The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.