Academics From The United States

"All component parts of any system of management must be consistent with each of the other parts and reflect the system's basic philosophy."

"To be effective in leading his own work group, a superior must be able to influence his own boss, that is he needs to be skilled both as a superior and as a subordinate."

"The superior in one group is a subordinate in the next group, and so on through the organization."

"[Each person] is a member of one or more functioning workgroups that have a high degree of group loyalty, effective skills of interaction and high performance goals."

"The leadership and other processes of the organization must be such as to ensure a maximum probability that in all interactions and all interactions and all relationships with the organization each member will, in the light of his background, values, and expectations, view the experience as supportive and one which builds and maintains his sense of personal worth and importance."

"As tasks become more varied and require greater training and skill, the relationship (between job attitudes and performance) appears to change progressively from the negative to positive."

"How best to organize the efforts of individuals to achieve desired objectives has long been one of the world's most important, difficult, and controversial problems."

"[It remains to be seen whether the newer management theories, based as they are on research in industrial concerns, will be] equally applicable to other kinds of organized human activity, such as schools, voluntary organizations, unions, hospitals, governmental agencies, scientific and professional organizations, and the like."

"Research reveal that managers achieving better performance (i.e., greater productivity, higher earnings, lower costs, etc. ) differ in leadership principles and practices from those achieving poorer performance."

"Conflict is viewed as the active striving for one's own preferred outcome which, if attained, precludes the attainment by others of their own preferred outcome, thereby producing hostility."

"A number of statistical assumptions are made in the application of his (Thurstone's) attitude scale e.g. that the scale values of the statements are independent of the attitude distribution of the readers who sort the statements assumptions which as Thurstone points out, cannot always be verified. The method is more over laborious. It seems legitimate to enquire whether it actually does its work better than the simple scales which may be employed and the same breath to ask also whether it is not possible to construct equally reliable scales without making unnecessary statistical assumptions."

"The present study undertakes to describe the introduction into political science of these devices, the most familiar of which are the separation of powers, bicameralism, the written constitution, and judicial review. No attempt is made to carry on the story in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, but connective tissue is supplied to form a juncture with the work of Haines, Corwin, and Wright, who have already dealt with the American materials more competently than the present writer could hope to do. Nor has any effort been made to trace the undeniable connection between English constitutionalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the constitutional documents of continental Europe in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries."

"The french revolution has not received more attention than it deserves; but in comparison disproportionately little attention has been given to the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. In a more modest way, these too helped fix the shape of the modern world. Specifically, most of the devices and ideas which have found expression in subsequent constitutions date from the experiments and theories of that day."

"Theory The Greek and Roman roots of constitutionalism have been analyzed authoritatively in the works of Francis D. Wormuth and ... Wormuth characterized constitutionalism as the auxiliary precautions that, together with a state's citizens, enable the government to control itself. Recently, a government's ability to control the actions of others within the government has been referred to as horizontal accountability. Both Wormuth and Friedrich centered their definitions of constitutionalism on the necessity of separation of powers."

"It is doubtful that democracy could survive in a society organized on the principle of therapy rather than judgment, error rather than sin. If men are free and equal, they must be judged rather than hospitalized."

"in his Monarchy Asserted, a reply to Harrington published in 1659, reversed the relation between politics and economics. Dominion in land was a mere effect of empire, not the cause. Moreover, money was important as well as land, but the power of money was dependent upon the support of the sovereign, for without such support riches were defenseless, a mere attractive booty. Harrington was mistaken in thinking that an army necessarily belonged to the owner of the pasture, for "this beast is none of those tame ones that are kept within fences, or imprisoned in a several: when an army is once on foot, the enclosure of the law is too weak to hold it in, and property is no better than a hedge of rotten sticks." This was something less than fair to Harrington's position, but as an analysis of the relation of politics to economics it came as close to the truth as Harrington."

""The free man ... believes in destiny and believes that it has need of him," wrote Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher. "Destiny," added Marianne Moore, the spinster poet, when she quoted Buber. "Not fate." What is this distinction Moore takes such care to draw between destiny and fate?"

"[M]y religious faith remains in possession of the field only after prolonged civil war with my naturally skeptical mind."

"It is the final test of a gentleman—his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him."

"If the happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, we are bound to grow happier as we advance in years, because our minds have more and more interesting thoughts. A well-ordered life is like climbing a tower; the view half way up is better than the view from the base, and it steadily becomes finer as the horizon expands."

"The expression "as right as rain" must have been invented by an Englishman."

