Cornell University Alumni

"We can actually change the expression of genes—tumor suppressing genes, tumor activating genes—by what we eat, what we put into our bodies. So, even if you've been dealt a bad genetic deck, you can still reshuffle it with diet."

"By age 10, nearly all kids have fatty streaks in their arteries. This is the first sign of atherosclerosis, the leading cause of death in the United States. So the question for most of us is not whether we should eat healthy to prevent heart disease, but whether we want to reverse the heart disease we may already have."

"A plant-based diet is like a one-stop shop against chronic diseases."

"[Compared to cow's milk] is only deficient in blood pus, antibiotics, artery-clogging fat, and cholesterol."

"It is important to recognise that comparison is not a method or even an academic technique; rather, it is a discursive strategy. There are a few important points to bear in mind when one wants to make a comparison. First of all, one has to decide, in any given work, whether one is mainly after similarities or differences. It is very difficult, for example, to say, let alone prove, that Japan and China or Korea are basically similar or basically different. Either case could be made, depending on one’s angle of vision, one’s framework, and the conclusions towards which one intends to move. (In the jingoist years on the eve of the First World War, when Germans and Frenchmen were encouraged to hate each other, the great Austro-Marxist theoretician Otto Bauer enjoyed baiting both sides by saying that contemporary Parisians and Berliners had far more in common than either had with their respective medieval ancestors.) Here I have tried, as perhaps offering a useful example, to show how the comparative works I wrote between the early 1970s and the 2000s reflected, in their real difference, changing perspectives, framings and (political) intentions."

"They aimed at and directed action towards the establishment of an internationally interconnected monetary and credit system based on stable national currencies in fixed value relationship with gold and other gold currencies. Financial reconstruction and the approbation of external loans were accordingly made conditional upon institutional safeguards of central bank independence; the settlement of past external debt ; and the establishment ... They were Professor Edwin Walter Kemmerer, of the United States, for the second Polish stabilization ; Professor Charles Rist and Roger Auboin, of France, for the Romanian stabilization; and anonymous representatives of the Banque de"

"Professor Fisher's The Purchasing Power of Money is dedicated to Simon Newcomb, from whom vid Professor Kemmerer the PT = MV formula ultimately derives. Newcomb was not a professional economist but a mathematician (Professor of Mathematics in the U.S. Navy and at Johns Hopkins). His Principles of Political Economy, published in 1886, is one of those original works which a fresh scientific mind, not perverted by having read too much of the orthodox stuff, is able to produce from time to time in a half -formed subject like economics."

"Princeton's Edwin W. Kemmerer [was] widely referred to as the “money doctor” by virtue of his advisory missions to position foreign governments on the gold standard in the 1920s."

"Knight is the first to use the circular-flow diagram as a means of explaining the way in which the interaction of individuals and businesses in goods and factor markets simultaneously solve all the functions required for effective social organization (Knight 1951, pp. 61–6). Prices provide a measure of the social importance of goods and services (albeit ‘not a true index of social importance according to any recognized ethical standard’), ensure that productive resources are allocated to the production of goods and services which place the highest value on them, and simultaneously distribute income across the productive resources accordingly. ‘The principal connection between the price system and social progress’, meanwhile, ‘is mediated by the phenomenon of interest on capital’ (pp. 63–5)."

"Hayek greatly praised Knight on several occasions. In 1951, he grouped Knight, with Ludwig von Mises and Edwin Cannan, as one of three primary transmitters of classical liberalism during the 1920s and 1930s. Even more significantly, Hayek wrote in the beginning of the “Acknowledgments and Notes” section of The Constitution of Liberty: “If I had regarded it as my task to acknowledge all indebtedness and to notice all agreements, these notes would have been studded with references to the work of Ludwig von Mises, Frank H. Knight, and Edwin Cannan.” Hayek referred to Knight eight times in The Constitution of Liberty. Notwithstanding Hayek’s praise and references to him, Knight ripped the book in a 1967 review."

"To Knight the task for economists (and for social philosophers) is not to be located at the extensive margin of "science." The task is to be located squarely at the level of elementary common sense. No sophisticated analysis is required to recognize that legally-enforced wage floors cause unemployment or that inflation cannot increase production in any long-term sense. But many men are prejudiced and romantic fools."

"[The Economic Organization by Frank Knight provided] the elements of theory that helped to establish for Chicago its eminence in neoclassical economics."

"A civilization which is dominated by this matter-of-fact insight must prevail against any cultural scheme that lacks this element. This characteristic of western civilization comes to a head in modern science, and finds its highest material expression in the technology of the machine industry."

