Rhetoric is an economics of language, the study of how scarce means are allocated to the insatiable desires of people to be heard.#
Economics is unsuccessful as social weather forecasting, a role forced on it by the rhetoric of politics and journalism. But it is strikingly successful as social history.#
If a 5 percent tax on gasoline is said by some congressman or journalist to be “designed” to fall entirely on producers the economist will complain, saying “It’s not an equilibrium.” “Not an equilibrium” is the economist’s way of saying that she disputes the ending proposed by some untutored person.#
The notion that ideas and their words are invariant lumps unaltered by combination, like bricks, is analogous to believing that an economy is a mere aggregation of Robinson Crusoes.#
Unexamined metaphor is a substitute for thinking—which is a recommendation to examine the metaphors, not to attempt the impossible by banishing them.#
Flexibility is frequently praised in scientific theories and of course should be. But flexibility is simply a promise that the theory will be able to evade crucial tests, surviving unscathed from positivist tortures. Nothing could be further from naïve falsification.#
The opportunity cost of enchanting one’s fellow economists is alienating noneconomists. There is no such thing as a free argument.#
Much of economics turns on quarrels of characterization. Is America monopolistic? Were medieval peasants selfish? Is the market for goods worldwide? Is capitalism stable? These are quantitative questions, all depending on answers to the question, “How large is large?”#
At the level of broad scientific law, scientists simply use their theories. They seldom try to falsify them.#
It is a cliché among philosophers and historians of science that one of the most successful of all scientific theories, the theory of evolution, makes no predictions and is therefore unfalsifiable by prediction. With fruit flies and bacteria, to be sure, you can test the theory in the approved manner; but its main facts, its dinosaurs and multicolored birds, are things to be explained, not predicted.#
Something is awry with an appeal for an open intellectual society, an appeal defending itself on liberal grounds, that begins by demarcating certain ways of reasoning as forbidden and certain fields of study as meaningless.#
Talk against talk is self-refuting. The person making it appeals to a social, nonepistemological standard of persuasiveness by the very act of trying to persuade someone that mere persuasion is not enough.#
Precision means low variance of estimation . . . but if the estimate is greatly biased, it will tell precisely nothing.#
Stories or articles can give only a small sample of experience, because actual experience is overwhelmed with irrelevance: taking out the garbage, bumping the table, scratching the back of one’s head, seeing the title of the book one was not looking for. It is a sense of pointedness that distinguishes the good storyteller and the good scientific thinker from the bad.#