning of "diversity" has shifted from the intellectual to the racial-ethnic sphere, foreclosing discussion of certain subjects like affirmative action, gender differences and everything considered politically incorrect.

Thus, the current Guide to the First Year at Harvard alerts incoming students to orientation programs in diversity designed to build connections within and across "nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, physical ability, and religion." Characteristically and tellingly absent from the list is political or intellectual diversity.

Those who established higher education in this country knew that constitutional democracy was not biologically transmitted, but would have to be painstakingly nurtured in every new cohort of students. When schools dropped requirements for compulsory attendance at religious services and subjected all certainties to critical scrutiny, the schools may have assumed that faculty would find more creative ways of teaching the foundational texts and of rehearsing the debates inspired by those texts. Conservative students—and not they alone—long for exposure to the ideational diversity of Jefferson and Hamilton, Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor, Marx and Hayek, liberal and conservative. They want a campus where a professor who says he votes Republican isn't considered either courageous or crazy.

The pity is that, so far, students who desire such a campus will have to work for its transformation on their own.

—Wisse, Ruth R. August 27, 2012. “Welcome To Freshman Disorientation.” The Wall Street Journal. A15.

—Lepore, Jill. September 24, 2012. “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business.” The New Yorker.

For all the talk about income inequality in the United States, there is too little recognition of education's role in the problem. Yet it is no coincidence that, as economist John Bishop has shown, the middle class's economic woes followed a decline in 12th-grade verbal scores, which fell sharply between 1962 and 1980—and, as the latest news confirms, have remained flat ever since.

The federal government reported this month that students' vocabulary scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have seen no significant change since 2009. On average, students don't know the words they need to flourish as learners, earners or citizens.

All verbal tests are, at bottom, vocabulary tests. To predict competence most accurately, the U.S. military's Armed Forces Qualification Test gives twice as much weight to verbal scores as to math scores, and researchers such as Christopher Winship and Anders D. Korneman have shown that these verbally weighted scores are good predictors of income level. Math is an important index to general competence, but on average words are twice as important.

Yes, we should instruct students in science, technology, engineering and math, the much-ballyhooed STEM subjects—but only after equipping them with a base of wide general knowledge and vocabulary.

Students don't learn new words by studying vocabulary lists. They do so by guessing new meanings within the overall gist of what they are hearing or reading. And understanding the gist requires background knowledge. If a child reads that "annual floods left the Nile delta rich and fertile for farming," he is less likely to intuit the meaning of the unfamiliar words "annual" and "fertile" if he is unfamiliar with Egypt, agriculture, river deltas and other such bits of background knowledge.

Yet in the 1930s, American schools transformed themselves according to the principles of "progressive education," which assume that students need to learn not a body of knowledge but "how-to" skills that (supposedly) enable them to pick up specific knowledge later on. Analyses of schoolbooks between 1940 and 1960 show a marked dilution of subject matter and vocabulary. Little surprise, then, that students began scoring lower on tests that probed knowledge and vocabulary size. The decline became alarming in the 1970s, as the federal report "A Nation at Risk" pointed out in 1983.

The focus on the "skill" of reading has produced students who cannot read. Teachers cannot cultivate reading comprehension by forcing children to practice soul-deadening exercises like "finding the main idea" and "questioning the author." Students would be better off gaining knowledge by studying real subject matters in a sensible, cumulative sequence. Instead, elementary schools are dominated by content-indifferent exercises that use random fictional texts on the erroneous assumption that reading comprehension is a formal skill akin to typing.

Vocabulary-building is a slow process that requires students to have enough familiarity with the context to understand unfamiliar words. Substance, not skill, develops vocabulary and reading ability—there are no shortcuts. The slow, compounding nature of vocabulary growth means that successful reform must lie in systematic knowledge-building. That is the approach used in South Korea, Finland, Japan, Canada and other nations that score highly in international studies and succeed best in narrowing the verbal gap between rich and poor students.

In the U.S., 45 states have recently adopted the Common Core State Standards for language arts. The standards have been denounced for various pedagogical and political reasons, but all sides in the debate should accept one key principle in the new standards: "By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge . . . to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation . . . [through] rich content knowledge within and across grades."

Opponents of Common Core's new nonfiction requirement ought to recognize that good, knowledge-enhancing nonfiction is literature that helps students gain the knowledge and words they need to understand fiction and everything else.

The most secure way to predict whether an educational policy is likely to help restore the middle class and help the poor is to focus on the question: "Is this policy likely to translate into a large increase in the vocabularies of 12th-graders?" When questions of fairness and inequality come up in discussions, parents would do well to ask whether it's fair of schools to send young people into a world where they suffer from vocabulary inequality.

—Hirsch, E. D. December 13, 2012. “Vocabulary Declines, With Unspeakable Results.” The Wall Street Journal. A15.

Writing and Stories

Sometimes he gave twenty days to composing one letter, then rushed it off to the printer lest the public interest should cool. He gave a unique apology for the length of Letter XVI: “I had no time to make it shorter.”

—Will and Ariel Durant. The Age of Louis XIV. The Story of Civilization. Page 59. Regarding Blaise Pascal’s The Provincial Letters.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well and you will soon write quickly.

—Quintiliam (35-?). Quoted in: Durant, Will. Caesar and Christ. The Story of Civilization. Page 315.

Is Moby Dick a metaphor for the struggle of trying to read Moby Dick?

—Colbert, Stephan. August 15, 2013. The Colbert Report.

I heard [someone] say the other day … “The only indisputable truth is to be found in fiction.”

—Panelist on Intelligence Squared [podcast]. December 20, 2013. “An Anatomy of Truth: Conversations on Truth-telling.”

I don’t really think most books are meant to be read.

—Steven Levitt. July 4, 2012. “Please Steal My Car.” Freakonomics podcast.

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
—Edwin Schlossberg

What surprises me most about people’s skills is how poor their writing and grammar are, even for college graduates. If we can’t get the basics right, there is a real problem.

—Sharef, Eleonora, co-founder of HireArt. Quoted May 29, 2013 by Thomas Friedman in the NY times.

