Category: Economics
“It isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences.” – Michael Lewis, Boomerang
“There is no such thing as a riskless asset. The reason an asset pays a return is that it carries risk.” – Michael Lewis, Boomerang
“When you borrow a lot of money to create a false prosperity, you import the future into the present. It isn’t the actual future so much as some grotesque silicone version of it. Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven’t really earned.” — Michael Lewis, Boomerang
“One of the hidden causes of the current global financial crisis is that the people who saw it coming had more to gain from it by taking short positions than they did by trying to publicize the problem.” — Michael Lewis, Boomerang
“A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.” – Michael Lewis, Boomerang
“Through the tax code, there has been class warfare waged, and my class has won. It’s been a rout. You have seen a period where American workers generally have gone no place, and where the really super rich as a group increased their incomes five for one in this rarefied atmosphere.” — Warren Buffet, quoted in “Returns ‘Terrific’ as U.S. Workers Suffer,” Bloomberg News, 11.15.11
“Just surrender and it won’t hurt at all.” — Brian May, “Hammer to Fall”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCGtN1lKoUc
“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)
“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
“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,’ the shopkeeper a good trade, the farmers high markets, and the professional classes would collect their fees; consequently it was only right that such important matters as the tariff and monetary standards should be determined according to the ideals of the great business interests of the country. The new view was that the object of legislation should be to aid all citizens with no special privilege or regard to any one class. Its birth was in the Granger movement. It was more widely disseminated by Populism, but its ablest presentation was by William Jennings Bryan, notably in his speech before the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1896: ‘You have made the definition of a business man too limited in its application. A man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer. The attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis. The merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business man as a merchant of New York. The farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day—who begins in the spring and toils all summer—and who, by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country, creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain. The miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth, or climb two thousand feet upon the cliffs and bring forth from their hiding place the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade, are as much business men as the few financial magnates, who, in a back room, corner the money of the world. We come to speak for this broader class of business men.’” — The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XXI, Sec. 36
“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 every new story but hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who must be condemned to poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social inequality political institutions under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.” — Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879)
“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
“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”
“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 regulate or control the railroads and telegraphs; to limit the ownership of land; to modify the laws of inheritance; and possibly to levy a progressive income-tax, so that the enormous fortunes should bear more rather than less than their share of the public burdens.” — Washington Gladden (quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XVII, Ch. XVI, Sec. 12)
“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)
“Vicious thieves have always ruled the world.” — Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
“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.))
“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”)
“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. At any rate, it’s a terrible metaphor for the rest of life.”– Brian Christian, The Most Human Human
“When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of nonthinkers.” — Jason Fried & David Hansson (from The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” — Oscar Wilde
“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”
“Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny.” — James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
“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. It’s not just that we move the goalposts; we mock the machines’ touchdowns as they spike the ball. We place the communicative element of language above the propositional and argumentative element, not because it matters more but because it’s all that’s left to us.” — Adam Gopnik, “Get Smart”
“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.
“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)
“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
“You’re abandoning a lot of ideas when you are too into comfort.” — Christian Louboutin (from “Sole Mate,” by Lauren Collins)
“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)
“Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.” — Josh Billings