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Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 5 of James Grant’s excellent 2014 book, The Forgotten Depression:

The adage that “the past is a foreign country” is nowhere more apt than in economic history.  In the case at hand, anachronism is inherent in the very language of economics.  Readers of this book speak and think about “aggregate demand” and “aggregate supply.”  Having imbibed at least the rudiments of macroeconomics, they casually talk about the national income.  In the early 1920s, such ideas were yet unformed.  You can comb through the professional economics journals of the day, as I have done, without finding a single article espousing the notion of macroeconomic management.

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