Now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write, merely for the sake of entertainment, what would be best forgotten, or still, be erased from all books.

—Niccolo Perotti in 1471, in response the printing press. Quoted in: The Economist. October 11, 2014. Essay: The Future of the Book.

If everyone write, who will read?

—Christoph Martin Wieland, and 18^th century German writer. Quoted in: The Economist. October 11, 2014. Essay: The Future of the Book.

Do we read the classics or do the classics read us?

—a conundrum popular with the Chinese philosophers of the Middle Ages.

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
—Josh Billings

—Rove, Karl. July 29, 2012. “Freakonomics Goes to College.” Freakonomics podcast.

It’s what saved me, I think. If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled my writing capacity.

—Barbara Tuchman.

Goethe, reading Chinese novels, observed: “These people think and feel much as we do.”

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 52

Hollywood is a land of retakes. Everyone understands that constant revisions improve the product. In a recent book, “Creativity, Inc.,” Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar and president of Disney Animation, argues that every film starts out as an “ugly baby”, growing through countless changes into a graceful adult.

—The Economist. November 1, 2014. “Schumpeter: Creative Capitalism.” Page 67.

If you divide up the time it takes for me to do research and the time it takes for me to write, it takes me twice as long to write than to research, because I labor over it. Sometimes people try to be complimentary and say, "it must be wonderful to sit down and let it all flow out in that lyrical prose that you are sometimes capable of," and I say, "see that paragraph, it took two days!"
—Robert Ellis

When I read a novel I am looking for one of two themes: an underdog who perseveres in demanding that the universe acknowledge his existence, or the universe redeeming itself after an embarrassing neglect of humankind.

—F. Bailey Norwood

A lot of people helped him out because although he was so enthusiastic about writing, his writing was so bad, you know, he could just barely write in his own language.

—Comment about Hans Christian Andersen. February 27, 2012. “The Fairy Tale of Hans Christian Anderson.” Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast.

Bad writing has always been with us, and one can see almost identical complaints about all of the writing, and the imminent decline of the language, in every decade and every century, literally going back to the invention of the printing press—yes, literally. I think this perennial abundance of bad writing just speaks to the fact that good writing is inherently difficult.

—Pinker, Steven. October 16, 2014. Intelligence Squared. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GubdYZPYPg.

I am repeatedly bewildered by articles in my own professional field, written for the likes of me, that I still don’t understand. And I know why I don’t understand, and that’s because they’re badly written.

—Pinker, Steven. October 16, 2014. Intelligence Squared. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GubdYZPYPg.

Recent research shows that far from being a means to escape the social world, reading stories can actually improve your social skills by helping you better understand other human beings.

—Oatley Keith. November/December 2011. “In the Minds of Others.” Scientific American Mind. Pages 63-67.

...the more people read fiction, the better they were at perceiving emotion in the eyes and, to a lesser extent, correctly interpreting social cues...the more fiction people read, the better they are at making mental models of others...we still find a large and significant relation between the amount of fiction people read and their empathic and theory-of-mind abilities; it looked as if reading fiction improved social skills...

—Oatley Keith. November/December 2011. “In the Minds of Others.” Scientific American Mind. Pages 63-67.

Our accumulating findings are providing increasing support for the hypothesis that reading fiction facilitates the development of social skills because it provides experience thinking about other people.

—Oatley Keith. November/December 2011. “In the Minds of Others.” Scientific American Mind. Pages 63-67.

The emotional empathy that is critical to our day-to-day relationships also enables us to picture ourselves living as the characters do when we read fiction. In fact, recent brain scans reveal that we internalize what a character experiences by mirroring those feelings and actions ourselves...when we read fiction we put aside our own concerns and plans and adopt those of the story’s protagonist.

—Oatley Keith. November/December 2011. “In the Minds of Others.” Scientific American Mind. Pages 63-67.

We may often think of stories as diversions. But how we engage with them involves the same mental processes that enable us to interact with others in daily life.

—Oatley Keith. November/December 2011. “In the Minds of Others.” Scientific American Mind. Pages 63-67.

Like many writers, I’m often too close to my work to see it clearly, and a fresh pair of eyes can be invaluable. Kindness is a luxury I can’t afford: I need my readers to be straight with me. It stings when they trash my drafts, but once I get over my defensiveness, I’m grateful. Writers must kill their “darlings,” it’s often said, but sometimes you need a friend to take the first stab.

—Deborah Landau in The Wall Street Journal. “The Best Readers Are Merciless Friends.” C12. March 31 & April 1, 2012.

Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read.

—Seigel, Lee. July 13-14, 2013. “Who Ruined the Humanities?” The Wall Street Journal. C1.

And just as we do not need to know about biology and physiology in order to love and to be loved, we do not need to know about, for example, Homer's rhetoric or historical context in order to enter into Odysseus's journey of wandering, rebirth and homecoming. The old books will speak to the oldest part of us. Young people will read them when they are touched by inexpressible yearnings the way they will eat when they are hungry. If they want to. Some of these pitiable non-humanities majors might not be interested in literature at all. They might have to settle for searching for a cure for cancer, and things like that.

—Seigel, Lee. July 13-14, 2013. “Who Ruined the Humanities?” The Wall Street Journal. C1.

There is no one right way to experience what I’ve written.

I write — and talk — in order to find out what I think.

But that doesn’t mean “I” “really” “think” that. It only means that is my-thought-when-writing (or when- talking). If I’d written another day, or in another conversation, “I” might have “thought” differently.

—Susan Sontag. March 31, 2012. “A Sontag Sampler.” The New York Times Sunday Review.

Despite the statistics that we are a country suffering from functional illiteracy, we seem to be producing an extraordinary number of imaginative, interesting writers. The problem is that they can't get anyone to read what they write.

—Rayanna Simmons, about her first four years as a first reader for Macmillan

Publishing is a profit-driven business based on a gamble in which the odds favor no one.

—Chris Roerden in Don't Sabotage Your Submission.

“Never start a sentence with a comma.” That's the only rule in publishing, said Bill Brohaugh, former editorial for Writer's Digest Books, speaking at a Mid-America Publishers Association conference. He continued, “Everything after that is up for discussion.”