"The word "restraint" implies the asking of an essential question, one that is more important now than ever, and is antithetical both to capitalism and to science as we practice them: Because we can do something, must we do it?"

"Counter to the avalanche of messages from our culture, I recognize celibacy not as negation but as a joyous turning inward. “Inebriate of air am I, / And debauchee of dew,” wrote Emily Dickinson, most promiscuous of celibates. “Opulence in asceticism,” Marianne Moore wrote, a phrase that celebrates the solitary life even as it provides a sound bite for saving the planet."

"We are caught — trapped, some might say — in the web of fate, but we are each just as surely among its multitude of spinners. In our spinning lies our hope; in our spinning lies our destiny."

"Fate suggests submission to the circumstances of life; destiny suggests active engagement. The former implies some all-powerful force or figure to whose will we must submit. The latter implies that each of us is a manifestation of one of the infinite aspects of creation, whose fullest expression depends in some small but necessary way on our day-to-day, moment-to-moment decisions."

"In the beginning, at least for academics, there was philosophy. All of learned inquiry occurred within the discipline of philosophy and was carried out by philosophers. We retain the vestiges of this organization in our practice of awarding a single advanced academic degree, the Ph.D. or Doctor of Philosophy.’ As our understanding of the world around us grew, however, various areas of philosophy became sufficiently well understood to graduate into their own disciplines. Mathematics and the physical and biological sciences were the first to appear, followed more recently by the social sciences. Emerging as its own discipline is only the first step toward becoming a mature field of study. Economics is unique among the social sciences for the number of remaining steps it has taken. Unlike many social sciences, economics has a well-defined core set of methods. The first year graduate program in economics is virtually indistinguishable across American universities, consisting of microeconomics, macroeconomics and econometrics. As a result, economics can be easily defined by its tools of inquiry as by the target of its inquiry."

"I would guess that most MIT Ph.D.’s since 1980 might deem themselves not to be “Keynesians.” But they, and modern economists everywhere, do use models like those of Samuelson, Modigliani, Solow, and Tobin. Professor Martin Feldstein, my Harvard neighbor, complained at the 350th Anniversary of Harvard that Keynesians had tried to poison his sophomore mind against saving. Tobin and I on the same panel took this amiss, since both of us since 1955 had been favoring a “neoclassical synthesis,” in which full employment with an austere fiscal budget would add to capital formation in preparation for a coming demographic turnaround."

"A critical feature of the EU(European Union) in general and EMU in particular is that there is no legitimate way for a member to withdraw... The American experience with the secession of the South may contain some lessons about the danger of a treaty or constitution that has no exits."

"What is clear is that a French aspiration for equality and a German expectation of hegemony are not consistent."

"Although 50 years of European peace since the end of World War II may augur well for the future, it must be remembered that there were also more than 50 year of peace between the Congress of Vienna and the Franco-Prussian War. Moreover, contrary to the hopes and assumptions of Jean Monnet and other advocates of European integration, the devastating American Civil War shows that a formal political union is no guarantee against an intra-European war."

"Instead of increasing intra-European harmony and global peace, the shift to EMU and the political integration that would follow it would be more likely to lead to increased conflicts within Europe."

"But further analysis and experience soon raised doubts about the efficacy of these new tools. Empirical research indicated that the Keynesian multiplier was much smaller than earlier analyses had assumed, reduced by a crowding out of interest-sensitive spending caused by an induced increase in the demand for money and by the effect of the larger national debt on long-term interest rates. The leakage of demand through imports and the effect of the fiscal expansion on the exchange rate further reduced the multiplier."

"Thanks to the work of John Maynard Keynes and of Milton Friedman, we now have a better understanding of how governments can (at least in principle) reduce the severity of major economic downturns. Keynesian economics taught us that government spending can raise GDP and reduce unemployment."

"The economic policy issues that we debate today—trade policy, inflation, the proper role of government, the eradication of poverty, and the means of raising the rate of economic growth—have been discussed by economists for more than two centuries. Many of today’s economic policies—both the good ones and the bad—are the result of the ideas of those past economists. And many of today’s debates about economic policy can be understood only by those who have at least some familiarity with the ideas of earlier economists. The giants of economic science during the past two hundred years have been men concerned with the critical policy issues of their time. They studied the working of the economy in order to advocate better economic policies. But despite their concern with policy, they were not polemicists or politicians but men who sought to persuade their contemporaries in government and in the broader public by analysis and evidence that would meet the standards of professional debate."

