Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on July 6, 2020
… is from page 60 of the May 9th, 2020, draft of the important forthcoming monograph from Deirdre McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Illiberal and Anti-Entrepreneurial State of Mariana Mazzucato (original emphasis):
In the United States, of course the Exact Perfection Store is staffed not by Bismarcks or Lenins or Mussolinis but by amiable regulation lawyers such as Elizabeth Warren and amiable economic theorists such as Richard Thaler and amiable policy economists such as Mariana Mazzucato. All are specialized in imagining failures in the polity or the economy, and raising the alarm, qualitatively. Qualia, not quanta. None of them, that is, pause to measure how important for the nation, or Lake Wobegon, the failures are in quantitative fact. In the dim twilight of reality, of course, imperfections are ubiquitous and will remain so. But, we repeat, since 1800 an imperfect world, inspired by liberalism, has yielded astonishing economic growth, and, while we’re at it, astonishing spiritual growth, too.
Comments