—Chris Roerden in Don't Sabotage Your Submission.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 3: The Heroic Age. Page 140.

Poetry seems natural to a nation’s adolescence, when imagination is greater than knowledge, and a strong faith gives personality to the forces of nature in field, wood, sea, and sky; it is hard for poetry to avoid animism, or for animism to avoid poetry. Prose is the voice of knowledge freeing itself from imagination and faith; it is the language of secular, mundane, “prosaic” affairs; it is the emblem of a nation’s maturity, and the epitaph of its youth.

—Will Durant. 1939. The Story of Civilization Part II: The Life of Greece. Chapter 3: The Heroic Age. Page 139.

Ms. Clark has perfected a formula that appeals to a broad swath of mystery readers, 70% of whom are women. Her novels feature beautiful, intelligent women in danger, who often orchestrate their own escapes. Her heroines tend to be ambitious, self-confidence professionals—doctors, lawyers, journalists, interior designers. All of them, like Ms. Clark, are proud Irish-Catholics.

—Alexandra Alter about Mary Higgins Clark in the Wall Street Journal (March 25, 2011; D1)

“Inspiration comes during work, not before it,” Madeleine L’Engle once wrote, and for that to happen you must sit down in a chair. I don’t believe in writer’s block. It’s not that sometimes you can’t write, it’s that you can’t write well. Experience has told me that writing poorly sometimes leads to something better. Not writing at all leads only to reruns of “Law and Order.” Which I love, but still.

—Anna Quindlen. April 21-22, 2012. The Wall Street Journal. C12.

I’m convinced that there are only so many words per day in the human body: If you do some longish emails and a few tweets, you feel done.

Finally, how you start each day depends on how you finished the day before. I never knock off at the end of the chapter, or the end of a paragraph, or even the end of a sentence. I always stop in mid-sentence. Starting a new chapter or a new paragraph first thing in the morning might be too much to bear. But I can always manage to finish a sentence. And one sentence has a way of following another if everything else around me is routine enough.

—Anna Quindlen. April 21-22, 2012. The Wall Street Journal. C12.

Ms. Clark's books are routinely ignored by mainstream literary critics, or slammed as formulaic and hackneyed. She says her popularity has biased critics against her. “I firmly believe the more popular you are, the less chance you have to have decent literary criticism.”

—Alexandra Alter about Mary Higgins Clark in the Wall Street Journal (March 25, 2011; D1)

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

—April 3, 2012. “Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story.” The Atlantic.

Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

—Interview with John Steinbeck in The Paris Review. 1975.

10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize,demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.

6. Check your quotations.

7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.

8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.

9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.

10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

—Internal memo sent by Ogilvy to all his agency employees.

The end is to enhance life—to give the self (the soul) body by wedding it to the world, to give the world life by wedding it to the self. Or, more simply, to teach to see, for that, as Conrad maintained, is everything.

—Francis Christensen, about writing, in Notes Toward a New Rhetoric.

Michael Lewis is a fantastic storyteller...but what he does very well is he distills, and he basically will omit things that don’t necessarily go with his thesis...

—Jonah Keri. Interviewed by NPR on September 22, 2011.

It is the function of the novelist to tell timeless and universal truths through the device of a fashioned narrative. A story’s significance as a piece of art cannot be divorced from its message, any more than a society’s prospects for freedom and prosperity can be divorced from its underlying principles. The write and the man are one and the same, as are the culture and its common beliefs.

—Mario Vargas Llosa. November 8, 2011. “Literature and the Search for Liberty.” The Wall Street Journal. A19.

Let me suggest here one principle of the writer's craft, which though known to practitioners I have never seen discussed in print. The principle is this: When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed.

—John Erskine

The most perfect character is supposed to lie between those extremes; retaining an equal ability and taste for books, company, and business; preserving in conversation that discernment and delicacy which arise from polite letters; and in business, that probity and accuracy which are the natural result of a just philosophy. In order to diffuse and cultivate so accomplished a character, nothing can be more useful than compositions of the easy style and manner, which draw not too much from life, require no deep application or retreat to be comprehended, and send back the student among mankind full of noble sentiments and wise precepts, applicable to every exigence of human life. By means of such compositions, virtue becomes amiable, science agreeable, company instructive, and retirement entertaining.

—David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

A style is not simply a response to a particular kind of subject-matter, nor is it entirely a matter of the writer's situation and his presumed audience. It is partly a matter of sheer individual will, a desire for a particular kind of self-definition no matter what the circumstances.

—Walker Gibson in Tough, Sweet, and Stuffy

Novelists seem to fall into two camps: the scientists and the mystics...Scientists-novelists will tell you that writing a novel without a plan is about as good an idea as building a supercollider without a blueprint, measuring everything by eye and improvising as you go...Mystic-novelists, on the other hand, might tell you that their scientific counterparts aren't even really writers, that if you need to see where you're going ahead of time, what good is the journey, anyhow?...For me, it involves doing research on the world of the story, looking into the characters and their motivations, attempting a provisional outline. Once I start writing, though, things inevitably look far different than they did from afar. So many of the data were wrong, inadequate, irrelevant. Now it's up to the mystic in me—improvising solutions, relying on wits, guts, adaptability and a prayer...Back and forth it goes like this, from Mission Control to the missionary, taking the ground-level intelligence and incorporating it into new and better plans, taking the new and better plans and getting a little further, and getting lost again.

—Alex Shakar in The Wall Street Journal. August 20-21, 2011. C12.

Life could be just “one damn thing after another” if it weren't for such stories.”

—Akerlof and Shiller in Animal Spirits

Great leaders are first and foremost creators of stories.

—Akerlof and Shiller in Animal Spirits

In 1916 Georges Polti ventured that there are just thirty-six basic dramatic situations. Ronald Tobias wrote that in 1993 that there are just twenty fundamental plots, which he titled “quest, adventure, pursuit, rescue, escape, revenge, riddle, rivalry, underdog, temptation, metamorphosis, transformation, maturation, love, forbidden love, sacrifice, discovery, wretched excess, ascension, and descension.”

