The Art of Tetman Callis

“The best way to do good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.” — Benjamin Franklin (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVIII, Ch. XXIV, Sec. 3)

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“The man who serves is the one who comes to understand other men.” — Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XXII, Sec. 9

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“Gradually public opinion concerning the scope and purpose of government in its relation to the general welfare underwent a transformation. The view which had long been dominant was that national prosperity depended upon the prosperity of the manufacturing and commercial classes of the country; when they flourished the labourer would enjoy a ‘full dinner pail,’ [...]

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“So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundations, and [...]

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“Sound loans are at the heart of a sound banking system.  Unsound loans are the surest route to disaster.” — McLean & Nocera, All the Devils Are Here

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“Old men are just as bad as young men when it comes to money.  They can’t think.  They always try to buy what they should have for free.  And what they buy, after they have it, is nothing.” — James Alan McPherson, “A Solo Song: For Doc”

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“Out of unrestricted competition arise many wrongs that the State must redress and many abuses which it must check. It may become the duty of the State to reform its taxation, so that its burdens shall rest less heavily upon the lower classes; to repress monopolies of all sorts; to prevent and punish gambling; to [...]

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“Dishonest men can be bought and ignorant men can be manipulated. This is the kind of government which private capital, invested in public-service industries, naturally feels that it must have.” — Washington Gladden (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XVI, Sec. 12)

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“Vicious thieves have always ruled the world.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear

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“It is no Disgrace to be Poor; it is simply Inconvenient.” — George Ade, from Fables in Slang High Street 4.7 — “Radio Stars and Hemp TV” (cont.) is posted today. (Tomorrow: High Street 4.8 — “Radio Stars and Hemp TV” (cont.))

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“A full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane.” — Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death High Street 2 — “How to Get to High Street” is posted today. (Tomorrow: High Street 3.1 — “Downhill Racing”)

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“Our legal system is adversarial, founded, like capitalism, on the idea that a bunch of people trying to tear each other apart, plus certain laws and procedures preventing things from getting too out of hand, will yield, in one, justice, and in the other, prosperity, for all.  Sometimes this does happen; other times, it doesn’t.  [...]

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“When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of nonthinkers.” — Jason Fried & David Hansson (from The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)

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“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” — Oscar Wilde

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“For most people will power is a limited resource; if we spend lots of energy controlling our impulses in one area, it becomes harder to control our impulses in others.  Or, as the psychologist Roy Baumeister puts it, will power is like a muscle: overuse temporarily exhausts it.” — James Suroweicki, “In Praise of Distraction”

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“Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny.” — James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

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“We have been outsourcing our intelligence, and our humanity, to machines for centuries.  They have long been faster, bigger, tougher, more deadly.  Now they are much quicker at calculation and infinitely more adept at memory than we have ever been.  And so now we decide that memory and calculation are not really part of mind.  [...]

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“Grilled Cheese Sandwich with Pickles and Fries” is the result of taking a handful of ideas languishing in the workshop, mixing them together to see how they might fit, and making a prose bracelet out of them.  It was published in The Writing Disorder on New Year’s Eve last year.

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“The honor of parents is a fair and noble treasure to their posterity, but to have the use of a treasure of wealth and honor, and to leave none to your successors, because you have neither money nor reputation of your own, is alike base and dishonorable.” — Plato, Menexenus (trans. Jowett)

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“The king who does not deal with the concerns of his kingdom in person and on time, verily he, those concerns, and even his kingdom get ruined.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Aranyakanda Sarga 33

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“You’re abandoning a lot of ideas when you are too into comfort.” — Christian Louboutin (from “Sole Mate,” by Lauren Collins)

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“Countries may fall, but their rivers and mountains remain.  When spring comes to the ruined castle, the grass is green again.” — Basho (from “Aftershocks,” by Evan Osnos)

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“Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.” — Josh Billings

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“The CDOs manufactured in 2006 and 2007 were in large part a direct manifestation of their ingredients–pools of tainted assets precariously situated atop a wave of home-price appreciation.  As investors became addicted to the higher yields of investment-grade CDOs, their rose-colored glasses focused on the AAA rating rather than the pool of shoddy subprime mortgages [...]

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“There’s a difference between an old-fashioned financial panic and what had happened on Wall Street in 2008.  In an old-fashioned panic, perception creates its own reality: Someone shouts ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater and the audience crushes each other to death in its rush for the exits.  On Wall Street in 2008 the reality finally [...]

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“With stagnant wages and booming consumption, the cash-strapped American masses had a virtually unlimited demand for loans but an uncertain ability to repay them.  All they had going for them, from the point of view of Wall Street financial engineers, was that their financial fates could be misconstrued as uncorrelated.  By assuming that one pile [...]

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“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” — [...]

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“Nothing so much contributes to promote the public well-being as the exportation of manufactured goods.” — Robert Walpole (quoted by John Cassidy in “Enter the Dragon”)

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“CDOs were flawed from the outset, used too often as a junkyard for risky and substandard assets.  CDOs survived because of changes in the credit markets that produced an excess quantity of these assets and herds of investors hungry for higher yields.” — Anna Katherine Barnett-Hart, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical [...]

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“Not only did the rating agencies fail to examine the accuracy of their own prior collateral ratings, but in many cases, they also used other agency’s ratings without checking for accuracy.  To correct for any shortcomings in the other agency’s rating methodology, they created the practice of ‘notching,’ whereby they would simply decrease the ratings [...]

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