Food for Thought

The Environment

• "Hitherto the Industrial Revolution has been based essentially on the exploitation of inanimate energy derived from irreplaceable sources ... One can summarize the story of our happy generations in the following way: for millions of years wealth was stored and cumulated. Then, someone in the family discovered the hoard - and started to dissipate it. We are now living through this fabulous dissipation. Humanity is today consuming more coal in a single year than had been generated in a hundred centuries or so during the process of carbonization." (Carlo M. Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population, Penguin, 1962, page 55)

Growth and Technology

• "We are not used to thinking of ideas as economic goods, but they are surely the most significant ones that we produce ... We once used iron oxide as a pigment in cave paintings. An elaborate set of ideas now lets us use it to store magnetic signals on audio cassettes, video cassettes and computer disk drives." (Paul Romer (1993), 150 Economist Years, page 86).
• "Ideas are instructions that let us combine limited physical resources in arrangements that are ever more valuable", (Paul Romer (1992), "Two Strategies for Economic Development: Using Ideas and Producing Ideas", Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics)
• "Good work is rightly appreciated, inventions and improvements in machinery, in process and the general organization of the business have their merits promptly discussed: if one man starts a new idea, it is taken up by others and combined with suggestions of their own; and thus becomes the source of further new ideas." (Alfred Marshall (1890) Principles of Economics, IV.X.3)
• "Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile." (John F. Kennedy, 1968)
• "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." (Adam Smith)

Division of Labour

• "Quantity and quality are therefore more easily produced when a man specialises appropriately on a single job for which he is naturally fitted, and neglects all others." (Plato, The Republic, trans. Lee, D, 2nd Edition, Middlesex: Penguin, (1974) cited by Bhagwait, J)
• "The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity and judgement with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour." (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter I)

• "As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by the extent of that power, or, in other words, by the extent of the market." (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter III)

• "The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education." (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter II)

Competitiveness

• " ... the obsession with competitiveness is not only wrong but dangerous, skewing domestic policies and threatening the international economic system ... Thinking in terms of competitiveness leads, directly and indirectly, to bad economic policies on a wide range of issues, domestic and foreign." (Paul Krugman (1996), Chapter 1, Pop Internationalism, MIT Press, page 5)

Trade

• "The spirit of trade cannot coexist with war, and sooner or later this spirit dominates every people." (Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays)
• "The natural effect of trade is to bring about peace. Two nations which trade together, render themselves reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and all unions are based upon mutual needs." (Montesquieu, De l’esprit des Lois, 1758)
• "I will never falter in my belief that enduring peace and the welfare of nations are indissolubly connected with friendliness, fairness, equality, and the maximum practicable degree of freedom in international trade." (Cordell Hull, U.S. secretary of state, 1933–1944)
• "So it is upon the sea-coast, and along the banks of navigable rivers, that industry of every kind naturally begins to subdivide and improve itself, and it is frequently not till a long time after that those improvements extend themselves to the inland parts of the country." (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776)

• "It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost more to make than to buy." (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776)

• "By such maxims as these, however, nations have been taught that their interest consisted in beggaring all their neighbours. Each nation has been made to look with an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trades, and to consider their gain as its own loss. Commerce, which ought naturally to be, among nations, as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity." (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776)

• "A protectionist measure provides large benefits to a small number of people, and causes a very great number of consumers a slight loss." (Vilfredo Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, 1909)
• "Before we were a trading people, ... we ... lived in a kind of penury, a stranger to money or affluence, inconsiderable in ourselves, and of no consequence to our neighbors." (R Cambbell, The London Tradesman, 1747, pages 284-5)

• "A realm can never be rich that hath not an intercourse and trade of merchandise with other nations" (William Cecil, cited in Francis Peck, Desiderata Curiosa, 1779)

• "The popular view that free trade is all very well so long as all nations are free-traders, but that when other nations erect tariffs we must erect tarifss too, is countered by the argument that it would be just as sensible to drop rocks into our own harbours because other nations have rocky coasts ...." (Joan Robinson, Essays in the Theory of Employment, Oxford: Blackwell, 1947)
• "What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914! ... The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as we might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages." (John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, New York: Harcourt, 1920, p. 11)

• "In a regime of Free Trade and free economic intercourse it would be of little consequence that iron lay on one side of a political frontier, and labor, coal, and blast furnaces on the other. But as it is, men have devised ways to impoverish themselves and one another; and prefer collective animosities to individual happiness." (John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, New York: Harcourt, 1920, p. 99)

• "It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy. The taylor does not attempt to make his own shoes, but buys them of the shoemaker. The shoemaker does not attempt to make his own clothes, but employs a taylor. The farmer attempts to make neither the one nor the other, but employs those different artificers. All of them find it for their interest to employ their whole industry in a way in which they have some advantage over their neighbours, and to purchase with a part of its produce, or what is the same thing, with the price of a part of it, whatever else they have occasion for. What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage." (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, New York: The Modern Library 1937, p. 424).

