Richard A. Posner: Quotes about thinking

Richard A. Posner is United States federal judge. Explore interesting quotes on thinking.
Richard A. Posner: 22 quotes0 likes

“Jurisprudence addresses the questions about law that an intelligent layperson of speculative bent — not a lawyer — might think particularly interesting.”

Richard A. Posner

The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990). Introduction.

“If judges are pragmatic, as I think they largely are in our system, it can only be in the everyday sense of the term. But immediately the counterexample of Holmes, a gifted and serious though not systematic philosophical thinker, comes to mind.”

Richard A. Posner

Law, pragmatism, and democracy (2003), Ch. 2. Legal Pragmatism.

“As conceived in this book, economics is the science of rational choice in a world─our world─in which resources are limited in relation to human wants. The task of economics, so defined, is to explore the implications of assuming that man is a rational maximizer of his ends in life, his satisfactions─what we shall call his “self-interest.” Rational maximization should not be confused with conscious calculation. Economics is not a thoery about consciousness. Behavior is rational when it conforms to the model of rational choice, whatever the state of mind of the chooser.(…) Nor is perfect rationality assumed; rational-choice thoery allows us to assume that rationality is “bounded” because of human cognitive limitations, although another way to think of those limitations is as costs of absorbing and using information.”

Richard A. Posner

Source: Economic Analysis of Law (7th ed., 2007), Ch. 1: The Nature of Economic Reasoning

“Correctly anticipating the rapid growth of living standards, moreover, Keynes predicted that within a century people's material wants would be satiated, and so per capita consumption would stop growing. People would work less, but only because their need for income, and more important their desire for it, was less. And then the challenge to society would be the management of unprecedented voluntary leisure. This was a popular 1930s theme--think of Huxley's Brave New World--but it underestimated the ability of business to create new wants, and new goods and services to fulfill them.”

Richard A. Posner

How I Became a Keynesian (2009)