Tyler and I are looking for a good epigram, quote, maxim etc. which will be placed on the copyright page of Modern Principles of Economics, our forthcoming textbook (micro and macro). It should be no more than a few lines. The person who provides the best entry, as judged by us, will receive a signed copy of our book and, if we use the entry, much gratitude!
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“Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing down a road that has led him to great sucess.” – F.A. Hayek
“Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” – Albert Einstein
“In the field of observation, chance only favors the prepared mind” – Louis Pasteur
“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.†
-Murray N. Rothbard
(I’m not holding my breath)
if you don’t have tenure change that to professors seeking tenure.
“The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.”
Sir Antony Hoare, 1980
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1304.html
“It´s the economy, stupid!”
“A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson. English Traits. Aristocracy
The following quote express the importance of knowledge and incentives :
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Sorry, I don’t understand the incentives. I can get a free copy of your textbook by requesting it from the publisher, no?
For the copyright page, there is a passage from Woody Guthrie’s song book that might appeal to you in some ways:
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ours, cause we don’t give a darn. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do. ”
Which I believe you could modify to read:
“This book is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #XXXXXXX, for a period of XX years, and anybody caught teaching with it without our permission will be a mighty good friends of ours, cause we don’t give a darn. Teach it. Read it. Sing it. Live it. Shout it from the mountaintop. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
Does that not capture your beliefs about copyrights and the positive externalities of education?
“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 influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” — JM Keynes
I had Sergei’s idea, but I would leave off the last sentence.
“Never be afraid to try something new. Remember amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.” ~Unknown
I’m sure you won’t choose it, but I my choice would be:
“[The mathematical economist] has 30 pages of mathematics, and at the end there emerge the assumptions he put in at the beginning.”
- Voprosy Economiki 1948.
If the world was perfect, then nobody would have anything to complain about.
– Jason Isringhausen
Another one that I like is from James J. Heckman:
“Economics is really about understanding the world — and changing it — and not in a messianic fashion but in an honest fashion.”
Said in an interview after winning the Nobel; I have the citation for you if you want it (Chicago Sun Times, October 12, 2000).
“The principles of economics are approximations to the way we behave. The business of economics is to correct these approximations.”
Don’t let your lack of ability stop you.
“Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, ‘Is it reasonable?’” — Richard Feynman
An economist and her son were walking down the street. Seeing a ten dollar bill lying on the ground, her son reached down to pick it up. His mother tugged his arm and said, “Don’t bother, it’s not really there. In an efficient market, someone will have already picked it up.”
“I bet you aren’t reading this, because the copyright page is not part of your assigned reading for this week.”
“There’s no such thing as a free textbook.”
“Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.” – Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
(On Principles)
“In fine, it is the soul of science. It is an eternal truth: it contains the mathematical demonstration of which man speaks, and the extent of its uses are unknown.” – Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
“strong men know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle. Most of the dilemmas which we face in this time of confusion are not choosing between right and wrong, but between the more complicated ones of right and right.” – Charles Handy, The Empty Raincoat
“Even these principles and rules are intended to provide a thinking man with a frame of reference for the movement he has been trained to carry out…” – Karl von Clausewitz, On War
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.
-Dante
“[These] are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.”
-With apologies to Groucho Marx.
“Everything is amazing right now and nobody’s happy.”
~Louis Szekely (Louis CK)
The best way out is always through.
“Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.”
Samuel Johnson
This leads nicely into any acknowledgments you might have. Of course, Dr.Johnson has an even more famous saying, which you two may have falsified (or maybe not…)
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
“The only difference between a rich person and poor person is how they use their time.†
or
“Academic qualifications are important and so is financial education. They’re both important and schools are forgetting one of them.†
-Robert Kiyosaki
Borges, from The Zahir (I shall have to dig up the translator):
“I turned the corner; the chamfered curb in darkness at the far end of the street showed me that the establishment had closed. On Belgrano I took a cab. Possessed, without a trace of sleepiness, almost happy, I reflected that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin (a twenty-centavo piece, for instance) is, in all truth, a panoply of possible futures. Money is abstract, I said over and over, money is future time. It can be an evening just outside the city, or a Brahms melody, or maps, or chess, or coffee, or the words of Epictetus, which teach contempt of gold; it is a Proteus more changeable than the Proteus of the isle of Pharos. It is unforeseeable time, Bergsonian time, not the hard, solid time of Islam or the Porch. Adherents of determinism deny that there is any event in the world that is possible, i.e., that might occur; a coin symbolizes our free will. (I had no suspicion at the time that these “thoughts† were an artifice against the Zahir and a first manifestation of its demonic influence.) After long and pertinacious musings, I at last fell asleep, but I dreamed that I was a pile of coins guarded by a gryphon.”
