People From New York City

"It must be emphasized, because the contrary has so often been asserted, that Marx was not trying to reduce everything to economic terms. He was rather attempting to uncover the true interrelation between the economic and the non-economic factors in the totality of social existence."

"The legitimate purpose of abstraction in social science is never to get away from the real world but rather to isolate certain aspects of the real world for intensive investigation."

"Most people take capitalism for granted, just as they take the solar system for granted. The eventual passing of capitalism, which is often conceded nowadays, is thought of in much the same way as the eventual cooling of the sun, that is to say, its relevance to contemporary events is denied."

"In possessing use value a commodity is in no way peculiar. Objects of human consumption in every age and in every form of society likewise possess use value. Use value is an expression of a certain relation between the consumer and the object consumed. Political economy, on the other hand, is a social science of the relations between people."

"In possessing exchange value relative to one another, commodities show their unique characteristic. It is only as commodities, in a society where exchange is a regular method of realizing the purpose of social production, that products have exchange value."

"It is essential to realize that it was this analysis of the social characteristics of commodity production, and not an arbitrary preconception or an ethical principle, which led Marx to identify labor as the substance of value."

"A. No matter what you do, you're always hearing something."

"The misunderstandings have seemed to come from comparing fluxus with movements or groups whose individuals ‘have had some principle in common, or an agreed-upon program. In fluxus there has never been any attempt to agree on aims or methods; individuals with something unnameable in common have simply naturally coalesced to publish and perform their work. Perhaps this common something is a feeling that the bounds of art are much wider than they have conventionally seemed, or that art and certain long-established bounds are no longer very useful. At any rate, individuals in europe, the us, and japan have discovered each other’s work and found it nourishing (or something) and have grown objects and events which are original, and often uncategorizable, in a strange new way."

"fluxus is the “event” according to george brecht:"

"Once you know about a work of mine you own it. There's no way I can climb inside somebody's head and remove it."

"I didn’t come from a background that had any idea about what contemporary art was, it was not anti or pro, it had nothing to do with it. I do remember something my mother said when I was sixteen. I was going off to college, and I said, “I think I’m going to be an artist, not a professor of philosophy.” They all assumed I would be a professor because I’m good at logic, and she looked at me and she said, “Lawrence, you’ll break your heart.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “Art is for rich people and women.”"

"1. The artist may construct the piece."

"... the fact is, they are sculptures, since they show the relationship of object to object and that is the idea and purpose of a sculpture. I’ve got nothing against ‘poetry,’ but it’s only resonance and tempo. Each of my works is perhaps also indeed a poetic sculpture. It’s not that I think it’s a bad word, poetry, but I’m not a poet, since a poet is concerned with the relationship of human beings to human beings."

"What makes art interesting is the fact that anyone can realize it as soon as the idea has been formulated. That’s the point."

"I do not mind objects, but I do not care to make them."

"My work is a complex product of a personality continuous with all of nature, and one making progressively better-integrated efforts to structure experience on all levels.... My art is the result of a deeply personal, infinitely complex, and still essentially mysterious, exploration of experience. No words will ever touch it."

"No, I don’t think it’s correct to define my writing as fables. There are themes, yes, but I’m not trying to offer some categorical cure-it-all to the problematic situation of Man. I’m neither theologian nor a politician. My concern in my first novel, The Zoo, was loss of inner life. After long years of writer’s block, the novel just exploded out of me. Thirty days. All too quickly to really do it justice. With my second novel, The Nihilesthete, I was taken by the spiritual diminishment and the all-pervasive powerlessness that I felt was taking over our culture which in turn prevented and inverted my lead character’s full expression. Such is the motive-force behind almost banal, cerebralized cruelties he harbours upon his arch-enemy, the artist, Brodski."

"Richard Kalich is a successful novelist, one who has succeeded in consistently producing perplexing fictions that fail to categorize themselves and escape the warping influence of authorial intent."

"He's after what it means to be profoundly out of step with one's culture yet still unwilling to let go of the American dream."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"Mazur suggests that it’s possible to glimpse the essence of Grothendieck’s approach to mathematics by looking at two concepts—categories and functors. A category can be thought of almost as a grammar: take triangles, perhaps, and understand them in terms of their relationship to all other triangles. The category consists of objects, and relationships between objects. The objects are nouns and the relationships are verbs, and the category is all the ways in which they can interact. Grothendieck’s discoveries opened up mathematics in a way that was analogous to how Wittgenstein (and Saussure) changed our views of language."

"Sometimes the mathematical anti-Platonist believes that headway is made by showing Platonism to be unsupportable by rational means, and that it is an incoherent position to take when formulated in a propositional vocabulary. It is easy enough to throw together propositional sentences. But it is a good deal more difficult to capture a Platonic disposition in a propositional formulation that is a full and honest expression of some flesh-and-blood mathematician’s view of things. There is, of course, no harm in trying—and maybe its a good exercise. But even if we cleverly came up with a proposition that is up to the task of expressing Platonism formally, the mere fact that the proposition cannot be demonstrated to be true won’t necessarily make it vanish. There are many things—some true, some false— unsupportable by rational means."

