If someone chooses to take all their hopes for a better and more just society and bundle it up in the name of “socialism,” then any criticism of “socialism” will be viewed as an attack on their dreams and desires. Conversely, pretty much no one ever has said that “capitalism is the name of my desire.” The arguments for capitalism are typically made in terms of machine-like functionality, emphasizing what works and doesn’t work under capitalism. And of course, the arguments for capitalism emphasize how it has actually raised the standard of living for average people over recent decades and centuries, not how it summarizes one’s dreams for the future.

Timothy Taylor, Socialism is the Name of Our Desire, in Conversable Economist

The diversity across countries in measured per capita income levels is literally too great to be believed … I do not see how one can look at figures like these without seeing them as representing possibilities. Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia’s or Egypt’s? If so, what, exactly? If not, what is it about the ‘nature of India’ that makes it so? The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.

Robert Lucas (1988). On the mechanics of economic development. Journal of Monetary Economics, p 5

I believe that even if government officials were free of special-interest influence and wanted to be pro-social, they would fail. They under-estimate their own ignorance, and in choosing leaders the political process selects for a lack of humility. Officials are prone to blunders, and the error-correction mechanisms are much weaker in the public sector than in the private sector. Markets tend to correct their failures. Governments tend not to.

Arnold Kling, Why I lean libertarian, Askblog

Part of the joy of studying economics lies in the discovery that actions have complicated, unexpected, and sometimes perverse consequences. At its best, economics is the science dedicated to tracing these consequences, pushing the analysis beyond where common sense and naive intuition alone can take us.

Joseph Heath (2018). The Contribution of Economics to Business Ethics, in Routledge Companion to Business Ethics, p 302

Tacit artisanal savoir-faire, experience-driven insights, trial and error, and serendipity drove many of the eighteenth-century inventions, especially in mechanical engineering and iron and coal, far more than any solid scientific base. … Experience, dexterity, imagination, and intuition created new technology more than science.

Joel Mokyr (2009). The Enlightened Economy. Britain and the Industrial Revolution. 1700-1850, p 60

I don’t see how any society can hope to survive unless there’s at least some degree of alignment between society’s interests and economic incentives.

Jaron Lanier, Financial Times, Lunch with the FT, July 6 2018

Dear Mr. Brailsford,
Very many thanks for sending me your book. I have read it, as I do everything you write, with a good deal of pleasure. Partly I agree with it, but partly I am still confused in my own mind. At present I am busy on a technical treatise about the theory of money and credit. Once I am through with this I want to give myself up to getting quite clear in my own mind as to where I stand in relation to the ideal future of society. At present, my feeling is that this has to be attacked in the first instance from the ethical side rather than from the standpoint of technical economic efficiency. What we need is a form of society which shall be ethically tolerable and economically not intolerable. My opinions on a good many matters are shifting, but I do not yet clearly see where I am being led to. When it comes to politics, I hate trade unions.

John Maynard Keynes (1925). Brief aan Henry Noel Brailsford, geciteerd in Zachary Carter (2020). The Price of Peace. Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, p 148.

One kind of trouble that the equation with rational and gentlemanly behavior caused for economic argument is that it deflected attention away from the analysis of deception and fraud in the economy.

Mark Granovetter (2017). Society and the Economy. Framework and Principles, p 21

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

John Stuart Mill (1828). Speech to London Debating Society

It is not wonder, but rather the social enthusiasm which revolts from the sordidness of mean streets and the joylessness of withered lives, that is the beginning of economic science.

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1920). The Economics of Welfare. Geciteerd door Amartya Sen in Economics with a Moral Compass. Welfare economics: Past, Present, and Future

But what, then, is the significance of Economic Science? (It provides) no norms which are binding in practice. It is incapable of deciding as between the desirability of different ends. It is fundamentally distinct from Ethics. Wherein, then, its unquestionable significance consist? Surely it consists in just this, that, when we are faced with a choice between ultimates, it enables us to choose with full awareness of the implications of what we are choosing. Faced with the problem of deciding between this and that, we are not entitled to look to Economics for the ultimate decision. There is nothing in Economics which relieves us of the obligation to choose.

Lionel Robbins (1935). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science

The way to happiness is to focus on process. Then the winning becomes secondary to that. It becomes a way to keep score on how you’re doing on the process piece. And to really focus on that as opposed to focusing on the end result.

Annie Duke over poker in Conversations with Tyler.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

Adam Smith (1759). The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part 1, chapter1

We have become accustomed to the idea that a natural system like the human body or an ecosystem regulates itself. To explain the regulation, we look for feedback loops rather than a central planning and directing body. But somehow our intuitions about self-regulation do not carry over to the artificial systems of human society. (Thus)…the…disbelief always expressed by (my) architecture students (about)…medieval cities as marvelously patterned systems that had mostly just “grown” in response to myriads of individual decisions. To my students a pattern implied a planner… The idea that a city could acquire its pattern as “naturally” as a snowflake was foreign to them.

Herbert Simon (1981). The Sciences of the Artificial, p 33

But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. … It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Adam Smith (1776). The Wealth of Nations, p 26-27