—Akerlof and Shiller in Animal Spirits

It is generally considered unprofessional for economists to base their analyses on stories...But what if the stories themselves move markets?...The stories no longer merely explain the facts; they are the facts.

—Akerlof and Shiller in Animal Spirits

It was like starting to write a novel. When I face the desolute impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate...
—John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley

In American literature in general, and in American poetry in particular, the best known and most admired figures have, on the whole, been collectivists and statists.

—William H. Stoddard in Reason magazine. November, 1976.

Professor X is shrewd about the reasons it's hard to teach under-prepared students how to write. “I have come to think,” he says, “that the two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms.” This makes sense. If you read a lot of sentences, then you start to think in sentences, and if you think in sentences, then you can write sentences, because you know what a sentence sounds like.

—Louis Menand. June 6, 2011. “Live and Learn.” The New Yorker.

From now on, [you will permit] no thought about yourself, only your work. You don't exist. You are only a writing engine. The "secret of life" is that you must be nothing but will. [You must] know what you want and do it....All will and all control. Send everything else to hell.
—Ayn Rand. From her notes on The Little Street where she added a personal resolution.
Source: Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller.

There is a sense, with Lawrence, that he wrote with his entire body, not just his pen, viscerally explaining where lesser authors explain simply with their minds.
—Victoria Blake describing the writing of D.H. Lawrence in the introduction to Sons and Lovers

It took Fontane a while to find the proper vehicle for his talent for depicting everyday realities imbued with the poetic—ordinary people reaching for (and, as often as not, failing to attain) transcendence. That vehicle, as the literary world soon discovered, was women.

—Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker (March 7, 2011)

The Naturalist school of writing consists of substituting statistics for one's standard of value, then cataloguing minute, photographic, journalistic details of a given country, region, city or backyard in a given decade, year, month or split-second, on the over-all premise of: 'This is what men have done' — as against the premise of: 'This is what men have chosen and/or should choose to do.' This last is the premise of the Romantic school of writing, which deals, above all, with human values, and therefore, with the essential and the universal in human actions, not with the statistical and the accidental. The Naturalist school records the choices which men happened to have made; I am a Romantic Realist — distinguished from the Romantic tradition in that the values I deal with pertain to this earth and to the basic problems of this era.
—Ayn Rand in the author's foreword to We The Living.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
—Thomas Berger

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity, and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon, and by moonlight.
—Robertson Davies

When did you last see a businessman treated sympathetically in a novel or play? He has two choices; he can be a knave or he can be a fool. Whose name is better known to the American people—Ralph Nader's or the president of General Motors?
—Benjamin A. Rogge in Who Will Defend Capitalism?

The world is a complicated place, and yet our nature requires us to develop an identity, one dictating our view on most every subject, an outlook with a resolute idea on how the world would be better. Thomas Huxley stated, “Try to learn everything about something, and something about everything.” To do the latter, we cannot perform vast readings on every conceivable subject. Instead, to learn something about everything, we must read or hear a condensed version of everything. Yet a subject can be condensed infinite ways: whose condensed version will you read? Answer: those who share your values and beliefs.

The communication must be consistently bias and slanted towards the reader's beliefs and values, in order to reinforce the relationship between reader and author. Face it, if you are to be read, you must tell small lies, distort other people's statements, and neglect to tell the whole truth frequently. Disagree with me, and you will be the first profitable communicator to defy this assertion. The reader needs to know they can trust you. The reader needs to be assured of your values and intellect. To achieve this, you must repeatedly speak the mantra of your loyalty. Just as English subjects shouted, “Long live the Queen,” throughout their empire to demonstrate their loyalty, so must you cower—at times, not all the time—to your reader as if she were Queen.

The reader must finish your writing with more confidence in their identity, a sharpened depiction of their adversaries, and tools for defending their identity in public. Christians do not visit Hindu priests or Mosques to hear another point of view. Young adults do not thoroughly investigate all religions, they take the religion of their family. Catholics attend Mass to be reminded of their divine rituals, and Protestants attend fiery sermons challenging them to read the Bible themselves, to be reminded why the Protestant Reformation occurred and why they are its offspring.

Similarly, writers who consistently challenge the values and beliefs of their readers do so at their professional peril. Readers who are urged to doubt themselves will doubt the author first. You are the reader's guide to an intricate and complex world. If you make them doubt their destination, they will doubt you, and every word you write.

—F. Bailey Norwood. “Writing For The Public About Ethical Issues.” Seeds (a blog). November 10, 2011.

We can tell stories to explain things, from a child’s or a country’s pouty “They started it” to why the world is as it is, according to myth or science. We also tell stories just because we cannot stop, because they fascinate and engage us even if we know they are untrue.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories.

The mind is not inductive, as Shakespeare’s contemporary Francis Bacon suggested thinking should be. We do not patiently wait for all available evidence before advancing as short an additional distance as possible to our conclusion. Instead, we hastily construct inferences that reach well beyond what we find and that nevertheless, as in this case, thanks to the writer’s skill, hit home.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 10.

Literature has been the great repository of our detailed knowledge of human nature in the past. It will be illuminated by, and will illuminate, our knowledge of an even deeper past.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 41.

For the great bulk of the 600-million-year evolution of mind on Earth, this ability to think in sustained fashion beyond the here and now has not been available to any species. But humans not only have this ability; we also have a compulsion to tell and listen to stories with no relation to the here and now or even to any real past.

—Brian Boyd. 2009. On The Origin of Stories. Page 49.

The First Rule of writing is that there are no rules.

—Lisa Lutz, novelist, in The Wall Street Journal. February 18-19, 2012. C12.

All that is required of a novel is that it can fit on pages that you can turn with your finger (or, now, with the press of a button).

—Lisa Lutz, novelist, in The Wall Street Journal. February 18-19, 2012. C12.

What I learned from screenwriting can be reduced to a single aphorism: Don’t bore your audience.

—Lisa Lutz, novelist, in The Wall Street Journal. February 18-19, 2012. C12.

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in story-telling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

By all means.

And what shall be their education? Can we find a better than the traditional sort? And this has two divisions, gymnastic for the body, and music for the soul.

