Robert Heilbroner - The Worldly Philosophers

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For one who has read the works of Marx it is frightening to look back at the grim determination with which so many nations steadfastly hewed to the very course which he insisted would lead to their undoing.

Robert Heilbroner
If one could divine the nature of the economic forces in the world, one could foretell the future.

Robert Heilbroner
He who enlists a man's mind wields a power even greater than the sword or the scepter.

Robert Heilbroner
David Ricardo saw that the escalator worked with different effects on different classes, that some rode triumphantly to the top, while others were carried up a few steps and then kicked back down to the bottom.

Robert Heilbroner
But like Marx, Veblen badly underestimated the capacity of a democratic system to correct its own excesses.

Robert Heilbroner
The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources, but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears.

Robert Heilbroner
The book was called Imperialism; it was a devastating volume. For here was the most important and searing criticism which had ever been levied against the profit system. The worst that Marx had claimed was that the system would destroy itself; what Hobson suggested was that it might destroy the world.

Robert Heilbroner
Keynes disdained inside information — in fact, he once declared that Wall Street traders could make huge fortunes if only they would disregard their "inside" information — and his own oracles were nothing but his minute scrutiny of balance sheets, his encyclopedic knowledge of finance, his intuition into personalities, and a certain flair for trading.

Robert Heilbroner
The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society.

Robert Heilbroner
Even today-in blithe disregard to his actual philosophy — Smith is generally regarded as a conservative economist, whereas in fact, he is more avowedly hostile to the motives of businessman then most New Deal economists.

Robert Heilbroner
In the periods of crisis, the bigger firms absorb the smaller ones, and when the industrial monsters eventually go down, the wreckage is far greater than when the little enterprises buckle.

Robert Heilbroner
But while Ricardo, the economist, walked like a god (although he was a modest and retiring person), Malthus was relegated to a lower status.

Robert Heilbroner
The change began with John Stuart Mill and the Utopians. When Mill pointed out that economics had no ultimate solution to the problem of distribution, that society might do with the fruits of its toil as it saw fit, he introduced into the mechanical calculus of the market a conflicting calculus of moral judgment.

Robert Heilbroner
[The great economists] can be called the worldly philosophers, for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of all of man's activities—his drive for wealth.

Robert Heilbroner
To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort, dignity, and personal advance is only a myth, or worse, a bitter mockery.

Robert Heilbroner
It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy.

Robert Heilbroner
The Wealth of Nations may not be an original book, but it is unquestionably a masterpiece.

Robert Heilbroner
But despite the clarion words of the Manifesto, the demonic note was not a call for a revolution of communism; it was a cry born only of frustration and despair.

Robert Heilbroner
It may strike us as odd that the idea of gain is a relatively modern one; we are schooled to believe that man is essentially an acquisitive creature and that left to himself he will behave as any self-respecting businessman would. The profit motive, we are constantly being told, is as old as man himself.
Nothing could be further from the truth.

Robert Heilbroner
But the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old ones.

Robert Heilbroner
Very few of the heroes of the Golden Age of American finance had much interest in the solid realities of what underlay their structure of stocks and bonds and credits.

Robert Heilbroner
Economic freedom is a highly desirable state — but in bust and boom we must be prepared to face the its consequences.

Robert Heilbroner
It is from the scope and wisdom of the economists of the past that we must reap the knowledge with which to face the future.

Robert Heilbroner
If an economy in the doldrums could drift indefinitely, the price of government inaction might be graver by far than the consequences of bold unorthodoxy.

Robert Heilbroner