"I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed." - James Thurber
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"That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceit of one's own wisdom, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves; for they see their own wit at hand, and other men's at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equal, than unequal. For there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share." - Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as concerning their Felicity and Misery
"The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning of it is often lost. When it has a meaning, it is this. The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is, what is it?—the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it. It is in vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual." - Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
"Either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them" - David Hume
"Unfortunately it has proved very hard to reconcile this [Keynesian] view of the world with the neoclassical assumption of rational, optimizing economic agents, assumed to be free of any sort of money illusion... Within the neoclassical tradition it is a very short step from asserting that something is less than optimal to maintaining that it cannot exist at all...
An alternative view of unemployment was developed, based on strict neoclassical principles... One is left with a theory that maintains that large numbers of workers spent an entire decade during the great depression searching for the right opportunity, or alternatively, that they misjudged the true state of the labor market for the same period of time, and as a result refused to work at lower wages...
What determines the size of the probabilities pi1 and pi2? The neoclassical tradition assumes that these subjective probabilities are the same as the true objective probabilities implied by the model itself. This view of the world treats macroeconomic events as the umpteenth realization of a controlled, unchanging random experiment. As a result, agents are able to infer the true values of the parameters of the model and the moments of all relevant probability distributions. The only remaining uncertainty (or risk) concerns the actual magnitude of various random shocks.
The Keynesian view of uncertainty is very different. Major macroeconomic events are viewed as unique historical occurences. In consequence there is not much in the way of informaton or precedent to guide the formation of subjective probabilities concerning the likely behavior of the economy. For example, there has been one major monetary contraction in the western world in the past sixty years."
- Howard Naish, Labor Market Externalities and the Downward Inflexibility of
Nominal Wages