…

And when you speak of music, do you include literature or not?

I do.

And literature may be either true or false?

Yes.

And the young should be trained in both kinds, and we begin with the false?

I do not understand your meaning, he said.

You know, I said, that we begin by telling children stories which, though not wholly destitute of truth, are in the main fictitious; and these stories are told them when they are not of an age to learn gymnastics.

Very true.

That was my meaning when I said that we must teach music before gymnastics.

Quite right, he said.

You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken.

Quite true.

And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?

We cannot.

Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only.

…

Of what tales are you speaking of? He said?

…

Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes—as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original.

—Plato in The Republic

Unfortunately, the myth persists, especially among junior faculty still winding their anxious way up the tenure track, that the gates of academic publishing are guarded by grumpy sentries programmed to reject everything but jargon-laden, impersonal prose. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly everyone, including the editors of academic journals, would much rather read lively, well-written articles than the slow-moving sludge of the typical scholarly paper.

—Helen Sword. “Yes, Even Professors Can Write Stylishly.” The Wall Street Journal. April 7-8, 2012. C12.

Could it be that publishing is so unpredictable that even if our novel is destined for the best-seller list, numerous publishers could miss the point and send those letters that say thanks but no thanks? One book in the1950s was rejected by publishers, who responded with such comments as “very dull,” “a dreary record of a typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions,” and “even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject [World War II] was timely, I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it.” That book, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, has sold 30 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books in history. Rejection letters were sent to Sylvia Plath because “there certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice,” to George Orwell for Animal Farm because “it is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.,”…

Those were not isolated misjudgments. In fact, many books destined for great success had to survive not just rejection, but repeated rejection. For example, few books today are considered to have more obvious and nearly universal appeal than the works of John Grisham, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), and J. K. Rowling. Yet the manuscripts they wrote before they became famous—all eventually hugely successful—were all repeatedly rejected. John Grisham’s manuscript for A Time to Kill was rejected by twenty-six publishers; his second manuscript, for The Firm, drew interest from publishers only after a bootleg copy circulating in Hollywood drew a $600,000 offer for the movie rights. Dr. Seuss’s first children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected by twenty-seven publishers. And J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter manuscript was rejected by nine. Then there is the other side of the coin—the side anyone in the business knows all too well: the many authors who had great potential but never made it, John Grishams who quit after the first twenty rejections or J. K. Rowlings who gave up after the first five. After his many rejections, one such writer, John Kennedy Toole, lost hope of ever getting his novel published and committed suicide. His mother perservered, however, and eleven years later A Confederacy of Dunces was published; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has sold nearly 2 million copies.

—Leonard Mlodinow. 2008. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Pantheon Publishers: NY, NY.

Cornell researchers who applied computer analysis to a database of movie scripts think they may have found the secret of what makes a line memorable.

The study suggests that memorable lines use familiar sentence structure but incorporate distinctive words or phrases, and they make general statements that could apply elsewhere. The latter may explain why lines such as, "You're gonna need a bigger boat" or "These aren't the droids you're looking for" (accompanied by a hand gesture) have become standing jokes. You can use them in a different context and apply the line to your own situation.

—Cornell University (2012, May 8). Computer scientists show what makes movie lines memorable. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 11, 2012.

When you "lose yourself" inside the world of a fictional character while reading a story, you may actually end up changing your own behavior and thoughts to match that of the character, a new study suggests.

Researchers at Ohio State University examined what happened to people who, while reading a fictional story, found themselves feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of one of the characters as if they were their own — a phenomenon the researchers call "experience-taking."

They found that, in the right situations, experience-taking may lead to real changes, if only temporary, in the lives of readers.

—Geoff F. Kaufman, Lisa K. Libby. “Changing Beliefs and Behavior Through Experience-Taking.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012; DOI: 10.1037/a0027525

If you want to know me, then you must know my story, for my story defines who I am. And if I want to know myself, to gain insight into the meaning of my life, then I, too, must come to know my own story. I must come to see in all its particulars the narrative of the self—the personal myth—that I have tacitly, even unconsciously, composed over the course of my years. It is a story I continue to revise, and tell to myself (and sometimes to others) as I go on living.

—Dan P. McAdams. 1993. The Stories We Live By. The Guilford Press: NY, NY.

But as Amazon’s six other publishing imprints (Montlake Romance, AmazonCrossing, Thomas & Mercer, 47North, Amazon Encore, The Domino Project) have discovered, in certain genres (romance, science fiction and fantasy) formerly relegated to the moribund mass-market paperback, readers care not a whit about cover design or even good writing, and have no attachment at all to the book as object. Like addicts, they just want their fix at the lowest possible price, and Amazon is happy to be their online dealer.

—Steve Wasserman. May 29, 2012. “The Amazon Effect.” The Nation.

…good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature.

Skilled genre writers know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail, lest the reasons we turn to their books evaporate. It’s plot we want and plenty of it. Heroes should go up against villains (sympathetic or hateful); love should, if possible, win out; and a satisfying sense of closure and comeuppance should top off the experience. Basically, a guilty pleasure is a fix in the form of a story, a narrative cocktail that helps us temporarily forget the narratives of our own humdrum lives.

—Krystal, Arthur. May 28, 2012. “Easy Writers.” The New Yorker.

To create a great game, there must be hope for all the players up to the end. Novels are much the same.

— Brunt, Carol Rifka. June 23-24, 2012. “How Novels Are Like Board Games.” The Wall Street Journal. C13.

If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building. . . .

Everyone who applies for a position at either of my companies, iFixit or Dozuki, takes a mandatory grammar test. Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, English language learners, etc.), if job hopefuls can't distinguish between "to" and "too," their applications go into the bin. . . .

[G]rammar is relevant for all companies. Yes, language is constantly changing, but that doesn't make grammar unimportant. Good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet. In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have. They are a projection of you in your physical absence. And, for better or worse, people judge you if you can't tell the difference between their, there, and they're. . . .

If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use "it's," then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with. So, even in this hyper-competitive market, I will pass on a great programmer who cannot write.

Grammar signifies more than just a person's ability to remember high school English. I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing—like stocking shelves or labeling parts.

