Rick > Rick's Quotes

“Buy American and helping sweatshop workers are conflicting goals.”
― Benjamin Powell, Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy

“Under the system of centralized control without constitutional checks and balances, the war spirit identifies dissent with treason, the pursuit of private happiness with slackerism and sabotage, and, on the other side, obedience with discipline, conformity with patriotism. Thus at one stroke war extinguishes the difficulties of planning, cutting out from under the individual any moral ground as well as any lawful ground on which he might resist the execution of the official plan. (Lippmann 1936: 67)”
― Anonymous

“By its largely rhetorical devotion to the free market and its actual policies of constructing a permanent war economy, conservatism helps to perpetuate the myth that it is the policies of free markets rather than those of planning that have been obstructing peace, and that it is an existing market economy rather than an established system of noncomprehensive planning which is responsible for our current economic distress. In fact, Reagan’s rapid militarization of the American economy, in spite of the rosy pictures of free-market economies that fill his speeches, is the very essence of national economic planning.”
― Anonymous

“All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“Goals unattainable now will never be reached unless they are articulated when they are still unattainable.”
― Anonymous

“All this form of planning offers is to replace our present rulers with leaders or representatives of the intellectuals who endorse its policies. All it can promise is that rule by the “good guys” will be more pleasant than rule by the “bad guys.” Since it grudgingly concedes the need for market institutions but insists on interfering with them to achieve specific goals, it is a prescription for a continuation of the arbitrary use of power to which the twentieth century has become all too accustomed. Having abandoned the principle put forward by comprehensive planning, it has none left. Instead it recites social priorities that represent a wish list for the progressive-minded, but it has no well-defined standard on what means are to be deemed appropriate to achieve these ends. In short, noncomprehensive planning is not a basis for a radical movement at all. It is politics as usual. It is another plea by messianic political leaders that we should trust them to set things right. The goal of a genuine radicalism must be to transcend this whole level of politics.”
― Anonymous

“Power thrives on coercive obstructions to market competition. Ideologies that seek increased governmental intervention into the economy have been only helping the powerful secure better control throughout the world.”
― Anonymous

“The first thing which philosophy undertakes to give is fellow-feeling with all men; in other words, sympathy and sociability.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“whatever some Prius fans may believe, it turns out that Priuses do have a corporeal form, and a Prius in congested traffic will cause more emissions indirectly by slowing other cars down than it will emit directly.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“It may be satisfying to castigate the likes of Geithner and the heads of Lehman Brothers and AIG, but safety experts like Perrow know it is far more productive to design better systems than to hope for better people.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“And the fundamental point of all these massively parallel experiments is the same: when a problem reaches a certain level of complexity, formal theory won’t get you nearly as far as an incredibly rapid, systematic process of trial and error.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt leaves as legal tender, we have of course all become immensely rich. . . . But, we have also run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability. Which means that I gather the current going rate has something like three major deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut. So, um, in order to obviate this problem and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on an extensive defoliation campaign, and um, burn down all the forests. DOUGLAS”
― Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run--or Ruin--an Economy

“The reader who is familiar with the First Edition will note, in the Second Edition, a very slight and subtle shift of focus, a change of emphasis, in the direction of Pragmatism. Some of the later Chapters, if read uncritically, could even lead to a sort of optimism regarding Man’s ultimate ability to take charge of Systems—those created by his own hand as well as those originated by Mother Nature. The reader is hereby warned that any such optimism is the reader’s own responsibility.”
― John Gall, SYSTEMANTICS. THE SYSTEMS BIBLE

“Forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace.”
― Jonathan Lockwood Huie

“Doctors troubleshoot the human body—they never got a chance to debug it. (It took God one day to design, prototype, and release that product; talk about schedule pressure! I guess we can forgive priority-two bugs like bunions and male pattern baldness.)”
― David J. Agans, Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems

“Human morality is a mess of conundrums that could benefit from scrutiny, less superstition, and more evidence-based thinking. We’ll quickly find that trying to train AIs to be more humanistic will challenge us to be more humanistic. In the way that children can better their parents, the challenge of rearing AIs is an opportunity – not a horror. We should welcome it.”
― Anonymous