"Well, we haven’t learnt yet to live together peacefully... But I don’t know what progress really means. Anyway, I think we need to have faith in the fact that there is more out there to be explained. Even the paradigms that we now have, including subjective value theory, for example, are only provisional. Some physicist might believe that ultimately, we will be able to explain everything. To me, that is utterly stupid, just like saying that an atheist is equally dogmatic as a Texas Baptist. It seems to me that, if you accept evolution, you can still not expect your dog to get up and start talking German. And that’s because your dog is not genetically programmed to do that. We are human animals, and we are equally bound. There are whole realms of discourse out there that we cannot reach, by definition. There are always going to be limits beyond which we cannot go. Knowing that they are there, you can always hope to move a little closer – but that’s all."
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Nobel laureates from the United StatesLibertarians from the United StatesEconomists from the United StatesNobel laureates in EconomicsPeople from Tennessee
Original Language: English
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In: Karen Ilse Horn (ed.) Roads to Wisdom, Conversations With Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics (2009)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_M._Buchanan
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James M. Buchanan
James McGill Buchanan, Jr. (3 October 1919 – 9 January 2013) was an American economist known for his work on public choice theory, who was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics.
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