The spontaneous individual optimization that drives the theories with which I began is important, but it is not enough by itself. If spontaneous Coase‐style bargains, whether through laissez-faire or political bargaining and government, eliminated socially wasteful predation and obtained the institutions that are needed for a thriving market economy, then there would not be so many grossly inefficient and poverty-stricken societies.
― Mancur Olson
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Distributional coalitions slow down a society’s capacity to adopt new technologies and to reallocate resources in response to changing conditions, and thereby reduce the rate of economic growth.
― Mancur Olson
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The history of mankind and the place of the economy in it, is not, as the evolutionists would have it, an account of unconscious growth and organic continuity. Such an approach would necessarily obscure some aspects of economic development vital to men in the present phase of transition. For the dogma of organic continuity must, in the last resort, weaken man’s power of shaping his own history.
― Karl Polanyi
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To swerve from the expected course so often is to become inevitably fascinated by what Philip Roth once described as the “counterlife,” the alternative version of existence, where what ifs are fully rendered in the imagination.
~ Franklin Foer via The Atlantic
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The quintessential Levy subject is a member of the intelligentsia, a historian studying male tyrants, a poet, a doctoral student in anthropology. These characters are 21st-century Herzogs, who can’t help but channel their neuroses through the prism of their intellectual fixations.
~ Franklin Foer via The Atlantic
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In the early days of the pandemic, it became harder for us to see one another. The human face, the ultimate marker of individuality, what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “the first disclosure,” was suddenly sheathed in fabric. Strangers encountered on the street were even stranger—and the masks that covered their visage became a screen on which to project anxious thoughts.
~ Franklin Foer via The Atlantic
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Why did the Reaganites do this? They were in thrall to the idea that the highest, in fact the only, valid goal of economic policy is efficiency—defined narrowly as the maximum output for the lowest prices. And they believed that Big Business was inherently efficient.
~ Franklin Foer via The Atlantic
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