Historians From England

"It is surely delightful, Sir, to look forward to that period when a series of liberal and prudent measures shall have delivered islands, so highly favoured by the bounty of Providence, from the curse inflicted on them by the frantic rapacity of man. Then the peasant of the Antilles will no longer crawl in listless and trembling dejection round a plantation from whose fruits he must derive no advantage, and a hut whose door yields him no protection; but, when his cheerful and voluntary labour is performed, he will return with the firm step and erect brow of a British citizen from the field which is his freehold to the cottage which is his castle."

"To have been a Sovereign, yet the champion of liberty,—a revolutionary leader, yet the supporter of social order, is the peculiar glory of William. Till his accession the British Constitution was in its Chaos. It had contained, from a very remote period, the simple elements of an harmonious government. But they were in a state not of amalgamation, but of conflict,—not of equilibrium but of alternate elevation and depression. The tyranny of Charles the first produced civil war and anarchy. Tyranny had now again produced resistance and revolution. And, but for the wisdom of the new King, it seems probable that the same cycle of misery would have been again described."

"As free constitutions are the strongest supports of governments, social order is the best safeguard of freedom. Liberty has no enemies so pernicious as those misguided friends whose ardour in her cause leads them to outrage the moral sense of mankind, and to arm against her the interests and feelings which are her natural allies. Even the prejudices of nations should be respected."

"What an incalculable debt do we owe to that little speck of land, Greece.—The principles of taste, the finest models of composition, the doctrines and the glorious examples to which we owe political freedom, the arts, the sciences, architecture, sculpture, every thing that is great and splendid in literature and politics, must be considered as ultimately derived from that little peninsula."

"I have been deep in Plato, Aristotle, and Theocritus ever since I left home, and admiring more and more every day the powers of that mighty language which is incomparably the best vehicle both for reasoning and for imagery that mankind have ever discovered, and which is richer both in abstract philosophical terms and poetical expressions than the English, French, and Latin tongues put together."

"Expenditure rises to meet income."

"It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow."

"Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay."

"The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything for himself."

"A perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse."

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion... Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced. The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson's Law and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish, or even disappear. The importance of Parkinson's Law lies in the fact that it is a law of growth based upon an analysis of the factors by which that growth is controlled."

"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."

"Delay is the deadliest form of denial."

"It is a popular error that bureaucracy is less flexible than private enterprise. It may be so in detail, but when large scale adaptations have to be made, central control is far more flexible. It may take two months to get an answer to a letter from a government department, but it takes twenty years for an industry under private enterprise to readjust itself to a fall in demand."

"That combination, Hayek, Myrdal and Robinson, might have cast the contributions of each into sharper relief: three pioneers who, after important early contributions, gave up economics for political activism."

"Instead, I would concede her a point of uncertain importance. There isn't really a great deal to economics, considered as a logical structure based upon a few indisputable axioms about the world. … A logician is a wondrous creature, but he cannot distinguish between the two simple errors: if A = B, and B = C, then (1) A = 1.01C, and (2) A = 10⁶⁵C. An economist can."

"I remember also when I was a student in Cambridge, one of my teachers, Joan Robinson, a great economist, explained to me why China is so admirable, as she was making a cultural comparison of the kind which has become very common now ever since Sam Huntington wrote his book about civilisation and trying to reduce every civilisation into something like a one or two sentence summary. Joan told me that the real trouble with Indians, she told me, is that Indians are just too rude; and she said the Japanese, the trouble really is that the Japanese are too polite; and then she said the Chinese are just right. So I think those are good inspiration to go and study the Chinese experience. Now, in so far as private income is only one of the influences on the achievements in reducing poverty, the first thing I want to mention is that even though in the poverty discussion most of the concentration tends to be these days on what happened since economic reform. The fact is that there is a very major lesson in what happened in China previous to that. I am not commenting on the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, I am not talking about the Chinese famine (from) ’59 to ’61 in which 29.6 million people died. There were all kinds of mistakes. But the fact is that China was still the global leader as a poor country expanding basic education at a level which was very hard to imagine, as well as basic health care. All kinds of things came like “barefoot doctors” and so on. But the spread of health care across the country was quite remarkable. By 1979, when the economic reform came, the Chinese life expectancy was already 68 years; the Indian life expectancy was 54 years, 14 years behind it. There are really major lessons there, and I might say also one of the unsung contributions of the pre-reform educational and health care expansion is, I believe, the radical economic expansion that took place in the 1980s. After the economic reform, it would have been very hard without the base of elementary education which China had and India did not at that time, which is still a factor which bothers India badly."

"She was taken in a sealed train from coast to coast—from Paul Baran to Paul Sweezy."

