Non Fiction Authors From England

"I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: (i) this is worthless nonsense; (ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; (iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; (iv) I always said so."

"An inordinate fondness for beetles."

"The commonest cause of gastritis – that is to say, an inflamed and irritable stomach – is worry and anxiety. It is particularly common among busmen and travelling salesmen. I had it for about fifteen years until I read Lenin and other writers, who showed me what was wrong with our society and how to cure it. Since then I have needed no magnesia. But these pains may also be due to gastric ulcer or even cancer. So it is better to consult a doctor, even though he will probably recommend magnesia. But the Daily Worker may effect a permanent cure."

"My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world."

"Lourdes is the Blackpool of Christianity."

"One of the most unfortunate things about being an unfit Englishman cycling long distances in France is the number of signs that yell 'PAIN' down every high street."

"I hate plays. I've never seen the point of paying money to watch people shout a lot and pretend to die, and now that I'm the father of three young children I don't have to."

"The question now is whether the price of his misjudgement is to be paid only by the man himself, or whether those who trusted him and elevated him to the peerage, and to one of the highest diplomatic posts available, should also share in his ignominy."

"There's no suggestion that Lord Mandelson has done anything unlawful. But I would claim the friend's privilege to tell Peter that he has been, at best naive and foolish, at worst greedy and duplicitous. Whatever is true as far as politics and public office are concerned, for Peter Mandelson, this is the end."

"For a long time, I too thought that Europe’s Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain’s diverse identity landscape. I should have known better."

"Most liberal-minded folk would like to think that since they are not hostile to people of a different race, racism is a disease of the uneducated, unenlightened and socially backward - football hooligans, British National Party supporters, policemen. You could call this the Bad Guy Theory. But the Bad Guy Theory does not explain why Indian-heritage children do nearly twice as well as Pakistani-heritage children at GCSE. If the difference were simply a matter of teacher attitudes you would have to believe that most British teachers were bigoted — and that their prejudice was directed solely at the Pakistani pupils and never at their Indian classmates. Both suggestions defy common sense."

"During the renaissances in thinking led by Shakespeare and Goethe, the first new development in memory techniques for 1,700 years appeared: the Major System. This was the first system that enabled the user to transfer easily and instantaneously from numbers to letters, thus creating the opportunity for a system that could stretch from zero to an infinite number, and which allowed the user to translate any word into its own special number, and any number into its own special letter. This multiplied the opportunity for developing memory techniques 100-fold."

"The old linear pattern of thinking by reading and describing from left to right, top to bottom has many problems in organizing information coming from eyes, ears, etc. For example, the ability to read and understand the context of a book is different from memorizing them simply as sentences."

"The human brain has left and right brain symmetry with its own nature and can process information which initially appears to have no pattern or order. However, the brain has the ability to process visual information much more efficiently."

"As knowledge of the alphabet and its permutations and combinations is to traditional literacy, and as a knowledge of numbers and their permutations and combinations is to mathematics, so a knowledge of the biological and conceptual alphabets of the brain and its apparently infinite permutations and combinations is to mental literacy."

"Normal linear note taking and writing will put you into a semi-hypnotic trance, while mind mapping will greatly enhance your left and right brain cognitive skills."

"Even traditionally well educated and literate individuals are significantly restricted by the fact that they are able to use only a fraction of the biological and conceptual thinking tools which are available (the mind map)"

"The world is historically mentally illiterate."

"The mind map will change your life."

"Did you know that you use less than 1% of your brain? The good news is that mind mapping can help you to access the other 99%!"

"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."

"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."

"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."