There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.

Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

She is a reflection of comfortable middle-class values that do not take seriously the continuing unemployment. What I particularly regret is that she does not take seriously the intellectual decline. Having given up the Empire and the mass production of industrial goods, Britain's future lay in its scientific and artistic pre-eminence. Mrs Thatcher will be long remembered for the damage she has done.

Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.

I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.

Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.

Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.