Members Of The American Philosophical Society

"A group which has a simple structure may offer difficult questions when operating as a transformation group. For example, the ways in which a cyclic group of order 2 can operate on a manifold, even on E 3, are far from completely known."

"THEOREM: if G is a locally euclidean, connected, simply connected topological group of dimension n greater than one, then G contains a closed proper subgroup of positive dimension."

"Others have spoken and written about his solution of Hilbert's fifth problem, but perhaps not enough is said about his later work, especially his joint work with C. T. Yang. In a long series of papers written in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they used the study of group actions on homotopy 7-spheres to showcase and test the growing new techniques of differential topology, especially index theory and surgery theory. At a time when much work in topology consisted in building these machines, their papers demonstrated the beauty of applying this theory to unfurl complexities of symmetry and structure."

"The ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus, propounded an hypothesis of the constitution of matter, and gave the name of atoms to the ultimate unalterable parts of which he imagined all bodies to be constructed. In the 17th century, Gassendi revived this hypothesis, and attempted to develope it, while Newton used it with marked success in his reasonings on physical phenomena; but the first who formed a body of doctrine which would embrace all known facts in the constitution of matter, was Roger Joseph Boscovich, of Italy, who published at Vienna, in 1759, a most important and ingenious work, styled Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis ad unicam legem virium, in Natura existentium redacta. This is one of the most profound contributions ever made to science; filled with curious and important information, and is well worthy of the attentive perusal of the modern student. In more recent days, the theory of Boscovich has received further confirmation and extension in the researches of Dalton, Joule, Thomson, Faraday, Tyndall, and others."

"Philippe Durance: ... How does one become Michel Crozier?"

"The Bureaucratic Phenomenon was the first of a series of books published over a 15-year period through which Michel stimulated attention to the organizations of contemporary society and their contributions to social and political problems. In La société bloquée (1970), L’acteur et le système (with co-author Erhard Freiberg; 1977), and On ne change pas la société par décret (1979), he explored modern, particularly French, society and its social, political, and economic structures. Better than most, he saw the difficulties of achieving democratic aspirations in a modern nation state. In particular, as his 1979 book trumpeted, he saw that modern societies did not change simply by giving them well-intentioned orders."

"Crozier's breakthrough book, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (1963 in French, 1964 in English), is a still wonderful account of how an organisation as a system generates the overlapping vicious circles that then block the system. The voices of his interviewees in two public service organisations, one a clerical agency, the other a state industrial monopoly, explaining their attitudes and their behaviour, are as fresh as if they had been uttered yesterday. This book heralded a consistent theme in Crozier's work that organisational reform is not possible unless its proponents take into account the way that people will interpret it, react to it and subvert it. As Crozier put it in the title of a 1979 book: "You can't change a society by decree.""

"Much of the pioneering work in organization theory was written about public organizations, or with public organizations in mind. When Weber wrote about bureaucracy, he was thinking of the Prussian civil service. Philip Selznick began his scholarly career writing about the New Deal in TVA and the Grass Roots (1953). Herbert Simon’s first published article (1937) was on municipal government performance measurement, and Simon also coauthored early in his career a book called Public Administration (1950) and a number of papers (e.g., Simon, 1953) published in Public Administration Review. Michel Crozier’s classic, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (1954), was about two government organizations in France."

"Is democracy in crisis? This question is being posed with increasing urgency by some of the leading statesmen of the West, by columnists and scholars, and— if public opinion polls are to be trusted— even by the publics. In some respects, the mood of today is reminiscent of that of the early twenties, when the views of Oswald Spengler regarding "The Decline of the West" were highly popular. This pessimism is echoed, with obvious Schadenfreude, by various communist observers, who speak with growing confidence of "the general crisis of capitalism" and who see in it the confirmation of their own theories."

"The classic rationalists did not consider the members of an organization as human beings, but just as cogs in the machine. For them, workers were only hands. The human relations approach has shown how incomplete this rationale was. It has also made it possible to consider workers as creatures of feeling, who are moved by the impact of the so-called rational decisions taken above then, and will react to them. A human being, however, does not have only a hand a heart. He also had a head, which means that he is free to play his own game."

"Power is a very difficult problem with which to deal in the theory of organization."

