The Skeptical Optimist

FQ.08.02: Favorite Quote for This Week

Our national income accounts do not directly show the benefits of that very large part of knowledge creation represented by new and improved products ... Yet such new and improved products constitute a large part of the increase in economic welfare from year to year, accounting for increases in life expectancy, physical appearance, sense of well-being, range of activities available to us, and so on.
—Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2

FQ.08.01: Favorite Quote for This Week

Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future.  But that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away.  Ergo, we do not know what we will know.
N. N. Taleb, The Black Swan

FQ.07.52: Favorite Quote for This Week

Continuing to run surpluses... brings to center stage the critical longer-term fiscal policy issue of whether the federal government should accumulate large quantities of private assets.
—Alan Greenspan, Jan. 25, 2001

FQ.07.50: Favorite Quote for This Week

We should tax the private sector sufficiently to free the resources that we find desirable for the government to command, but no more than that.  This is likely to entail a stable debt/GDP ratio in a growing economy.
—Robert Eisner, The Misunderstood Economy

FQ.07.49: Favorite Quote for This Week

Humans have strongly ingrained rules about fairness and reciprocity that override calculated "rationality." ... We have deep rooted behaviors that reward cooperation and punish free riders.  While some economists might view these behaviors as irrational, [they] in fact provide the cornerstone for the social cooperation that is essential for wealth creation.
—Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth

FQ.07.48: Favorite Quote for This Week

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.
—Groucho Marx

FQ.07.47: Favorite Quote for This Week

Free trade only costs American jobs if we as a nation are too stupid to re-employ those workers relieved from menial jobs which other nations want to do.
—Dr. Rick Boettger

FQ.07.46: Favorite Quote for This Week

The smothering of incentive and the cultivation of mendacity are a characteristic weakness of large bureaucracies, whether public or private.
—George S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, 342.

FQ.07.45: Favorite Quote for This Week

Contrary to social-science wisdom, almost no discovery, no technologies of note, came from design and planning—they were just Black Swans.  The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves.  So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. 
—N.N. Taleb

FQ.07.44: Favorite Quote for This Week

Do not waste your time trying to fight forecasters, stock analysts, economists, and social scientists, except to play pranks on them...  If you hear a “prominent” economist using the word equilibrium or normal distribution, do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan