"There is no boon in life more sweet, I say,
than when a summer joy holds all the realm,
and banqueters sit listening to a harper
in a great hall, by rows of tables heaped
with bread and roast meat, while a steward goes
to dip up wine and brim your cups again.
Here is the flower of life, it seems to me!"
- "The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation"
"Human beings must make difficult choices. We are no longer in Eden. the world does not flow with milk and honey. We have to choose among cleaner air and faster cars, bigger houses and bigger parks, more work and more play. Economists do not tell us that any of these is bad. They only tell us that we cannot necessarily have them all - all at once. Economics is the study of choice. It does not tell us what to choose. It only helps us understand the consequences of our choices."
Tood G. Buchholz, "New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought"How well does economics help us understand the full consequences of our choices?
"Good work requires of us an appreciation of the value of routine, ordinary, mundane rhythms of doing what needs to be done, each day and each week, thoroughly and with care."
Gordon T. Smith, "Courage and Calling: Embracing your God-Given Potential"
"From the narrowly defined desire for money to a more inclusive sense of the overweening desire merely to possess for oneself - these positions are the boundaries of the definition of avarice as a vice into the fifteenth century, when one begins to see a more open acknowledgment of what is positive in the urge to acquire possessions. In Poggio Bracciolini's dialogue On Avarice, for example, Antonio Loschi voices a utilitarian, even modern, view of greed when he argues that avarice is the compelling reason for business investment, the growth of cities, philanthropy, and wage-earning..."
- Richard Newhauser, "The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature", 2000Bracciolini's writing predates Mandeville's "The Fable of the Bees",which first scandalized society but then popularized a similar belief, by almost 200 years. It should be noted that Bracciolini's objective was to refute that line of thinking, but he makes a clear argument for the social benefits of greed nonetheless.
"It is impossible to address ethical questions without first making them visible. The danger is that once incentives are introduced in certain areas and people become habituated to their use, the important questions simply no longer arise... I hope that this book will make its readers worry abut things they did not worry about before."
- Ruth Grant, "Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives"
"We were awash in wealth, or something that looked like wealth, and the secret of unleashing yet more of it was adherence to the notion that markets were in some sense free, and should be even freer so that this perfect rationality and maximization of utility could have its full, beneficent effect. Simply stand out of the way, and the best of all possible world will emerge on its own, more or less inevitably.
The best of all worlds might not have been to one's taste, since it seemed to move toward its fulfillment with a vigorous disregard for the fragility of the plant and the finitude of its resources, and since it was driven by a calculus of self-interest that was materialist in the strictest sense of the word. Child labor on one continent produced a plethora of cheap and disposable gadgets for another continent, which fouled and wearied the sea in their transit. No matter. There was a rationality in it all that made doubts about the value of it, objections to the destructiveness of it, sentimental and retrograde. And unenlightened."
- Marilynne Robinson, When I was a Child I Read Books: Essays
