Capitalism , as Marx defined it, is a system in which productive wealth is privately owned. Communism (which Marx proposed as an alternative) is one in which productive wealth is owned by the community, or by the nation on behalf of the people.
The economics we need is of the "seminar room" variety, not the "rule-of-thumb" kind. It is an economics that recognizes its limitations and caveats and knows that the right message depends on the context. The fine print is what economists have to co...
Just as the church needs members with different skills, our world must have various forms of labor, interdependent and thus valuable. A world full of ministers would be without churches, bread for the Lord's Supper, and printed Bibles to read.
There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality ...
Rules do not determine outcomes - the players still have to make choices - but they make some outcomes more likely than others, by defining what it means to "win", and by creating incentives for and imposing constraints on the players.
An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly...
We must arm ourselves with patience and wisdom and listen to the poor what they want. This is the best way to avoid the trap of ignorance, ideology and inertia on our side.
Mankind, as history tells us over and over again, seeks the least painful solution and, as a result, ends up exchanging one problem for another
Can we imagine a togetherness that isn't founded on gross generalizations, conceptualizing ourselves as unique individuals who still stand to gain from looking out for one another? Can we identify with each other rather than with categories or master...
Economics evolved as a more moral and more egalitarian approach to policy than prevailed in its surrounding milieu. Let's cherish and extend that heritage. The real contributions of economics to human welfare might turn out to be very different from ...
The human community and individual people are more likely to hurt or undernourish children they think of as 'bodies' to be used. Cultures and people are more likely to raise children to be mere economic interns rather than fully developed humans if t...
But only 'rich' people by definition have the 'extra' money to buy things and invest to create economic growth. Do we really want to tax that 'extra' money away - and give it to the government to spend? Does that make any economic sense outside of po...
The economic sense of possibility was so great when I was growing up that my parents had no question that I could do anything I wanted to do, even as a girl. I've always believed that the economics of a story intersects with the women's story - that ...
Our economics are not baseball's economics. Our game is not baseball's game. Our owners are not baseball's owners, with one or two exceptions. Our union is not baseball's union. What we do has to be crafted and suited to address hockey, to address th...
One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced the guilt-free, external-less, everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end philosophy of economics in order to justify their own evil works...
Obama and the Democrats' preposterous argument is that we are just one more big tax increase away from solving our economic problems. The inescapable conclusion, however, is that the primary driver of the short-term deficit is not tax cuts but the la...
Christian theological history is filled with stories of groups who have developed theories of the election of themselves to salvation and the damnation of others; theories that demonstrate that their particular group has been exclusively endowed with...
I am using the word as a scientist means it: a set of ideas so well established by observations and physical models that it is essentially indistinguishable from fact. That is different from the colloquial use that means "guess." To a scientist, you ...
It often seems to me that's all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again." Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory....
An enthusiastic philosopher, of whose name we are not informed, had constructed a very satisfactory theory on some subject or other, and was not a little proud of it. "But the facts, my dear fellow," said his friend, "the facts do not agree with your...
The sensible man,' Crow had said (to Sherlock Holmes), 'don't look to confirm what he already knows -- he looks to deny it. Finding evidence that backs up your theories ain't useful, but finding evidence that your theories are wrong is priceless. Nev...
