There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of the those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.

A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.

I think the role of the Federal Reserve is enormously exaggerated.

The power of the corporate bureaucracy - the power of technostructure (a term that did not take off) - is something to which I still adhere.

Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.

The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are.

Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy — what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.