"Hodge cohomology, algebraic de Rham cohomology, crystalline cohomology, the étale ℓ-adic cohomology theories for each prime number ℓ ... A strategy to encapsulate all the different cohomology theories in algebraic geometry was formulated initially by Alexandre Grothendieck, who is responsible for setting up much of this marvelous cohomological machinery in the first place. Grothendieck sought a single theory that is cohomological in nature that acts as a gateway between algebraic geometry and the assortment of special cohomological theories, such as the ones listed above—that acts as the motive behind all this cohomological apparatus. ..."

"Vladimir Voevodsky and his collaborators have provided us with a very interesting candidate-category of motives: a category (of sheaves relative to an extraordinarily fine Grothendieck-style topology on the category of schemes) which in some intuitive sense “softens algebraic geometry” so as to allow for a good notion of homotopy in an algebro-geometric setup and is sufficiently directly connected to concrete algebraic geometry to have already yielded some extraordinary applications. The quest for a full theory of motives is a potent driving force in complex analysis, algebraic geometry, automorphic representation theory, the study of L functions, and arithmetic. It will continue to be so throughout the current century."

"Number theory swarms with bugs, waiting to bite the tempted flower-lovers who, once bitten, are inspired to excesses of effort!"

"Few architects tried to emulate this honest and enthusiastic attempt to use the concrete itself as a decorative feature, and the more reinforced concrete frame structures became common, the more customary it was to hide the skeleton within a covering of brick... In 1905 Ernest Flagg, one of the most brilliant Beaux-Arts trained American architects of the day, had complained bitterly when a thirty per cent rise in building costs obliged him to substitute a reinforced concrete skeleton for the masonry construction of the at Annapolis, carefully modeled on the Dome of the Invalides in Paris."

"Ernest Flagg, the renowned twentieth-century architect, built the "new" Naval Academy in the early 1900s and infused a sense of grandeur into the Yard—physical structures befitting the training ground for the world's preeminent Navy. ...It is now recognized as Flagg's most monumental accomplishment."

"In 1908 the architect Ernest Flagg proposed that street facades should be limited to 100 feet and towers should be permitted to rise to an unlimited height above them so long as they occupied no more than twenty-five percent of the site, a provision that was eventually adopted by the city code. Flagg wanted to "Parisianize" New York with even cornice lines yet allow for a "diadem of towers"; his own Singer Building (1908) shows what he meant."

"Inevitably Le Corbusier's large-scale housing was associated with the more visionary aspects of his planning and deemed unacceptable to pragmatic housing reformers. That association formed a sixth barrier. On one hand, the Radiant City, like his urban visions of the 1920s, was linked to a tradition of utopian planning that thrived in America during the 1920s and early 1930s. Such projects and proposals by Raymond Hood, Richard Neutra, Kocher and Ziegler, Wallace Harrison, Hugh Ferriss, Harvey Wiley Corbett, Ernest Flagg, and others enjoyed wide circulation. On the other hand, what separated the Radiant City (and Le Corbusier's projects of the 1920s) from many of its American visionary counterparts was his radical treatment of urban infrastructure and his advocacy of cooperative ownership, thus mandating not only material changes in the structure of the city but also political changes in a free-market economy that historically promoted individual property rights."

"A master in art need not go into the highways and byways for affects; he knows the straight course and follows it."

"With dignity and simplicity come repose... the natural state of one at home in his surroundings and sure of his ground. Repose is a distinguished characteristic of Greek art."

"The contraction from 1929 to 1933 was by far the most severe business-cycle contraction during the near-century of U.S. history we cover and it may well have been the most severe in the whole of U.S. history."

"Style... the very hall-mark of great art... there is little use in trying to define style."

"Imagination... implies originality. It results in a reflection... of the working mind of the designer. ...Imagination may be called the dynamic force in art. ...It is the quality which distinguishes the artistic from the photographic representation of nature."

"Interest. ...a design to be great must have great interest. ...the most potent of all ways to impart interest is to endow the design with beauty of form, and... the one which makes the strongest appeal to human interest and admiration is physical beauty in human shape."

"Variety. ...Movement, contrast, and accent all contribute to variety... the spice of life... Monotony and dryness are lurking enemies which may be vanquished by variety."

"The qualities called personal... and the ability to impart them, in greater or less degree, is the gage of genius in art."

"Refinement. While the possession of this quality is due, in the first instance, to education, it is also largely a matter of temperament."

"Clarity or Decision. ...without it there is uncertainty, hesitation, obscurity, instability... incomparable with good art. The meaning and object of the design should be clear... it should be frank, as the French say."

"Simplicity and Dignity are so nearly related that they may be considered together. ...A quiet air of reserved power is characteristic of dignity, and that is best obtained by simple means and the absence of apparent effort. Simplicity is the mark of genius. The giant in art does his work easily, without straining and without affectation; his ways are direct and to the point."

"We don't know what would have happened had [Federal Reserve Governor Benjamin] Strong lived; but what we do know is that the central bank of the world's economically most important nation in 1929 was essentially leaderless and lacking in expertise. This situation led to decisions, or nondecisions, which might well not have occurred under either better leadership or a more centralized institutional structure. Associated with these decisions, we observe a massive collapse of money, prices, and output. … Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."