—Tech industry CEO Kyle Wiens in the Harvard Business Review on July 20, 2012. Quoted in The Wall Street Journal on August 9, 2012. A11. Notable & Quotable.

…we learned the meaning of selflessness, the capacity to sacrifice oneself in the name of the common good.

—Kanatchikov, reflecting on the stories Russians read about popular struggles for liberation in foreign lands, as inspiration for the strength they may someday need to gather. From: Figes, Orlando. 1996. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (1892-1924). Penguin Books: NY, NY.

Farm Animal Welfare

But there came a day when there was no rice left and no wheat left and there were only a few beans and a meager store of corn, and the ox lowed with its hunger and the old man said,

“We will eat the ox, next.”

Then Wang Lung cried out, for it was to him as though one said, “We will eat a man next.” The ox was his companion in the fields and he had walked behind and praised it and cursed it as his mood was, and from his youth he had known the beast, when they had bought it as a small calf. And he said,

“How can we eat the ox? How shall we plough again?”

— Pearl S. Buck in The Good Earth (1931).

Well then God constitutes every animal, one to be eaten, another to serve for agriculture, another to supply cheese, and another for some like use; for which purposes what need is there to understand appearances and to be able to distinguish the?

—Epictetus. 108 AD. The Discourses.

...consider every flock of hens an egg factory.

— Davis et. al. in Livestock Enterprises, 1928.

Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animals suffering? Because government is not. Why not? Animals don't vote.

— Paul Harvey (widely published quote)

Love the animals: God gave them the rudiments of thought and an untroubled joy. Do not trouble it, do not torment them, do not take their joy from them, do not go against God's purpose. Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals: they are sinless...

— Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamozov (1879).

Put the fowls in coops so small that they cannot turn around.

— A. H. Baker in Livestock: A Cyclopedia (1913).

The hen home should be a place of comfort, safety, contentment, cheerfulness, and happiness. Given these, the hen responds.

— Davis, et. al. in Livestock Enterprises (1928).

One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical . . . Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs where they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some were young; some were long and lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. . . a black shadow hung over him an a horrid fate waited in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to it – it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life. And now was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog-personality was precious, to whom these hog-squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done and show him the meaning of his sacrifice?

— Upton Sinclair in The Jungle (1906).

From your point of view, which of the following people are unethical?

(a) a meat-eater whose desire for food brings into existence an animal that lives in misery.

(b) a vegan whose unwillingness to eat meat precludes the existence of an animal that would live an overall pleasant live.

—Norwood, F. Bailey and Jayson L. Lusk in Compassion by the Pound.

Improvements to farm animal welfare can only come about within the context of the forces that drive the free market. In essence, consumers need to afford a greater extrinsic value to farm animals...The responsibility is therefore on the consumer to convert an expressed desire for higher welfare standards into an effective demand.

— A. J. F. Webster in The Veterinary Journal (2002).

The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable. Besides, they don’t allow anything dirty or filthy to be brought into the city, lest the air become tainted by putrefaction and thus infectious.

—Thomas More in Utopia, 1516.

What pleasure can there be in listening to the barking and howling of dogs—isn’t that rather a disgusting noise? Is any more pleasure felt when a dog chases a hare than when a dog chases a dog? If what you like is fast running, there’s plenty of that in both cases; they’re just about the same. But if what you really want is slaughter, if you want to see a creature torn apart under your eyes—you ought to feel nothing but pity when you see the little hare fleeing from the hound, the weak creature tormented by the stronger, the fearful and timid beast brutalized by the savage one, the harmless hare killed by the cruel hound. Utopians, who regard this whole activity of hunting as unworthy of free men, have accordingly assigned it to their butchers, who, as I said before, are all slaves. In their eyes, hunting is the lowest thing even butchers can do. In the slaughterhouse, their work is more useful and honest, since there they kill animals only out of necessity; whereas the hunter seeks nothing but his own pleasure from killing and mutilating some poor little creature. Taking such relish in the sight of slaughter, even if only of beasts, springs, in their opinion, from a cruel disposition, or else finally produces cruelty, through the constant practice of such brutal pleasured.

—Thomas More in Utopia, 1516.

“The plight of the livestock,” Hickok wrote, “is pitiable.” Milk cows were drying up for the lack of feed. Farmers eligible for relief road work did not have teams healthy enough to pull road scrapers. “Half-starved horses have dropped in the harness,” Hickok related, “right on the road job...They’ve even harvested Russian thistle to feed to their horses and cattle. Russian thistle, for your information,” she explained to Hopkins, “is a thistle plant with shallow roots that dries up in the fall and is blown across the prairies like rolls of barbed wire. The effect on the digestive apparatus of an animal...would be, I should imagine, much the same as though it had eaten barbed wire.” In neighboring South Dakota several days later, she found farm wives feeding Russian thistle soup to their children.”

—David M. Kennedy describing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in Freedom From Fear. Chapter 7.

Reaching through an incision in the sheep’s hide, the slaughterer severs a vital artery with his fingers, allowing the animal to quickly slip away without alarm, so peacefully that one must check its eyes to see if it is dead.

…

As one of the students explained, “If a Tuvan killed an animal the way they do in other places,”—by means of a gun or knife—“they’d be arrested for brutality.”

—Rymer, Russ. July, 2012. “Vanishing Voices.” National Geographic magazine. Narrative concerns how a Siberian culture (the Tuvan) slaughters their livestock.

Matrona’s Four Children

From the Book

Political and religious power is a tick. It numbs your skin as its legs make contact and it plunges its head within you. Only after the tick has feasted, increased the size of its body seven-fold and detached itself from your body, only then do you recognize the bite. You don’t see the tick, you only see the infected skin after the it has left. You never recognize the corrupting nature of power until it has consumed you thoroughly.

—F. Bailey Norwood, from Matrona's Four Children

Power is an addictive feeling, boys. You must either shun it or embrace it, because it is a jealous lover.

—F. Bailey Norwood, from Matrona's Four Children

…whenever someone tells you to do something for the greater good, they are usually asking you to do something for their own good. The mark of a tyrant is confusing one’s own ambitions with the ambitions of the masses.