"The first of the two cases which we are about to discuss concerns a large-scale Parisian administrative organization which may be described as rigid, standardized, and impersonal, and which seems unable to cope with the human and technical problems engendered by its recently accelerated growth. Its hierarchical structure, its promotional system, and its principles of organization are extremely simple. The behavior of its different categories of personnel, as actors within its social system, is therefore much easier to analyze. The actors appear to be both extremely rational and extremely predictable, as if they were playing a game that followed an experimental model. We shall use the opportunity afforded by such a situation to try to understand better one of the most fundamental problems usually associated with the concept of bureaucracy, the problem of routine."

"I shall always regard this aspect of my dispute with Keynes as the greatest mistake of my professional career, and the book, The Great Depression, which I subsequently wrote, partly in justification of this attitude, as something which I would willingly see be forgotten. […] Now I still think that there is much in this theory as an explanation of a possible generation of boom and crisis. But, as an explanation of what was going on in the early ’30s, I now think it was misleading. Whatever the genetic factors of the pre-1929 boom, their sequelae, in the sense of inappropriate investments fostered by wrong expectations, were completely swamped by vast deflationary forces sweeping away all those elements of constancy in the situation which otherwise might have provided a framework for an explanation in my terms. The theory was inadequate to the facts. Nor was this approach any more adequate as a guide to policy. Confronted with the freezing deflation of those days, the idea that the prime essential was the writing down of mistaken investments and the easing of capital markets by fostering the disposition to save and reducing the pressure on consumption was completely inappropriate. To treat what developed subsequently in the way which I then thought valid was as unsuitable as denying blankets and stimulants to a drunk who has fallen into an icy pond, on the ground that his original trouble was overheating."

"It has been the object…to show that if recovery is to be maintained and future progress assured, there must be a more or less complete reversal of contemporary tendencies of governmental regulation of enterprise. The aim of governmental policy in regard to industry must be to create a field in which the forces of enterprise and the disposal of resources are once more allowed to be governed by the market.But what is this but the restoration of capitalism? And is not the restoration of capitalism the restoration of the causes of depression?If the analysis of this essay is correct, the answer is unequivocal. The conditions of recovery which have been stated do indeed involve the restoration of what has been called capitalism. But the slump was not due to these conditions. On the contrary, it was due to their negation. It was due to monetary mismanagement and State intervention operating in a milieu in which the essential strength of capitalism had already been sapped by war and by policy. Ever since the outbreak of war in 1914, the whole tendency of policy has been away from that system, which in spite of the persistence of feudal obstacles and the unprecedented multiplication of the people, produced that enormous increase of wealth per head…. Whether that increase will be resumed, or whether, after perhaps some recovery, we shall be plunged anew into depression and the chaos of planning and restrictionism—that is the issue which depends on our willingness to reverse this tendency."

"The economist studies the disposal of scarce means. He is interested in the way different degrees of scarcity of different goods give rise to different ratios of valuation between them, and he is interested in the way in which changes in conditions of scarcity, whether coming from changes in ends or changes in means—from the demand side or the supply side—affect these ratios. Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."

"Lionel Robbins's The Great Depression (Macmillan, 1934) is one of the great economic works of our time. Its greatness lies not so much in originality of economic thought, as in the application of the best economic thought to the explanation of the cataclysmic phenomena of the Great Depression. This is unquestionably the best work published on the Great Depression. … To his work, Robbins brought a clarity and polish of style that I believe to be unequalled among any economists, past or present. Robbins is the premier economic stylist."

"I picked up a copy of Lionel Robbins’s 1934 book The Great Depression in a used book shop in Norwich. It's quite revealing: judicious in tone, full of tables and facts, clearly meant to be seen as the work of a wise observer – indeed, a Very Serious Person.And utterly, utterly wrongheaded"

"The Treatise is also one of the most important books of Western thought ever written. Spinoza was the first to argue that the Bible is not literally the word of God but rather a work of human literature; that “true religion” has nothing to do with theology, liturgical ceremonies, or sectarian dogma but consists only in a simple moral rule: love your neighbor; and that ecclesiastic authorities should have no role whatsoever in the governance of a modern state."

