"But I think it’s clear what his real objection was: universal suffrage has the potential to advance socialistic causes, interfering with his laissez-faire project. From his autobiography: “Another extension of the franchise since made…will inevitably be followed by a still more rapid growth of socialistic legislation.” When he realized women’s equality could potentially interfere with laissez-faire economics, it was time for women’s equality to get cut from his overall theory of a better world. He would rather mutilate his intellectual project instead of allowing his enemies to continue to build their governance project."

"Many models of market dynamics make use of the idea of wealth exchanges among economic agents. A simple analogy compares the wealth in a society with the energy in a physical system, and the trade between agents to the energy exchange between molecules during collisions. However, while in physical systems the equipartition of energy is valid, in most exchange models for economic markets the system converges to a very unequal "condensed" state, where one or a few agents concentrate all the wealth of the society and the wide majority of agents shares zero or a very tiny fraction of the wealth. Here we present an exchange model where the goal is not only to avoid condensation but also to reduce the inequality; to carry out this objective the choice of interacting agents is not at random, but follows an extremal dynamics regulated by the wealth of the agent.…"

"… The Panic of 1837 launched America's biggest and most consequential economic depression before the Civil War. And it was the decisions and behavior of thousands of actors like Bieller that created a perfect financial storm: bringing an end to one kind of capitalist boom; destroying the confidence of the slaveholding class, impoverishing millions of workers and farmers who were linked to the global economy; demolishing the already disrupted lives of hundreds of thousands of people like Harry and Roberson.…"

"The big change appears to be that those in school have become increasingly less attached to the labor market. The percentage of school enrollees aged between 16 and 24 who are also participating in the labor market was relatively stable between 1989 and 1998 at around 51 percent. However, labor market participation by those in school declined between 1999 and 2008 from 50 percent to 42 percent. In contrast, labor force participation by those aged between 16 and 24 not enrolled in school has declined only modestly—from 82 percent to 80 percent between 1989 and 2008."

"Yowza! Somewhere in 2004, the world changed, and we didn’t realize it. Employers in the private sector put a lid on the cost of benefits (which includes healthcare, retirement, vacation, and supplemental pay of all sorts). Meanwhile the cost of benefits in state and local govt jobs just kept rising, with barely any break, both before and after the financial bust. This is not good."

'“We haven’t seen anything like this before: a really deep recession combined with a really extended period, maybe as much as eight years, all told, of highly elevated unemployment,” Shierholz told me. “We’re about to see a big national experiment on stress.”'

"Perhaps full-scale economic devastation was the only way to restore the sense of “intimate and inextricable relation to the society” around us that Tom Wolfe famously hoped to instill in readers of his 1987 crash-lit classic Bonfire of the Vanities, one of the last memorable explorations of the morally hazardous culture of the Master of the Universe class."

"We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems."

"The preceding is such an important point. We became indebted, in large part, because of a structural imbalance in society, one that skewed incomes, redirected wealth, and encouraged companies and individuals to lever up instead of seeking out and earning higher incomes. At the same time, our unwillingness to say no to great society programs, without raising taxes to pay for them, meant that we became beholden to the bond market for funding ongoing operations, this creating an elevated base of required income to service our rising debt."

"The former Communist countries generally turned, after the dismal failure of their postwar system, to market capitalism, replacing Karl Marx with Milton Friedman as their god. The new religion has not served them well. Many countries may conclude not simply that unfettered capitalism, American-style, has failed but that the very concept of a market economy ... is ... unworkable under any circumstances. Old-style Communism won’t be back, but a variety of forms of excessive market intervention will return. And these will fail. The poor suffered under market fundamentalism—we had trickle-up economics, not trickle-down economics. But ... these new regimes ... will not deliver growth. Without growth there cannot be sustainable poverty reduction. There has been no successful economy that has not relied heavily on markets. ... The ... governments brought to power on the basis of rage against American-style capitalism ... will lead to more poverty. ..."

"“We have no words to waste on you.... We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain.”

If your only experience of Jack London is Call of the Wild and White Fang, do yourself a favor and read The Iron Heel or The Abyss. "

"People speak about this as if not bailing out Detroit means automobile production in America ends. That's not what failing to bailout Detroit means. Not intervening now would be these automakers would enter bankruptcy. And bankruptcy means the assets of these dinosaurs get reorganized: Someone else buys these companies, at a price the market sets, and runs them profitably, because of the price the market set.

Obviously, that change would not be painless. And I'm all for minimizing the pain where the pain is doing no good -- with workers, or others depending upon these industries. But I'm against interventions designed to minimize the pain where the pain would do good -- by radically changing how that industry is managed. The whole justification for insanely high executive compensation is, in part, so they can weather such storms. I don't see why the government should be in the business of building safety nets for the (relatively) well off."

"Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. “Mumbai is a golden songbird,” he said. It flies quick and sly, and you’ll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird."

"For a living, I’m an IT generalist and a Web specialist. For doing this, I get paid reasonably well and thus I have some savings to take care of. My conclusion: it is neither fair, nor is it sane, for me to hand them over to people who get paid ten times and up what I do. So I’m not gonna. If that means I have to deal my nest-egg out among real estate, gold, and cash under the mattress, so be it.

So if anyone wants to help me with my money, I’m going to insist on complete transparency as to how they’re getting paid and how much they’re getting paid, and if it’s really a lot more than me, then I’ll know I can’t afford their services.

Which should have been obvious a long time ago. If a lot of other people come to similar conclusions, maybe we can bring some sanity to the money business."

"My opinion, and its a strong one, is to encourage entrepreneurs to band together and help each other. Lets face it, great minds think alike. When you get a bunch of great minds together in one place, it can be like watching the best fireworks you’ve ever seen. Be warned though, ALWAYS know your scope and what your needs are. Only give what you get and make sure there is a value to everything that you do."

"there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man developed a machine to do his work he began to starve"

"Capitalism breeds destruction unless tempered by an intuition for equality."