—F. Bailey Norwood, from Matrona's Four Children

…whenever value exists there will be looters lurking in the shadows of moral ambiguity and confiscators proudly marching in the sunlight. They lurk, and they march to confiscate what you create. Altruism and charity: these are double-edged swords. They can improve the state of mankind, or they can be exploited by confiscators and aspiring tyrants. Altruism is not an unambiguously desirable trait. Only the man who employs altruism for the good of mankind, without allowing it to be exploited by confiscators, can truly call himself moral.

—F. Bailey Norwood, from Matrona's Four Children

When [Jesus] said to treat others as we would like to be treated, this meant that we should not place ourselves above others, but it also meant that we should not place the lives of others above our own.

—F. Bailey Norwood, from Matrona's Four Children

… remember this: whenever you have something of value, hide it. If you do not, the confiscators will come, and if their first justification for confiscation is untenable, they will find another. Whatever reason for the confiscation is offered, it will be stated in terms of altruism or service to the government.

—F. Bailey Norwood, from Matrona's Four Children

It is sad, so, so sad. They want to be ruled like serfs. And when you desire to be ruled like a serf, people will line up to be your master.”

—F. Bailey Norwood, from Matrona's Four Children

To preserve serfdom we must quell all rebellions with efficacy, but we must also make serfs feel reliant upon our charity. To truly enslave a people you must induce the people to enslave themselves. When all of the serfs’ needs, whether it is food or medical care, are provided by the estate, they grow to believe it can only be provided by the estate. When they lose sovereignty over their lives, they hand the power to us. The more they grow accustomed to receiving their needs through nobility, the stronger the chains that bind them become.

—F. Bailey Norwood, from Matrona's Four Children

Quotes Supporting Assertions In The Book

The bizarre scenario played out in seventeenth-century Russia gives the correct answer to our quiz… The Old Believers in Russia were the only successfully bourgeois portion of Russian society in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, except for an occasional Jew and a good many of what Landes calls by the Greek name “metics” (metoikoi, “people beyond the household,” noncitizen workers, in Russian mainly Germans).

—Deirdre N. McClosky in Bourgeois Dignity. Chapter 39.

Recent research, however, supports the idea that consciousness is a conversation rather than a revelation, with no single brain structure leading the dialogue.

—Melinda Wenner Moyer. November/December 2011. “Something’s Wrong With This Picture.” Scientific American Mind. Page 12.

“Let us worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,” says the psalm. What is beauty? Beauty is a sum not reducible to its parts. It is a perception of harmony in variety. What is worship? To worship means not to figure out, not to analyze, not to pin down like a dried butterfly on a grid, but to value. Deeply to value.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 9. Note: I read this years after finishing Matrona’s Four Children.

JACOB GOLDSTEIN, BYLINE: This is the height of communism in China. Everyone here worked on the village's collective farm. The idea was people would work together for the common good.

KESTENBAUM: Yen Jingchang was a farmer back then. In this world, as he describes it, nobody owned anything.

YEN JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) I used oxen to farm but they weren't mine. They belonged to the group.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) Back then even a piece of straw belong to the group. Individuals didn't own anything.

GOLDSTEIN: At one meeting with Communist Party officials, a farmer asked: What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those? No, was the answer. Your teeth belong to the collective.

KESTENBAUM: There was no incentive to work hard, to get up early and pull weeds.

JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) Work hard and don't work hard, everyone gets the same, so people don't want to work.

GOLDSTEIN: In Xiogang there was never enough food. Yen Jingchang says he and the other farmers had to knock on doors and beg for food.

JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) We were farmers. We were supposed to produce food. To beg for food was not honorable. My face was burning.

—Xiaogang, interviewed by Planet Money Podcast. On a collective/communist Chinese farm Xiaogant began the movement away from Communist China into a quasi-communist China with capitalistic features.

KESTENBAUM: With this document, they become, in a sense, the first capitalists of modern China. Yen Hongchang ends up hiding it in a piece of bamboo in the roof of his house.

GOLDSTEIN: Yen Jingchang remembers the first day he went out to farm after signing the contract.

Did you work harder than before?

JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) Of course I work harder. We all did because whatever I produce was mine. If you didn't work hard that's your loss. And we all secretly competed.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

HONGCHANG: (Through Translator) Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person. That got people working hard.

GOLDSTEIN: So it's the same land, the same tools, the same people. But just by changing the economic rules, by saying you get to keep some of what you grow, everything changes.

(following from previous quote)

“Because, my dear brother,” Ilya explained, “numerous Russian economists over the last two decades have conclusively shown that, all other considerations aside, if you free your serfs, you yourself will actually be better off.”

—Edward Rutherfurd. 1991. Russka. Page 540. Crown Publishers.

“You know, Alexis Alexandrovich, wherever these Old Believers set up factories, they start converting all the local peasants, and the Orthodox church loses its flock.

—Edward Rutherfurd. 1991. Russka. Page 535. Crown Publishers.

Liu grew up in the aftermath of China’s great famine, which lasted from 1959 to 1961 and killed an estimated 30 million people. Drought played a part, but the catastrophe was inflicted mainly by the whims of Chairman Mao. The Chinese leader’s Great Leap Forward collectivized farming and forced peasants to turn their harvests over to a centralized bureaucracy.

The famine passed, but scarcity continued until the late 1970s, when farmers regained control of their own harvests. “Within two years, almost overnight, food was in surplus,” recalls Deli Chen, who witnessed those reforms as a boy in a small rice-growing village in Jiangsu Province.

— Charles, Dan. May 2013. “Our Fertilized World.” National Geographic. 94-111.

Quotes of a Similar Spirit

That’s exactly where we come in.

—Robert W. Spryszak in the introduction to SK Waller’s With A Dream (2009). Related to last paragraph of the book.

“Let us worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,” says the psalm. What is beauty? Beauty is a sum not reducible to its parts. It is a perception of harmony in variety. What is worship? To worshiop means not to figure out, not to analyze, not to pin down like a dried butterfly on a grid, but to value. Deeply to value.

—Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books: NY, NY. 1995. Page 9.

