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| 2011 publicantion |
If we are serious about creating wealth, our focus should not be on taking care of the rich so that their money trickles down; it should be on making sure everyone has a fair chance—in education, health, social capital, access to financial capital—to create new information and ideas.
In describing these movements, the term “hard right” is to be preferred to “new right” because the slogans, themes, and appeals are old. They go back through the twentieth and nineteenth centuries to historic splits on the conservative right, back, in fact, to conservatism’s never-resolved ambivalence about capitalist modernity and hence to its original quarrel with political liberalism.
Theory is a moon buggy for exploring terrain that’s difficult or impossible to explore any other way. We need our wits about us to build and to guide the buggy. The real distinction isn’t between formal and informal methods – they both need each other. It’s between the use of those methods that is skilful and fruitful, rather than just clever, and use that is less so – between good analysis (formal and discursive) and not-so-good analysis.
Nicholas Gruen, "What’s the beef with Krugman? Gruen on the disciplinary incentives of economics"
The study of “development”—that is, change in human societies over time—is therefore not just an endless catalog of personalities, events, conflicts, and policies. It necessarily centers around the process by which political institutions emerge, evolve, and eventually decay.
What Socrates discovered was that we can have intercourse with ourselves, as well as with others, and that the two kinds of intercourse are somehow interrelated. Aristotle, speaking about friendship, remarked: “The friend is another self”139—meaning: you can carry on the dialogue of thought with him just as well as with yourself. This is still in the Socratic tradition, except that Socrates would have said: The self, too, is a kind of friend.
All science, said Descartes, rests upon the one indubitable certainty that I think and that therefore I exist. Now the thought and existence of which Descartes spoke were not abstractions—anything thinking anything, or anything somehow getting itself thought about—as those wiseacres believe who offer to emend his formula to cogitatur ergo est, or cogitare ergo esse or the like. Descartes meant what he said, and what he said was that the concrete historical fact, the fact of my actual present awareness, was the root of science.
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