Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information - is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.

Still, I figure we shouldn't' discourage fans of actively managed funds. With all their buying and selling, active investors ensure the market is reasonably efficient. That makes it possible for the rest of us to do the sensible thing, which is to index. Want to join me in this parasitic behavior? To build a well-diversified portfolio, you might stash 70 percent of your stock portfolio into a Wilshire 5000-index fund and the remaining 30 percent in an international-index fund.

The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern, yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, 'We are starving, how about a potato?' I speak from poignant memory.

Kelsoism is not accepted by modern scientific economics as a valid and fruitful analysis of the distribution of income but rather it is regarded as an amateurish and cranky fad.

What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth...The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth.

Perhaps there really are managers who can outperform the market consistently - logic would suggest that they exist. But they are remarkably well-hidden.

That's what I would like to do until the end of time, to go on scribbling my articles on the third floor of the Sloan Building, in between playing tennis and drinking coffee at my other study in the Concord Avenue branch of Burger King.