To predict the future we would have to know today what we will learn tomorrow which will shape our future actions

The supremacy of Parliament and the embedding of property rights in Common Law put political power in the hands of men anxious to exploit the new economic opportunities and provided the framework for a judicial system to protect and encourage productive economic activity

Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political control limits the options. The best recipe is adaptive efficiency coping with novel uncertainty in a non-ergodic world, the maintenance of institutions which enable trial & error experiment to occur, and an effective means of eliminating unsuccessful solutions

What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.

Information costs are reduced by the existence of large numbers of buyers and sellers. Under these conditions, prices embody the same information that would require large search costs by individual buyers and sellers in the absence of an organized market.

Conformity can be costly in a world of uncertainty which requires innovative institutional creation because no one can know the right path to survival. Over time, the richer the cultural context in terms of providing multiple experimentation and creative competition, the more likely the successful survival of the society

My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.