Or… or… or… I can’t help myself here… one of the following poems from Issa (Robert Haas, trans.):
Deer licking
first frost
from each other’s coats.
Fleas in my hut,
it’s my fault
you look so skinny.
Animals
In the falling of petals
they see no Buddha,
no Law.
Men
We humans –
squirming around
among the blossoming flowers.
This stupid world —
skinny mosquitoes, skinny fleas,
skinny children
“The world has been exhausting its exhaustible resources since the first cave-man chipped a flint, and I imagine the process will go on for a long, long time.” (Bob Solow, AEA presidential address)
“In the practice the theory is different”
“I’ve been condemned by traditional economists who said that printing money is responsible for inflation. Out of the necessity to exist, to ensure my people survive, I had to find myself printing money. I found myself doing extraordinary things that aren’t in the textbooks. Then the IMF asked the U.S. to please print money. I began to see the whole world now in a mode of practicing what they have been saying I should not. I decided that God had been on my side and had come to vindicate me.”
-Gideon Gono, Central Bank Governor of Zimbabwe
I suggest quotes from Idiocracy.
Quote 1 (General Purpose): I can’t believe you like money too. We should hang out. – Frito
Quote 2 (perhaps a little edgy, but quite timely and would help motivate the study of econ): Shit. I know shit’s bad right now, with all that starving bullshit, and the dust storms, and we are running out of french fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution. – President Camacho
Quote 3 (if you want to demonstrate how incentives matter and accumulate): The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections. – Narrator
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
John Kenneth Galbraith
“The fact is that all famous 20th-century economists – Fisher, Keynes, Friedman, Samuelson, Galbraith, etc, etc – and 99.9% of working economists today are dilutionists. In other words, they believe that a closed-loop monetary system, or even a nearly-closed system such as the gold standard, is impractical or at least suboptimal.
We can even link to bloggers. Cowen and Tabarrok: dilutionists. Kling and Caplan: dilutionists. McArdle: dilutionist. Mankiw: dilutionist. Levitt: dilutionist. DeLong: major dilutionist. Und so weiter. Pretty much your only nondilutionists are to be found in the Austrian School, and even there you need to be careful.
Therefore, we are left with the conclusion that either (a) the above analysis is in some way wrong, or (b) 20th-century economics was dominated by quacks, and mostly remains so.
It’s not at all clear why (b) should even start to be surprising. Didn’t we already know that the 20th century was the era of quack economics? What was the Soviet Union but a giant outdoor experiment in economic quackery?”
-Mencius Moldbug
from http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/11/who-heck-is-benn-steil.html
“No challenge can withstand the assault of sustained thinking” – Pangloss
“You can’t do serious economics unless you are willing to be playful.”
- Paul Krugman, The accidental theorist.
Then leave Complaints: Fools only strive
To make a Great an honest Hive.
T’ enjoy the World’s Conveniencies,
Befamed in War, yet live in Ease
Without great Vices, is a vain
Eutopia seated in the Brain.
Fraud, Luxury, and Pride must live;
Whilst we the Benefits receive.
Bernard Mandeville (From: The Fable of the bees)
I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition that this margin is too narrow to contain.
-Fermat
“DON’T PANIC.”
Nobody knows anything. Wiliam Goldman
By virtue of exchange, one man’s prosperity is beneficial to all others.
- Frederic Bastiat
Some Yogi Berra’s could work:
“A nickel isn’t worth a dime today.”
“Slump? I ain’t in no slump. I just ain’t hitting.”
“If you don’t know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.”
“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”
“You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”
You might consider the ever quotable Samuel Johnson. For example,
“Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life,” which would lead nicely into any acknowledgments you might have.
Of course, Dr. Johnson also said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” You may have falsified that statement. Then again, maybe you haven’t…
Good Luck
“An economist’s guess is liable to be just as good as anybody else’s.”
-Will Rogers
“I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents” — Karl Marx, letter to Engels, June 18 1862
“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.† – John K. Galbraith
“Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one’s wishes† – Khrushchev
There is nothing which requires more to be illustrated by philosophy than trade does.
Samuel Johnson
(Commenting on the “Wealth of Nations”, which had just been published)
“Big time, Bill! Big time! Big time!”
- Ronnie Hawkins
Here’s one from The Wealth of Nations:
“To hurt in any degree the interest of any one order of citizens, for no other purpose but to promote that of some other, is evidently contrary to that justice and equality of treatment which the sovereign owes to all the different orders of his subjects.”
Maybe not for the copyright page, but perhaps for the chapter on trade. I always jump to trade when thinking about basic economics, because it was the simple yet powerful idea that trade _can_ always benefit both parties that sparked my interest in the subject.
“Choose well, your choice is brief, and yet endless.” – Goethe
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