… is from page 186 of Deirdre N. McCloskey’s 2006 volume, The Bourgeois Virtues; this quotation is from a profound chapter entitled “Humility and Truth”:
Scholarly excellence in understanding actual economies, for example, or the use of one’s wealth in proper stewardship, are good goods, and proper objects therefore of a paired humanity and great-souledness in their pursuit. Scholarly excellence in understanding imaginary economies, or wealth used in projects of gluttony, is not such a good. It is not surprising to find people bound up in such bad goods exhibiting an idiotic pride and lack of temperance. They sin boldly….