The value of a whole must not be assumed to be the same as the sum of the values of its parts.

A single instance will suffice to illustrate the kind of relation in question. It seems to be true that to be conscious of a beautiful object is of great intrinsic value; whereas the same object, if no one be conscious of it, has certainly comparatively little value, and it is commonly held to have none at all. But the consciousness of a beautiful object is certainly a whole of some sort in which we can distinguish as parts the object on the one hand and the being conscious on the other.

—G. E. Moore. 1903. Principia Ethica.

Who can doubt, however, that the wise man, if he is rich, has a wider field for the development of his powers than if he is poor, seeing that in the latter case the only virtue which he can display is that of neither being perverted nor crushed by his poverty, whereas if he has riches, he will have a wide field for the exhibition of temperance, generosity, laboriousness, methodical arrangement, and grandeur.

—Seneca in On a Happy Life. Book XXII. Related to Chapter 9 of Matrona’s Four Children.

Advice to College Students

I became sick of commencement speeches at about your age. My first job out of college was writing speeches for the governor of Maine. Every spring, I would offer extraordinary tidbits of wisdom to 22-year-olds—which was quite a feat given that I was 23 at the time. In the decades since, I've spent most of my career teaching economics and public policy. In particular, I've studied happiness and well-being, about which we now know a great deal. And I've found that the saccharine and over-optimistic words of the typical commencement address hold few of the lessons young people really need to hear about what lies ahead. Here, then, is what I wish someone had told the Class of 1988:

1. Your time in fraternity basements was well spent. The same goes for the time you spent playing intramural sports, working on the school newspaper or just hanging with friends. Research tells us that one of the most important causal factors associated with happiness and well-being is your meaningful connections with other human beings. Look around today. Certainly one benchmark of your postgraduation success should be how many of these people are still your close friends in 10 or 20 years.

2. Some of your worst days lie ahead.Graduation is a happy day. But my job is to tell you that if you are going to do anything worthwhile, you will face periods of grinding self-doubt and failure. Be prepared to work through them. I'll spare you my personal details, other than to say that one year after college graduation I had no job, less than $500 in assets, and I was living with an elderly retired couple. The only difference between when I graduated and today is that now no one can afford to retire.

3. Don't make the world worse. I know that I'm supposed to tell you to aspire to great things. But I'm going to lower the bar here: Just don't use your prodigious talents to mess things up. Too many smart people are doing that already. And if you really want to cause social mayhem, it helps to have an Ivy League degree. You are smart and motivated and creative. Everyone will tell you that you can change the world. They are right, but remember that "changing the world" also can include things like skirting financial regulations and selling unhealthy foods to increasingly obese children. I am not asking you to cure cancer. I am just asking you not to spread it.

4. Marry someone smarter than you are. When I was getting a Ph.D., my wife Leah had a steady income. When she wanted to start a software company, I had a job with health benefits. (To clarify, having a "spouse with benefits" is different from having a "friend with benefits.") You will do better in life if you have a second economic oar in the water. I also want to alert you to the fact that commencement is like shooting smart fish in a barrel. The Phi Beta Kappa members will have pink-and-blue ribbons on their gowns. The summa cum laude graduates have their names printed in the program. Seize the opportunity!

5. Help stop the Little League arms race. Kids' sports are becoming ridiculously structured and competitive. What happened to playing baseball because it's fun? We are systematically creating races out of things that ought to be a journey. We know that success isn't about simply running faster than everyone else in some predetermined direction. Yet the message we are sending from birth is that if you don't make the traveling soccer team or get into the "right" school, then you will somehow finish life with fewer points than everyone else. That's not right. You'll never read the following obituary: "Bob Smith died yesterday at the age of 74. He finished life in 186th place."

6. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

7. Your parents don't want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which isn't always the same thing. There is a natural instinct to protect our children from risk and discomfort, and therefore to urge safe choices. Theodore Roosevelt—soldier, explorer, president—once remarked, "It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed." Great quote, but I am willing to bet that Teddy's mother wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer.

8. Don't model your life after a circus animal. Performing animals do tricks because their trainers throw them peanuts or small fish for doing so. You should aspire to do better. You will be a friend, a parent, a coach, an employee—and so on. But only in your job will you be explicitly evaluated and rewarded for your performance. Don't let your life decisions be distorted by the fact that your boss is the only one tossing you peanuts. If you leave a work task undone in order to meet a friend for dinner, then you are "shirking" your work. But it's also true that if you cancel dinner to finish your work, then you are shirking your friendship. That's just not how we usually think of it.

9. It's all borrowed time. You shouldn't take anything for granted, not even tomorrow. I offer you the "hit by a bus" rule. Would I regret spending my life this way if I were to get hit by a bus next week or next year? And the important corollary: Does this path lead to a life I will be happy with and proud of in 10 or 20 years if I don't get hit by a bus.

10. Don't try to be great. Being great involves luck and other circumstances beyond your control. The less you think about being great, the more likely it is to happen. And if it doesn't, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being solid.

Good luck and congratulations.

—Charles Wheelan. “10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You.” The Wall Street Journal. April 28-29, 2012. C3.

Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, and feel they grow immortal as they quote. —Edward Young (1683-1765).

Religion

Knowledge

Mind

Art

Zigong: “Is there any single word that could guide one’s entire life?” Master: “Should it not be reciprocity? What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.” —Analects of Confucius

Death

Social Harmony

Morality

Hawaii: TPP Negotiators Push for Deal by End of Day amid Protests

Prosperity and Happiness

Views on Profit-Making

Antitrust and Market Power

Confiscation, Inequality, & Wealth Redistribution

Public Goods and Externalities

Regulation: Safety and Quality Standards

Law and Governance

Trade

American Progressive Politics

Corruption, Morality, and Public Choice

Statism, Tyranny, and Forced Altruism

Unintended Consequences

Economists in Academia

Education

Writing and Stories

Farm Animal Welfare

Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, and feel they grow immortal as they quote.
—Edward Young (1683-1765).

Zigong: “Is there any single word that could guide one’s entire life?”
Master: “Should it not be reciprocity? What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.”
—Analects of Confucius