… is from page xiii of my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein’s new book from Oxford University Press, Knowledge and Coordination (original emphasis; links added):
Maybe, as Alfred Marshall suspected, what is most important in economic wisdom are discursive verities about how things work by and large, not axiomatically or categorically, and the awareness that we generally cannot know the economic system well enough to intervene into it beneficially. That was Adam Smith‘s central message for public policy, and it authorized a presumption of liberty.