"[In 1932, Lionel Robbins declared economics ‘the science of choice’ (Robbins 1932). In the same year, when students at the University of Chicago opened their social sciences course reader, they read Knight’s response:] Such definitions come too near to saying that economics is the science of things generally, of everything that men are for practical reasons interested in. Such a definition is useless and misleading"

"In Professor Pigou's study the argument that free enterprise lead to excessive investments in industry having relatively upward-sloping cost curves is developed with the aid of concrete example, the case of two roads; Suppose that between two points there are two highways, one of which is broad enough to accommodate without crowding all the traffic which may care to use it, but is poorly graded and surfaced; while the other is a much better road, but narrow and quite limited in capacity. If a large number of trucks operate between the two termini and are free to choose either of the two routes, they will tend to distribute themselves between the roads in such proportions that the cost per unit of transportation, or effective returns per unit of investment, will be the same for every truck on both routes. As more trucks use the narrower and better road, congestion develops, until at a certain point it becomes equally profitable to use the broader but poorer highway."

"Economics and ethics naturally come into rather intimate relations with each other since both recognizedly deal with the problem of value."

"The Ethics of Competition is a book of Frank H. Knight's writings on a common theme: the problem of social control and its various implications. Knight believed in free economic institutions but was also aware that the competitive economic system could be improved. One of the central figures of neoclassical economics in the twentieth century, Knight pursued a lifelong campaign against irrationalities of nationalism, religious fanaticism, and group conflict, while conceding that these were fundamental orientations of human action that might yet frustrate his own work as an economist. While Knight vigorously defended human freedom and the liberal order, he also was sufficiently moved by the shortcomings of liberalism as to condemn it as rife with abuse."

"Of the American institutionalists, his most generous comments concerned Commons’s work, work that he regarded as hopelessly unsystematic but highly ‘suggestive and valuable’"

"[We may view the] economic organization as a system of prize relations. Seen in the large, free enterprise is an organization of production and distribution in which individuals or family units get their real income, their "living," by selling productive power for money to "business units" or "enterprises", and buying with the money income thus obtained the direct goods and services which they consume. This view, it will be remembered, ignores for the sake of simplicity the fact that an appreciable fraction of the productive power in use at any time is not really employed in satisfying current wants but to make provision for increased want-satisfaction in the future; it treats society as it would be, or would tend to become, with progress absent, or in a “static” state."

"[Weber] is the only one who really deals with the problem of causes or approaches the material from that angle that can alone yield an answer to such questions, that is, the angle of comparative history in the broad sense."

"Most striking feature... is the author’s failure to understand the elementary mechanics of the competitive economic organization."

"Nor are the general laws of economics "institutional." They work in an institutional setting, and upon institutional material; institutions supply much of their content and furnish the machinery by which they work themselves out, more or less quickly and completely, in different actual situations. Institutions may determine the alternatives of choice and fix the limits of freedom of choice, but the general laws of choice among competing motives or goods are not institutional unless rational thinking and an objective world are institutions, an interpretation which would make the term meaningless. Economic activity consists in the use of certain resources by certain processes, to produce "wealth." The content of the concept wealth is largely institutional, and the resources available and processes known and used at any place and time for producing wealth are in a sense historical products; but there are general laws of production and consumption which hold good whatever specific things are thought of as wealth and whatever productive factors and processes in use."

"Since economics deals with human beings, the problems of its scientific treatment involves fundamental problems of the relations between man and his world. From a rational or scientific point of view, all practically real problems are problems in economics. The problem of life is to utilize resources "economically," to make them go as far as possible in the production of desired results. The general theory of economics is therefore simply the rationale of life. - In so far as it has any rationale! The first question in regard to scientific economics is this question of how far life is rational, how far its problems reduce to the form of using given means to achieve given ends. Now this, we shall contend, is not very far; the scientific view of life is a limited and partial view; life is at bottom an exploration in the field of values, an attempt to discover values, rather than on the basis of knowledge of them to produce and enjoy them to the greatest possible extent. We strive to "know ourselves," to find out our real wants, more than to get what we want. This fact sets a first and most sweeping limitation to the conception of economics as a science."

"In spite of all the foregoing, there is a science of economics, a true, and even exact, science, which reaches laws as universal as those of mathematics and mechanics. The greatest need for the development of economics as a growing body of thought and practice is an adequate appreciation of the meaning, and the limitations, of this body of accurate premises and rigorously established conclusions. It comes about in the same general way as all science, except perhaps in a higher degree, i.e., through abstraction. There are no laws regarding the content of economic behavior, but there are laws universally valid as to its form. There is an abstract rationale of all conduct which is rational at alt, and a rationale of all social relations arising through the organization of rational activity."

"Frank Knight wrote some polemics against Slichter's textbook in The Journal of Political Economy in the early 1930s. He smelled some kind of heresy in Slichter. But Knight's discussion was methodological. He argued that old Slichter was a do-gooder who thought he could change human nature, and that governments can do some good. Hardened, experienced people, by contrast, know that people are cussed. I think there's a lot of merit in Knight, but a lot of demerit, too. Whether his total effect on me was more bad than good I'm not sure. But from 1932 to 1936 I was besotted on Frank Knight. It's not true, I'll say categorically, what Milton Friedman at one time tried to sell: that there was a very subtle Chicago oral tradition on the demand for money and monetary theory. Read Robertson's handbook on Money, and you will have plumbed the depths of Chicago's monetary sophistication."

