Quotes from “Boom and Bust: The Political Economy of Economic Disorder”

By Richard Wagner (1980)

• The way that [national income] accounts are constructed, resources devoted to the correction of error are valued equivalently with resources devoted to other production.#Quoted in Steven Horwitz, Microfoundations and Macroeconomics (2000)
  EconomicsMethodology
• So long as the interests of politicians are promoted more effectively through actions and policies that are negative-sum than through actions that are positive-sum, we should expect such negative-sum action and policies to dominate the political process.#
  Politics
• By virtue of the law of conservation, all engines are necessarily 100 percent efficient. To say that an engine is less than perfectly efficient requires a normative judgment that separates the output into useful or desired output and waste. A pump that moves water uphill to a house can be said to be less than 100 percent efficient only as a result of someone’s having judged that such things as the water lost in transit and the heat dissipated in the pump house are unwanted and hence represent waste. It is the same with society. . . . The efficiency of an economy cannot be judged without placing some valuation upon different uses of time, any more than the efficiency of an engine can be judged without placing some valuation upon different transformations of energy.#
  EconomicsMethodology