"A failure to help that polar bear – or any individual animal in a comparable condition, regardless of our responsibility (direct or indirect) for that suffering – is. Nor can lack of action be defended by some alleged concern for the course of nature ('We must not interfere!') or the gene pool of the species ('Let the weak die!'). Consider someone who would use those same arguments to justify not intervening to help relieve the suffering of particular human beings during a famine or after a tsunami, or someone who would use such arguments to say that we should not give antibiotics to a child with pneumonia. Such an attitude, reminiscent of various Charles Dickens characters, would be rejected out of hand as immoral. If the only morally relevant factor is 'can they suffer?', there is no relevant moral difference when animals suffer pain that we can alleviate."

"[…] the virtues of a medicine depend less upon its intrinsic properties and powers than on the sagacity of the physician who administers it; just as the efficiency of firearms depends less upon the explosives and the missile they contain than on the judgment and accuracy of aim of the man who discharges them."

"We should be very careful to distinguish between our knowledge of phenomena and our interpretations of them."

"Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it."

"Models constitute a framework or a skeleton and the flesh and blood will have to be added by a lot of common sense and knowledge of details."

"The advantages of models are, on one hand, that they force us to present a "complete" theory by which I mean a theory taking into account all relevant phenomena and relations and, on the other hand, the confrontation with observation, that is, reality."

"First of all I want to remind you of the essential features of models. In my opinion they are: (i) drawing up a list of the variables to be considered; (ii) drawing up a list of the equations or relations the variables have to obey and (iii) testing the validity of the equations, which implies the estimation of their coefficients, if any. As a consequence of especially (iii) we may have to revise (i) and (ii) so as to arrive at a satisfactory degree of realism of the theory embodied in the model. Then, the model may be used for various purposes, that is, for the solution of various problems. The advantages of models are, on one hand, that they force us to present a "complete" theory by which I mean a theory taking into account all relevant phenomena and relations and, on the other hand, the confrontation with observation, that is, reality. Of course these remarks are far from new."

"The dominant role played by... exporters’ and importers’ GNP and distance in explaining trade flows."

"The factor of distance may also stand for an index of information about export markets."

"The main sources of tension in today's world economy could be grouped under the following categories:"

"The world is in a process of a great transformation. In a considerable part of it a new economic order, "communism," is being vigorously tried out. Elsewhere an old order is passing as one country after another throws of the yoke of colonialism. The wholesale introduction of Western techniques and ways of life shaking the foundations of numerous beliefs and attitudes, for good and for evil."

"As a boundary science, econometrics is younger than the adjacent regions, which fact likewise has advantages and disadvantages. As a disadvantage, the lack of an established doctrine, and also the lack of established textbooks, can be felt; as an advantage is the fresh enthusiasm, with which its students work."

"Econometrics is the name for a field of science in which mathematical-economic and mathematical-statistical research are applied in combination. Econometrics, therefore, forms a borderland between two branches of science, with the advantages and disadvantages thereof; advantages, because new combinations are introduced which often open up new perspectives; disadvantages, because the work in this field requires skill in two domains, which either takes up too much time or leads to insufficient training of its students in one of the two respects."

"Mankind’s problems can no longer be solved by national governments. What is needed is a World Government. This can best be achieved by strengthening the United Nations system. In some cases, this would mean changing the role of UN agencies from advice-giving to implementation. But some of the most important new institutions would be financial—a World Treasury and a World Central Bank. Just as each nation has a system of income redistribution, so there should be a corresponding ‘World Financial Policy’ to be implemented by the World Bank and the World Central Bank. Some of these proposals are, no doubt, far-fetched and beyond the horizon of today’s political possibilities. But the idealist of today often turns out to be the realists of tomorrow."

"To Ehrenfest I owe a great deal. I studied physics at a time when a number of fascinating persons were there together. Ehrenfest would not instruct as such, as he preferred dialogue. Thanks to him I could participate in discussions with Albert Einstein. Also Kamerling Onnes, Lorentz and Zeeman were present. Being a student in the hands of such teachers, you are very fortunate indeed."

"A just social order can best be described as a humanist socialism, because its goal would be the establishment of equal possibilities within and between all countries, and at its base would lie universal human values"

"The shaping or reformulation of the aims of economic policy which are only vaguely felt may be exemplified in the aim of social justice."

"For some queer and deplorable reason most human beings are more impressed by words than by figures, to the great disadvantage of mankind."