• "Modern industry has established the world market ... All old established national industries ... are dislodged by new industries whose ... products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants ... we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes." (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto)
• "Complete equality of factor prices is ... almost unthinkable and certainly highly improbable", (Bertil Ohlin 1933)
• "In fact, there are exactly 2118 goods and 2118 factors. You did know that, didn't you?" (Edward Leamer, Sources of International Comparative Advantage: Theory and Evidence, MIT Press, 1984)
• "One of the best ways to understand how the international economy works is to start looking at what happens inside nations ... The data will be better and pose fewer problems of compatibility, and the underlying economic forces will be less distorted by government policies." (Paul Krugman, Geography and Trade, MIT Press, 1991)
• "If there is one single area of economics in which path dependence is unmistakable, it is in economic geography - the location of production in space. The long shadow cast by history over location is apparent at all scales, from the smallest to the largest." (Paul Krugman, Geography and Trade, MIT Press, 1991)
• "Saying that trade policy exists because it serves to transfer income to favored groups is a bit like saying Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest because he wanted to get some mountain air." (Dani Rodrik, Chapter 28 in Handbook of International Economics, vol 3, page 1470)

• "The progress of a society is all the more rapid in proportion as it is more completely subjected to external influences." (Henry Pirenne)

European Integration

• "A day will come in which you, France; you Italy; you Great Britain - all you nations of the continent - will be united in close embrace, without losing your identity or striking originality. ... A day will come in which markets open to commerce and minds open to ideas will be the sole battlefields." (Victor Hugo, 1861)

• "And what is the plight to which Europe has been reduced? ... over wide areas a vast quivering mass of tormented, hungry, care-worn and bewildered human beings gape at the ruins of their cities and their homes, and scan the dark horizons for the approach of some new peril, tyranny or terror. ... That is all that Europeans, grouped in so many ancient states and nations ... have got by tearing each other to pieces and spreading havoc far and wide. Yet all the while there is a remedy ... It is to recreate the European family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe" (Winston S. Churchill, Zurich, 19 September, 1946)

• "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia" (Winston S. Churchill, The Sinews of Peace Speech, March 5, 1946, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri)

Productivity

• "Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything" (Paul Krugman, The Age of Diminished Expectations, MIT Press, (1994))

Cities

• "Every city, no matter how small, is in fact divided into two; one the city of the rich, the other the city of the poor", (Plato, The Republic, cited in Benabou (1996))

Inflation

• "There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does so in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose," (John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919)

Science

• "We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, the workings of which we do not understand." (John Maynard Keynes, The Great Slump of 1930).
• "Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world." (John Maynard Keynes in a letter to Roy Harrod, 1938, cited by Vickers, J, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, May 1999, page 210).
• "All models are wrong, but some are useful." (Box, G (1979) "Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building", in (eds) Launer, R and Wilkinson, G, Robustness in Statistics, cited by Temple, J (1998) "Robustness Tests of the Augmented Solow Model", Journal of Applied Econometrics, 361-75).
• "All theory depends on assumptions which are not quite true. That is what makes it theory. The art of successful theorizing is to make the inevitable simplifying assumptions in such a way that the final results are not very sensitive." (Robert Solow 1956)

• "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?" (John Maynard Keynes)

• "The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak" (Hans Hoffman, cited in Efron, B and Tibshirani, R (1993) An Introduction to the Bootstrap, Monographs on Statistics and Applied Probability 57, Chapman & Hall).
• "The longer you look back, the farther you can look forward." (Winston S. Churchill)

• "The grand aim of science is to cover the greatest number of experimental facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms." (Alfred Einstein)

• "If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is. I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth, which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations, that mathematical ideas originate in empirics." (John Von Neumann)

• "The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error." (Bertolt Brecht)

• "'Data! Data! Data!'' He cried impatiently. 'I can't make bricks without clay.'" (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Copper Beeches)

• "It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest assured with that degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and not seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible." (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics)

• "To understand matters rightly we should understand their details, and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect." (La Rochefoucald)

• "What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent." (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C Ogden and F Ramsey, Routledge (1992)).
• "If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion" (David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), section 12, part 3)

• "There is, unfortunately, a kind of alchemy about figures which transforms the most dubious materials into something pure and precious; hence the price of working with historical statistics is eternal vigilance." (Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), cited by Angus Maddison)

• "When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." (William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, Electrical Units of Measurement, 1883)

• "The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." (T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays, 1893-4)

• "Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on" (Winston S. Churchill)

• "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" (Albert Einstein)

• "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." (John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Interest, Employment and Money, London: Macmillan, 1936).

General

• "The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty." (John Maynard Keynes)

• “No one can be a great economist who is only an economist ... likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger” (F A Hayek)

• "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." (Martin Luther King)

• "Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a lover; then it becomes a master; then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him about to the public." (Winston S. Churchill)

• "The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished." (George Bernard Shaw)

• "What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." Dr. Johnson.

• "Economists set themselves too easy too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again." (John Maynard Keynes, 1923)

• "If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid." (John Maynard Keynes)

• "A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new." (Albert Einstein)

• "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality." (Albert Einstein)

• "The most fundamental constraint is limited time." (Gary Becker)

• "Nothing in Excess." (Temple of Apollo in Delphi)

• "You may delay, but time will not, and lost time is never found again." (Benjamin Franklin)

• "It is the allowing of machines to be our masters, and not our servants, that so injures the beauty of life nowadays." (William Morris)

• "Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." (Winston S. Churchill)

• "Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." (Albert Einstein)

• "The beginning is half of every action." (Greek Proverb)

• "What is a cynic? A person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." (Oscar Wilde)