There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.
I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.
War remains the decisive human failure.
In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it...
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people ra...
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.
Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.
Tenure was originally invented to protect radical professors, those who challenged the accepted order. But we don't have such people anymore at the universities, and the reason is tenure. When the tim...
Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
When people are least sure they are often most dogmatic.