"Unfortunately, several decades of Keynesian instruction on the virtues of budget deficits have left the public and our political leaders confused about the costs of running persistent deficits. [...] Keynes has been that influential defunct scribbler for the past generation. But who would ever have thought that the politician hearing Keynes's voice in the air might be Ronald Reagan"

"The legacy of Keynesian economics — the misdiagnosis of unemployment, the fear of saving, and the unjustified faith in government intervention — affected the fundamental ideas of policy makers for a generation and altered such basic institutions of our economy as the tax laws, the social insurance programs and the financial system. Changing these deeply ingrained aspects of economic life can happen only slowly. But the economics profession has undoubtedly begun to re-examine and re-evaluate the Keynesian notions that have been so dominant for the past 35 years. There is a return to older and more basic economic truths and an attempt to adapt these ideas to the changing conditions of technology and affluence. From this is emerging a new view of unemployment, of saving, and of the role of government."

"Evolutionary game theory is one of the most active and rapidly growing areas of research in economics. Unlike traditional game theory models, which assume that all players are fully rational and have complete knowledge of details of the game, evolutionary models assume that people choose their strategies through a trial-and-error learning process in which they gradually discover that some strategies work better than others. In games that are repeated many times, low-payoff strategies tend to be weeded out, and an equilibrium may emerge."

"We have been keeping the peace in the Asia-Pacific theater for decades now, and the essence of the rebalance is to keep that peace and stability going, of which we have been a pivotal part. You ask about India, yes it is difficult. We are two technical and military cultures that grew up on opposite sides of the fence during the Cold War."

"That is what you wake up to every morning. It is what my wife and I think of when we go visit hospitals on the weekend. And so providing our people with all the support they can, you can possibly give them. And that does not always come naturally to this place, which is thinking in budgets and thinking in the future. You always have to remember that they are in danger."

"We need to change because the world is changing, and we need to anticipate what is next and be there first, as the US military has always been. So, the changes in our future, I think is something that we are all completely committed to."

"Our nightmare, any of us, which would change the way we lived our lives, was if we thought that any moment Al Qaeda might detonate a nuclear weapon in a city anywhere in the world, because we learned that they had gotten hold of some plutonium from the North Koreans by sale, or when the North Korean regime collapsed, somebody smuggled it out."

"I hope that the North Koreans understand that the conclusions that we came to are conclusions that are embedded in America's security situation."

"I don't know how long the North Korean regime can last. But we can't just wait for them to collapse, because in the meantime, they can do lasting damage to our security."

"The military option will remain on the table. If there is a good agreement to have, obviously it's worth waiting for and completing the negotiations."

"There was never a conspiracy, never a tremendous fear. This is a society which is now in its third generation of severe political repression, so that children in North Korea have several hours of political education a day. Their parents did, and their grandparents did."

"The greatest of vices according to Buddha is the lazy yielding to the impulses of temperament (pamada); the greatest virtue (appamada) is the opposite of this, the awakening from the sloth and lethargy of the senses, the constant exercise of the active will."

"It seems to me imperative to re-establish the true dualism—that between vital impulse and vital control—and to this end to affirm the higher will first of all as a psychological fact. The individual needs, however, to go beyond this fact if he is to decide how far he is to exercise control in any particular instance with a primary view to his own happiness: in short, he needs standards. To secure standards, at least critically, he cannot afford, like the Rousseauist, to disparage the intellect."

"This higher will is felt in its relation to the impressions and impulses and expansive desires of the natural man as a will to refrain. ... The failure to exercise the will to refrain in some form or degree means spiritual anarchy. A combination such as we are getting more and more at present of spiritual anarchy with an ever-increasing material efficiency—power without wisdom, as one is tempted to put it—is not likely to work either for the happiness of the individual or for the welfare of society."

"According to Mr. Walter Lippmann, the belief the modern man has lost is "that there is an immortal essence presiding like a king over his appetites." This immortal essence of which Mr. Lippmann speaks is, judged experimentally and by its fruits, a higher will. But why leave the affirmation of such a will to the pure traditionalist? Why not affirm it first of all as a psychological fact, one of the immediate data of consciousness, a perception so primordial that, compared with it, the denial of man's moral freedom by the determinist is only a metaphysical dream? The way would thus be open for a swift flanking movement on the behaviorists and other naturalistic psychologists."

"Everything in our modern substitutes for religion—whether Baconian or Rousseauistic—will be found to converge upon the idea of service. The crucial question is whether one is safe in assuming that the immense machinery of power that has resulted from activity of the utilitarian type can be made, on anything like present lines, to serve disinterested ends; whether it will not rather minister to the egoistic aims either of national groups or of individuals."