"Böhm and Wicksell and Cassel and Wieser and Clark and Walras and Hayek and other economists before and after Sraffa, all must face what the role of intertemporal pricing must be in organizing technologies that are irreducibly time-phasing. When Joan Robinson and I discussed these matters face to face, I used to get nowhere with her by babbling about supply and demand. She already had seen through that tommy-rot. Things went better if I could keep the focus on Mao’s China. "Could Mao’s 1970 China now, sans trade, produce a U.S. per capita standard of living for her near-billion population?" "Of course not. She can’t convert her few steam trains into diesels and electricfed railways. Her workers can use only few and primitive tools. Their medical care is fragmentary, their years of education limited by China’s previous despotism." "Joan, by what steps can a People’s Society move into the golden-rule plenty available to a 1970 America, or Britain or Spain?" "First they should build the higher-yield bridges, roads, and machines. Then, later, deferred and delayed projects can be ranked in their turns." Trite stuff, you will say? That is my point. Learned Aristotle couldn’t handle such trite stuff. And neither could the physicist-statistician P. C. Mahalanobis who had Premier Nehru’s ear in the decades just following India’s liberation from the British Empire."

"I claim that this dinner, too much to eat and drink, was the basic reason why, for the only time in my life, I slept with Joan Robinson. Let me tell you the story. Ken Arrow was to read his famous paper - we know now that it was famous - on uncertainty and the economics of medical care, and I was one of the guests asked to come to the Arts Theatre Restaurant. It was a cold winter's night, we ate and drank a lot, and then we went into this room with a great big fire and a huge couch. Joan sat here, and I sat there, and Ken was sitting as close to me as you are now, and both Joan and I went to sleep while he read his paper."

"I must mention my special intellectual debt to Joan Robinson, with whom I had the opportunity to discuss over a period of nearly twenty years some of the problems analysed here. She, more than anybody else, convinced me of the radical content of Keynesian economics which we could decipher more easily with the help of Marx and Kalecki."

"the merchant had observed that the marginal utility of daughters decreases with surprising rapidity."

"The bastard Keynesian doctrine, evolved in the United States, invaded the economic faculties of the world, floating on the wings of the almighty dollar."

"An agent must have some discretion."

"To supply goods is a source of profit, but to supply services is a ' burden upon industry '. It is for this reason that when, as a nation, ' we have never had it so good ' we find that we ' cannot afford ' just what we most need."

"It seems that neither the Keynesian nor the Marxian prognosis of the future of capitalism is being fulfilled and we are left without any particular theory as to what will happen next."

"At any moment there is certainly not balanced trade between the various areas of the habitable globe that happens to be under separate national governments — there is an ever-changing pattern of deficits and surpluses."

"Income from property is not the reward of waiting, it is the reward of employing a good stockbroker."

"It is much easier to organize control over one industry serving many markets than over one market served by the products of several industries."

"Why did the hunters in the Wealth of Nations exchange beavers for deer?"

"But the tygers of wrath go the other way. Do not ask me why. It is just a fact I noticed when I was looking through field glasses from a machan."

"It is high time to abandon the mainstream and take to the turbulent waters of truly dynamic analysis."

"'Capital' is not what capital is called, it is what its name is called."

"The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists."

"Michal Kalecki's claim to priority of publication is indisputable."

"But, as soon as speculators become an important influence in the market, their business is to speculate on each others behaviour."

"It is impossible to add the stock of money to the flow of saving."

"There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks."

"When I came up to Cambridge (in October 1921) to read economics, I did not have much idea of what it was about."

"Even if the crises that are looming up are overcome and a new run of prosperity lies ahead, deeper problems will still remain. Modern capitalism has no purpose except to keep the show going."

"The nature of technology depends very much upon what the public can be induced to put up with."

"Time, so to say, runs at right angles to the page at each point on the curve."

"There is an unearthly, mystical element in Friedman's thought. The mere existence of a stock of money somehow promotes expenditure. But insofar as he offers an intelligible theory, it is made up of elements borrowed from Keynes."

"When a large part of the market for British textiles was in the colonies, a fall in the price of tea and cocoa caused unemployment in Lancashire."

"But once we bring historical time into the argument, it is not so easy to present the free play of the market as an ideal mechanism for maximizing welfare and securing social justice."

"Rosa Luxemburg maintained that the capitalist system can keep up its rate of investment (and therefore its profits) only so long as it is expanding geographically."

"Reality is never a golden age."

"A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism."

"In all the talk in the Principles (as opposed to the formal analysis) it is not the saving of rentiers but the energy of entrepreneurs which governs accumulation."

"The orthodox doctrines of economics which were dominant in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had a clear message. They supported laisser faire, free trade, the gold standard, and the universally advantageous effects of the pursuit of profit by competitive private enterprise."