"Along with Frisch and others Tinbergen developed the field of econometrics, the use of statistical tools to test economic hypotheses. Tinbergen was one of the first economists to create multiequation models of economies. He produced a twenty-seven-equation econometric model of the Dutch economy, and his 1939 book, Business Cycles in the United States, 1919–1932, includes a forty-eight-equation model of the American economy that explains investment activity and models American business cycles."

"Tinbergen's methodology was exceptional at that time and was received sometimes with scepticism. In particular J.M. Keynes (1939), at the time editor of the Economic Journal, reviewed 'Professor Tinbergen's Method' quite critically, raising as one of the fundamental points that 'The method is neither of discovery nor of criticism. It is a means of giving quantitative precision to what, in qualitative terms, we know already as the result of a complete theoretical analysis.' Of course the latter criticism illustrates precisely Tinbergen's conviction that knowledge relevant for policy making should preferably be quantitative in nature. As to 'discovery,' Tinbergen (1940) in his 'Reply' indicated that 'it sometimes happens that the course of the curves itself suggests that some factor not mentioned in most economic textbooks must be of great importance,' and he mentioned some examples. 'As to the possibility of 'criticism,' it seems to me,' Tinbergen (1940) argued, 'that the value found for one or more of the regression coefficients may imply a criticism on one or more of the theories that have been used.' In a 'Comment' to Tinbergen's 'Reply,' Keynes (1940) still held some doubts: 'that there is anyone I would trust with it at the present stage or that this brand of statistical alchemy is ripe to become a branch of science, I am not yet persuaded.' But Keynes concluded: 'No one could be more frank, more painstaking, more free from subjective bias or parti pris than professor Tinbergen... But Newton, Boyle and Locke all played with alchemy. So let him continue.' And so Tinbergen did."

"Educational policies deserve to be programmed not only with a view to improving education in the widest sense, but also in order to ináuence the income distribution."

"An inequality-furthering phenomenon is technological development. But need it be? Increasingly we get the feeling that technological development is not simply something given, but that it may be guided, within limits."

"The central question of economic policy is the question of the effectiveness of its various instruments."

"The two preponderant forces at work are technological development, which made for a relative increase in demand and hence in the income ratio... and increased access to schooling, which made for a relative decrease."

"What matters is the di¤erence between qualities available and qualities required by the demand side, that is by the organization of production."

"It is my hope that in such a way we may again, as Marx claimed, find scientific arguments in the competition between various systems, but up-to-date scientific arguments rather than obsolete ones. This more fundamental research in economics deserves relatively more attention and resources than the more superficial versions of economic research directed at forecasting or analysing very short-term fluctuations in market prices, on which quite some money is being spent to-day."

"It is also our hope that the interpretation of the socio-economic optimum as a set of institutions may help to get under way a discussion of a more scientific character than was usual so far about the relative merits of various existing socio-economic orders, especially those of Eastern and Western Europe, including such interesting cases as Sweden, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. A considerable amount of better information about various types of external effects will be one of the necessary ingredients if we want to give concrete content to such merit rating of various systems."

"Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good."

"Alvin Plantinga is arguably the greatest philosopher of the last century."

"Like I say, you gotta have a PhD in engineering just to use your thermostat. And that seems over the top to me. [...] It’s not real nice, you know. If you live in Arizona, you get used to it, but we don’t. And it’s right after a really cold, kind of wet, spring. So we weren’t really up for that at all. [...] You know, there are worse things. I mean, if it were like, say, ten below zero, that would be worse."

"Well, I don't think there are any methodological conflicts either. As for those social conflicts, those aren't conflicts—in my opinion—between science and religion. They're conflicts between Christians and atheists or Christians and secularists: Christians want to do things one way, secularists want to do things another way. But that's not a science/religion conflict at all. You might as well say it's a science/secularism conflict. In each case, each group wants to do science and then use it in a certain way."

"I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term 'fundamentalist'. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like 'son of a bitch', more exactly 'sonovabitch', or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) 'sumbitch'. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of 'fundamentalist' (in this widely current use): it isn't simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like stupid sumbitch' (or maybe fascist sumbitch'?) than 'sumbitch' simpliciter. It isn't exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase 'considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.' The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like 'stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine'."