"Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others." - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

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Unfortunately, since this textbook (Williamson - Macroeconomics, 2nd ed.) will not be used next semester and will likely not be used in any future semesters, it looks like I'm stuck with it. Maybe I should put it on eBay. Or, *gasp*, read the rest of it. Ah well, might as well get my money's worth and transcribe all the amusing snipes I didn't have time to put up during the semester:

A weak defence of the optimising assumption: "If we were to abandon optimization behavior, there would be many possible alternatives, and it would be extremely difficult to get our models to make any predictions at all. While there is typically only one way to behave optimally, there are many ways in which individuals can be stupid." - p. 104

"If you were a macroeconomist working for a political party, how a particular tax policy affected the wealth of different consumers in different ways might be the key to your party's success, and you would want to pay close attention to this." - p. 274

"President Bush clearly did not put much stock in the Ricardian equivalence theorem, as he appeared convinced that the withholding reduction would increase private consumption expenditures." - p. 285


Meanwhile Varian is not to be bested: "Now we have two decisions to consider. The workers have to decide how much education to acquire and the firms have to decide how much to pay workers with different amounts of education. Let us make the extreme assumption that the education doesn't affect worker productivity at all. Of course this isn't true in real life - especially for economics courses - but it helps to keep the model simple." - p. 676


"The so-called Christian state is the Christian negation of the state, but by no means the political realization of Christianity. The state which still professes Christianity in the form of religion, does not yet profess it in the form appropriate to the state, for it still has a religious attitude towards religion -- that is to say, it is not the true implementation of the human basis of religion, because it still relies on the unreal, imaginary form of this human core. The so-called Christian state is the imperfect state, and the Christian religion is regarded by it as the supplementation and sanctification of its imperfection. For the Christian state, therefore, religion necessarily becomes a means; hence, it is a hypocritical state. It makes a great difference whether the complete state, because of the defect inherent in the general nature of the state, counts religion among its presuppositions, or whether the incomplete state, because of the defect inherent in its particular existence as a defective state, declares that religion is its basis. In the latter case, religion becomes imperfect politics. In the former case, the imperfection even of consummate politics becomes evident in religion. The so-called Christian state needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the real state, does not need religion for its political completion. On the contrary, it can disregard religion because in it the human basis of religion is realized in a secular manner. The so-called Christian state, on the other hand, has a political attitude to religion and a religious attitude to politics. By degrading the forms of the state to mere semblance, it equally degrades religion to mere semblance...

The separation of the "spirit of the Gospel" from the "letter of the Gospel" is an irreligious act. A state which makes the Gospel speak in the language of politics -- that is, in another language than that of the Holy Ghost -- commits sacrilege, if not in human eyes, then in the eyes of its own religion. The state which acknowledges Christianity as its supreme criterion, and the Bible as its Charter, must be confronted with the words of Holy Scripture, for every word of Scripture is holy. This state, as well as the human rubbish on which it is based, is caught in a painful contradiction that is insoluble from the standpoint of religious consciousness when it is referred to those sayings of the Gospel with which it "not only does not comply, but cannot possibly comply, if it does not want to dissolve itself completely as a state"." - Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question