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Quote by L. Albert Hahn

“Not every paradox is correct just because it is a paradox. And what may be an interesting and intriguing mental exercise for specialists who are certain never to lose the firm ground of common sense and fundamental economic insight, becomes irritating and misleading heresy when swallowed whole by minor minds and fanatics.”

Quote by L. Albert Hahn

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The Economics of Illusion

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L. Albert Hahn

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“In fact, I sometimes think Keynes wrote his book with his tongue in his cheek. He was doubtless often surprised at the seriousness with which his colleagues took his theses. And if to all this one should remark that I am incapable of grasping the Keynesian intricacies, I would have to console myself with what an old Berlin banker said to an apprentice who was desperate because he was unable to comprehend what a client had written: "Young man, if you are not able to understand his letter, it is probably because it is not understandable.”

“Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, 'The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!' The exclamation, to me so surprising - for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? - was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

“The 'swapping' is interesting. This practice one had thought confined to certain earnest Americans in the smaller, more tedious cities, to those wives and husbands who had read sex manuals and radically wanted more of life even if it had to be, like pizza, brought in from around the corner--all of this was accomplished by Bloomsbury in the lightest, most spontaneous and good-natured manner.”

“The Bloomsbury Group has been characterised as a liberal, pacifist, and at times libertine, intellectual enclave of Cambridge-based privilege. The Cambridge men of the group (Bell, Forster, Fry, Keynes, Strachey, Sydney-Turner) were members of the elite and secret society of Cambridge Apostles. Woolf’s aesthetic understanding, and broader philosophy, were in part shaped by, and at first primarily interpreted in terms of, (male) Bloomsbury’s dominant aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations, rooted in the work of G. E. Moore (a central influence on the Apostles), and culminating in Fry’s and Clive Bell’s differing brands of pioneering aesthetic formalism. ‘The main things which Moore instilled deep into our minds and characters,’ Leonard Woolf recalls, ‘were his peculiar passion for truth, for clarity and common sense, and a passionate belief in certain values.’ Increasing awareness of Woolf’s feminism, however, and of the influence on her work of other women artists, writers and thinkers has meant that these Moorean and male points of reference, though of importance, are no longer considered adequate in approaching Woolf’s work, and her intellectual development under the tutelage of women, together with her involvement with feminist thinkers and activists, is also now acknowledged.”

“Critics often say that DDLJ, with its emphasis on patriarchal permission for young love, discourages dissent. This argument narrows the space for dissent by legitimizing it only in its most blatant, combative form, demanding that dissent always be obvious and 'out there' in full view of TV cameras and Twitter. So, no act of protest short of elopement, short of the most radical rejection of family, would suffice. Demanding such all-or-nothing actions doesn't account for the costs that eloping and actively abandoning their families would impose on women from any economic strata. The way we express resistance is subject to our own personal calculus of risk and reward.”

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.”

“With the growth of market individualism comes a corollary desire to look for collective, democratic responses when major dislocations of financial collapse, unemployment, heightened inequality, runaway inflation, and the like occur. The more such dislocations occur, the more powerful and internalized, Hayek insists, neoliberal ideology must become; it must become embedded in the media, in economic talking heads, in law and the jurisprudence of the courts, in government policy, and in the souls of participants. Neoliberal ideology must become a machine or engine that infuses economic life as well as a camera that provides a snapshot of it. That means, in turn, that the impersonal processes of regulation work best if courts, churches, schools, the media, music, localities, electoral politics, legislatures, monetary authorities, and corporate organizations internalize and publicize these norms.”