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Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 108 of Deirdre McCloskey’s excellent 1990 book, If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise:

Economics is the science of the post-magical age.  Far from being unscientific or hoobla-hoo, it is deeply anti-magical.  It keeps telling us that we cannot do it, that magic will not help.

Yes.  Sound economics is indeed scientific in the truest sense of that term.  Its best and wisest practitioners stand like the senior scholar in this cartoon demanding that the distressingly common “then a miracle occurs” step be eliminated – and that if this step cannot be eliminated, then the entire formula for government intervention that depends upon it be scrapped, regardless of how impressive this formula may be to politicians, people on the street, and the unfortunately large numbers of impressionable students with high I.Q.s but low wisdom-Q.s.

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