What was the good of industrial development, what was the good of all the technological innovations, toil, and population movements if, after half a century of industrial growth, the condition of the masses was still just as miserable as before, and all lawmakers could do was prohibit factory labor by children under the age of eight?

For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.

Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they dont even talk - sometimes not even with their girlfriend or boyfriend or friends - about what they are doing.

I certainly agree that capital is not a one-dimensional object, and that the return on capital takes very different forms for different assets or different people.

We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information.

It's not Utopian to believe that we can create a global registry of financial assets so we know who owns what in different countries.

Without precisely defined sources, methods, and concepts, it is possible to see absolutely everything and its opposite.