Quote

I took the obligatory economics classes in school, but I've long been a fan of the Milton Friedman philosophy and its libertarian bent: One must be free to do what one wants to do, as long as you don't harm another. This is the seminal treatise on free-market economics.

Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It's how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.

Economics evolved as a more moral and more egalitarian approach to policy than prevailed in its surrounding milieu. Let's cherish and extend that heritage. The real contributions of economics to human welfare might turn out to be very different from what most people - even most economists - expect.

Economics is a strange science. Our subject deals with some of the most important as well as mundane issues that impinge on the human condition.

Egalitarian policies are the best way to unite and empower people, and are also a necessary counterweight to the sometimes detrimental influence of market forces.

Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one's wishes.

People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn't. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs.

I gravitated to economics because I'm interested in how people coordinate and collaborate with each other. Economics studies all the ways people get along with each other.

A Libertarian society of unfettered individualism spreads its benefits to virtually everyone - not just those who have the resources to seize political power.

'Egalitarians' who complain about inequality view the wealth of the wealthiest as bad in itself: it disfigures society. They would enact a wealth tax to extirpate the offending wealth.