Andre > Andre's Quotes

“Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth that the profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World

“the much-maligned “capitalism” has raised the real income per person of the poorest since 1800 not by 10 percent or 100 percent, but by over 3,000 percent.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“Modern liberals do not sit anywhere along the conventional one-dimensional right-left spectrum of governmental coercion.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“One suspects that the conservatives of left and right don’t much like the “mass” and its badly informed preferences. Let us take care of you, they cry. Let tradition celebrated by wise elders, or planning implemented by wise experts, guide you, oh you sadly misled mass. (The ruling lords and the monopolists view the clerisy’s conservative theorizing with delight, resting assured that the elders and the planners will inadvertently shield their rents.)”
― Deirdre McCloskey

“The way to help the poor, in short, is to let the Great Enrichment proceed by commercially tested betterment, as it has widely since 1800 and especially in the past forty years.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“Therefore, having a lot is not immoral. It is the good luck to be born in America or Japan or Denmark. The “luck” consists chiefly of a modern liberal ideology of innovism combined with reasonably honest courts and reasonably secure property rights and reasonably non-extractive governments and reasonably effective educational systems, and a reasonably long time for the reasonably good ideas, and especially the innovations, to do their work. By all means let’s spread the good luck around—by persuading people to a modern liberalism leading to the Great Enrichment, and a full life.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“What will matter in fifty years in economic history is poverty and its ending, and in political history what will matter is tyranny and its ending. If poverty and tyranny are ended, the rest follows.”
― Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science

“The economy, like science or art, is more like an organism growing uncertainly toward the light than a steel machine repeating exactly today and tomorrow what it did yesterday.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.”
― Ludwig Von Mises

“It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom. The first requisite for a better social order is the return to unrestricted freedom of thought and speech.”
― Ludwig Von Mises, Omnipotent Government

“Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.”
― Ludwig von Mises

“Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government

“a free market puts a premium on empathy.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“A world that is less invigorated by honor, glory, and ideology and more tempted by the pleasures of bourgeois life is a world in which fewer people are killed.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

“reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

“Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.”)”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“Individual Ambition Serves the Common Good.”
― Adam Smith

“Para ser, tenemos que narrarnos, y en ese cuento de nosotros mismos hay muchísimo cuento: nos mentimos, nos imaginamos, nos engañamos.”
― Rosa Montero, La loca de la casa