“The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all irrelevant -- that all you really need to know are a few simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them.”

— Paul Krugman

"Virus Strikes Again", Originally "Supply-Side Virus Strikes Again: Why there is no cure for this virulent infection" http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/virus.html, undated draft at web.mit.edu of a "The Dismal Science" column for Slate
The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From The Dismal Science (1998)

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Paul Krugman 106

American economist 1953

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

Source: Full House (1996), p. 212

“But the honest truth is that what drives me as an economist is that economics is fun. I think I understand why so many people think that economics is a boring subject, but they are wrong. On the contrary, there is hardly anything I know that is as exciting as finding that the great events that move history, the forces that determine the destiny of empires and the fate of kings, can sometimes be explained, predicted, or even controlled by a few symbols on a printed page. We all want power, we all want success, but the ultimate reward is the simple joy of understanding.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Incidents from my career http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/incidents.html (1995)

“Yes, we have to get economics back into proportion, as one aspect of politics, important but never really the main thing. This may be unfashionable, indeed anti-fashionable, because it is the current intellectual fashions which have wrought so much havoc in this country.”

Keith Joseph (1918–1994) British barrister and politician

Speech in Birmingham (19 October 1974) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101830
1970s

“Non-supply siders: Concern themselves with 'How to divide up a [fixed] pie'. Supply siders: Concern themselves with 'How to make a bigger pie.”

Mike Rosen (1944) American political pundit

October 22, 1996 KOA Radio

“The General Theory is at once both a book of economic theory and a font of economic prejudices—there are probably few academics in economics and political science who do not have an opinion of it, whether they have read it or not. It has reached the status—which it obtained almost immediately—where the fact of its existence is as important, if not more important, than what it actually says.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

“Like any major intellectual contribution, Keynes's ideas were bitterly criticized. To many people it seems obvious that massive economic slumps must have deep roots. To them, Keynes's argument that they are essentially no more than a problem of mixed signals, which can be cured by printing a bit more money, seems unbelievable.”

Paul Krugman book Peddling Prosperity

Source: Peddling Prosperity (1994), Ch. 1 : The Attack on Keynes

“There are so many ways of being wrong and so few ways of being right that it is much more economical to study successes.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

“One of the most depressing things about educated people today is that so few of them, even among professional intellectuals, are able to follow the steps of a simple logical argument.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

The Storm Over the University (December 6, 1990)
Context: You need to know enough philosophy so that the methods of logical analysis are available to you to be used as a tool. One of the most depressing things about educated people today is that so few of them, even among professional intellectuals, are able to follow the steps of a simple logical argument.

“Economics is a young science, and there is still much to be learned. Economists sometimes disagree because they have different hunches about the validity of alternative theories or about the size of important parameters that measure how economic variables are related.”

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

Source: Principles of Economics (1998-), Ch. 2. Thinking Like an Economist; p. 30

“Few men think; yet all have opinions.”

George Berkeley book Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous

Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue. This appears in a passage first added in the third edition, (1734)
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713)

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