Economical Writing Quotes

“You will probably object to Weber’s definition of the government as a monopoly of coercion. You will certainly object to Tolstoy’s definition, in 1857, of the government as “a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens.”5 And you will object vehemently to the more recent definition along the same lines by the anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), of the government as “the most extensive criminal group in society.” 6 Murray used to say that the government is a band of robbers into whose clutches we have fallen.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“Ethics has three levels, the good for self, the good for others, and the good for the transcendent purpose of a life.1 The good for self is the prudence by which you self-cultivate, learning to play the cello, say, or practicing centering prayer. Self-denial is not automatically virtuous. (How many self-denying mothers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: I’ll just sit here in the dark.) The good for a transcendent purpose is the faith, hope, and love to pursue an answer to the question “So what?” The family, science, art, the football club, God give the answers that humans seek. The middle level is attention to the good for others. The late first-century BCE Jewish sage Hillel of Babylon put it negatively yet reflexively: “Do not do unto others what you would not want done unto yourself.” It’s masculine, a guy-liberalism, a gospel of justice, roughly the so-called Non-Aggression Axiom as articulated by libertarians since the word “libertarian” was redirected in the 1950s to a (then) right-wing liberalism. Matt Kibbe puts it well in the title of his 2014 best seller, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto.2 On the other hand, the early first-century CE Jewish sage Jesus of Nazareth put it positively: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s gal-liberalism, a gospel of love, placing upon us an ethical responsibility to do more than pass by on the other side. Be a good Samaritan. Be nice. In”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“The Harvard philosopher John Rawls articulated what he called the Difference Principle: if the entrepreneurship of a rich person made the poorest better off, then the higher income of the rich entrepreneur was justified.7 It makes a good deal of ethical sense. Equality does not.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“Commerce works better than theft.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“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

“But it didn’t have the Great Enrichment because it didn’t have the ideas flowing from a free people. Ideas, not savings, did it. Liberalism, not empire.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“Ideas of human dignity and liberty did the trick, making the inventions and then investments profitable for entrepreneurs and the nation. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, “economic change in all periods depends, more than most economists think, on what people believe.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“The Great Enrichment was so big, so unprecedented, that it’s impossible to see it as coming out of routine causes, such as trade or exploitation or investment or imperialism. Economic science of an orthodox character is good at explaining routine. Yet all such routines had already occurred on a big scale in China and the Ottoman Empire, in Rome and South Asia. Slavery was common in the Middle East, trade was large in India, the investment in Chinese canals and Roman roads was immense. Yet no Great Enrichment happened.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession of 2007–2009, unpleasant though it was. Now it’s over. The big story is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 began to adopt liberal ideas in their economies, and came to welcome creative destruction.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“As an Italian liberal, and anti-fascist, Benedetto Croce, put it in 1928, “Ethical liberalism abhors authoritarian regulation of the economic process [equally from the left as from the right, from socialism as from fascism], because it considers it a humbling of the inventive faculties of man.”3 In”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“Yet each favor and handout and protection of vested interests shifts the direction of capital and labor artificially, resulting in over-investment in, say, mortgaged houses, or over-investment in corruption to get and maintain restrictions on entry to, say, ownership of taxi medallions, or over-investment in a war to protect slavery. Of course, any proposal to drop the mortgage-interest deduction or to let Uber and Lyft compete freely with medallioned taxis raises political storms. Or a Civil War.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“People are motivated in varying proportions by prudence, temperance, courage, justice, faith, hope, and love, together with the corresponding vices.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“By contrast, human action, to use the “Austrian” economic term, is not merely reactive to constraints and utility functions but active and creative, the exercise of the free and creative and (some of us think) God-given will that can say yes, or no.”
― 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

“He who would acquire a good style should devote his days and nights to the study of Joseph Addison.” Well, likewise Orwell, McCarthy, and Wolfe.”
― Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Economical Writing: Thirty-Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose

“Clarity is a matter of speed directed at The Point. Bad writing stops you with a puzzle in every other sentence. It sends you as reader off in irrelevant directions. It distracts you from The Point, provoking you to wonder what the subject is now, what the connection might be with the subject a moment ago, and why the words differ.”
― Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Economical Writing: Thirty-Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose

“The big secret is that good writing pays well and bad writing pays badly. Rotten writing causes more papers and reports to fail than do rotten statistics or rotten research. You have to be read to be listened to. Bad writing is not read, even by professors or bosses paid to read it. Can you imagine actually reading the worst report or term paper you’ve ever written? Your sainted mother herself wouldn’t.”
― Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Economical Writing: Thirty-Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose

“Therefore one ought to take care to write not merely so that the reader can understand but so that he cannot possibly misunderstand”
― Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Economical Writing: Thirty-Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose

“The guiding question in research (research, or invention, is not the main subject here, but no extra charge) is So What? Answer that question in every sentence, and you will become a great scholar, or a millionaire. Answer it once or twice in a ten-page paper or report, and you’ll write a pretty good one.”
― Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Economical Writing: Thirty-Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose

“As Raymond Aron, that rarest of things, a modern French liberal, noted, in Clive James’s translation, “the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity’s imperfection; he resigns himself to a régime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the result of conscious choice.”10 You could call it the invisible hand, noting that it is true also of other systems, such as language.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“A recognition of the impossibility of exact perfection lay behind the work of a few economists, such as Herbert Simon’s satisficing, Ronald Coase’s transaction costs, George Shackle’s and Israel Kirzner’s reaffirmation of the old Yogi Berra jest: it’s hard to predict, especially about the future.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“The left in its worrying routinely forgets this most important secular event since the invention of agriculture—the Great Enrichment of the last two centuries—and goes on worrying and worrying, like the little dog worrying about his bone in the Travelers Insurance advertisement on TV, in a new version every half generation or so.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“book of 2000 by Craig Gay (With Liberty and Justice for Whom?: The Recent Evangelical Debate over Capitalism), which showed that evangelical Christians on the left took wealth as given, manna, and “hence applied their Christian/Biblical principles only to the problem of (static) distribution, whereas the evangelicals on the right emphasized incentives to the ongoing creation of wealth, innovation, etc.”8”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“If we seized all the assets of the eighty-five wealthiest people in the world to make a fund to give annually to the poorest half, it would raise their spending power by less than 10 cents a day.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“The cry for more education, by the way, is often a despairing excuse for not liberalizing the economy directly and quickly.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“Human capital is of course much more equally distributed than ownership of factories or ships. We own ourselves, even if we are poor in stocks and bonds. Focusing on financial wealth is therefore misleading.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“The forces that will drive the whole world to become rich are temperate self-interest and temperate governance. As Adam Smith put it in 1755, “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“People often resent the dealers. But in the end they prefer them to thugs or thieves.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“The clerisy imagined in the nineteenth century nationalism, socialism, imperialism, and racism. Such theories resulted during the twentieth century in actually existing socialism and nationalism and national-socialist-racist imperialism, and the butcher bill for them all. In the late twentieth century the clerisy turned its hand to theorizing evil consumerism and environmental decay. Uh-oh. Watch out, dears, for fresh results in the twenty-first century.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All

“The bourgeois (which is merely the usual French and for a while the usual English word for the urban men of the middle class) were the innovators willing to subject their ideas to the democratic test of a market, and to supply Paris with grain and iron.”
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All