Quotations

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, That I finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction.

The future lies that way for me and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for the thousandth time, that will walk into the west or southwest. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

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Listening to Harry Reid on Bush’s speech, an Orwell quote comes to mind: “The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.”

But then, Orwell generally had a good eye–sometimes for the personal as well as the public: “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent that the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it” isn’t bad, either.

By the way, does anybody know if Orwell ever said anything about the Geneva Convention or of the use of narrative techniques in reporting?

…[T]he large differences in per capita income across countries cannot be explained by difference in access to the world’s stock of productive knowledge or to its capital markets, by differences in the quality of marketable human capital or personal culture. Albeit at a high level of aggregation, this eliminates each of the factors of production as possible explanations of most of the international differences in per capita income. The only remaining plausible explanation is that the great differences in the wealth of nations are mainly due to difference in the quality of their institutions and economic policy. …

…Though the low-income societies obtain most of the gains from self-reinforcing trades, they do not realize many of the largest gains from specialization and trade. They do not have the institutions that enforce contracts impartially, and so they lose most of the gains from those transactions (like those of the capital market) that require impartial, third-party enforcement. They do not have institutions that make property rights secure over the long run, so they lose most of the gains from capital-intensive production. Production and trade in these societies is further handicapped by misguided economic policies and by private and public predation. The intricate social cooperation that emerges when there is a sophisticated array of markets requires far better institutions and economic policies than most countries have. …

Mancur Olson, “Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk”, from A Not-So-Dismal Science: A Broader View of Economies and Societies.

We see a lot of people talking about the inadequacy of planning prior to Katrina. Whatever merits this critique may have, it is not possible to foresee everything and to plan for everything. So, what is it that mitigates disaster? Resilience:

A strategy of resilience … requires reliance on experience with adverse consequences once they occur in order to develop a capacity to learn from the harm and bounce back. Resilience, therefore, requires the accumulation of large amounts of generalizable resources, such as organizational capacity, knowledge, wealth, energy, and communication, that can be used to craft solutions to problems that the people involved did not know would occur. Thus, a strategy of resilience requires much less predictive capacity but much more growth, not only in wealth but also in knowledge. Hence it is not surprising that systems, like capitalism, based on incessant and decentralized trial and error accumulate the most resources. Strong evidence from around the world demonstrates that such societies are richer and produce healthier people and a more vibrant natural environment.

(From here.)

One reason that I am pro-immigrant is that I think that many immigrants — and certainly the immigrants I most want to encourage — are highly appreciative of the American system. Coming from countries where government controls more of the economy and where public officials are more corrupt, they are often grateful for the opportunities that our economy provides.

In contrast, as the school year begins, my daughter in high school is being inundated with the typical anti-American propaganda of the Left. She is bombarded with lessons claiming that America “controls” too much of the world’s wealth, that we are racist and uncaring, that we spoil the environment, etc.

Arnold Kling (here)

(Some of the same points I was making here.)