"Like Mises, Knight owes his original reputation to a theoretical monograph; notwithstanding an early lack of recognition, the latter’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921) eventually became, and for many years continued to be, one of the most influential textbooks on economic theory, although it had not originally been designed as such. Knight has since written a great deal on questions of economic policy and social philosophy— mostly in articles the majority of which have since been republished in book form. The best-known, and perhaps also the most characteristic, volume is The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays (1935). Knight’s personal influence, through his teaching, exceeds even the influence of his writings. It is hardly an exaggeration to state that nearly all the younger American economists who really understand and advocate a competitive economic system have at one time been Knight’s students."

"Knight's monograph The Economic Organization (1933) was prepared in the mid-1920s while Knight was at the University of Iowa and was later duplicated for student use at Chicago... It contains the elements of theory that helped to establish for Chicago its pre-eminence in neoclassical economics. While, according to Buchanan, there was little in the monograph that was wholly original, its value was in its emphasis on key points, its clarification of ambiguous concepts and notions, and its integrated approach to the economy as a social organization. According to Buchanan, several generations of undergraduate students at Chicago obtained their vision of the totality of the economic process only after encountering Knight (and Simons)."

"This is a very complex, wondrous business I'm in. My kicks are my work. I'm miserable when I'm not working."

"That was the best break of my life, hooking up with the Warners. They don't go much for the "pretty boy" type there. An average-looking guy like me has a chance to get someplace, to portray people the way they really are, without any frills."

"They fascinated me at first. Then suddenly it struck me that their constant snobbish talk about the 'theatah' was a little on the phony side. I decided it give it a try myself, just to show them anyone could do it. Before I knew it, I was getting small parts on Broadway, then bigger ones. Then finally I got some good spots in Dead End and Stage Door and finally took over the lead from Wally Ford in Of Mice and Men."

"The only thing I want to do in films is be Mr. Joe Average as well as I know how. Of course, anyone whose face appears often enough on the screen is bound to have bobby-soxers after him for autographs. But what I really get a kick out of is when cab drivers around New York lean out and yell 'Hi Brooklyn' when I walk by. They make me feel I'm putting it across O.K. when I try to be Joe Average."

"She had turned her back upon them all and no awful fate had overtaken her; instead, she had taken a firm hold upon life and made of it a fine, even glittering, success; and this is a thing which is not easily forgiven."

"Truth may be found in the heart of a philosopher but seldom in the figures of a statistician; it is far too delicate a thing to be pinned down to columns of numbers on ruled paper."

"I was brought up to look upon falling in love as something natural...something that was pleasant and natural and amusing. I've been in love before, casually, the way young Frenchmen are...but in earnest, too, because a Frenchman can't help surrounding a thing like that with sentiment and romance. He can't help it. If it were just ... just something shameful and nasty, he couldn't endure it. They don't have affairs in cold blood the way I've heard men talk about such things since I've come here. It makes a difference, Mrs. Pentland, if you look at things in the light they do. I've learned now, and it is a thing which needs learning, the most important thing in all life. The French are right about it. They make a fine, wonderful thing of love."

"She had come long ago to understand that loneliness was the curse of those who were free, even of all those who rose a little above the level of ordinary humanity."

"He had a feeling that somewhere in the course of her life something had happened to her, something terrible which in the end had given her a great understanding and clarity of mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day she had driven up to the door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery about life which he himself had made long since . . . that there is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.”"

"Much of the material is controversial, but if controversy means the stimulation of thought and ideas, so much the better. It is only thus that the citizens of a republic may protect themselves from the evils threatening them from within their borders as well as those which threaten from beyond."

"The polar view, as it was for Marx, is that it was not material factors, but rather ideal factors, that are the main drivers of globalization."

"Of course, it remains to be seen what the effect of the Great Recession will be on resistance to globalization. It seems clear, however, that if the recession grows deeper and extends over a long period of time, it will spur much greater resistance to globalization."

"Globalization reinforces preexisting gender structures, barriers, and relationships, only now on a global scale."

"It is also often argued that neo-liberalism, especially neo-liberal economics, helps those in the advantaged categories and hurts, often badly, those in the disadvantaged categories."

"It is increasingly difficult to find examples of warfare that are unaffected by globalization."

"What defines Web 2.0 is the fact that the material on it is generated by the users (consumers) rather than the producers of the system. Thus, those who operate on Web 2.0 can be called prosumers because they simultaneously produce what they consume such as the interaction on Facebook and the entries on Wikipedia."

"Globalization can also be seen as flow of "nothing" (as opposed to "something"), involving the spread of non-places, non-things, non-people and non-services."

"The system is run by the few with the few as the main beneficiaries. Most of the people in the world have no say in these systems and are either not helped or are adversely affected by them."

"If states themselves are less able to handle various responsibilities, this leaves open the possibility of the emergence of some form of global governance to fill the void."

"While the US was hegemonic in the era of geopolitics, it is greatly weakened as globalization competes with, and gains ascendancy over, geopolitics."

"It was the mass sale and distribution of novels and newspapers that was critical to the rise of the imagined nation."

"Free markets induce a natural collective reaction by society."

"One cannot understand globalization, and many of its problems, without understanding neo-liberalism."