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We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves.
Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.
I don't claim to have any special interest in natural history, but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in the number of game animals and the need to adjust the cull to the size of the surplus population.
The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.
The number of hypotheses and theories about climate change are numerous. Quite naturally they have caught the public attention, as any proof of past climactic change points to the possibility of future climate change, which inevitably will have significant implications for global economics.
It turns out that, somehow, there are a tremendous number of things to be optimistic about.
Success does not mean happiness: it means an unusual number of industrious enemies.
When I was 15, I left school to start a magazine, and it became a success because I wouldn't take no for an answer. I remember banging on James Baldwin's door to ask for an interview when he came to England. Then I got Jean-Paul Sartre's home phone number and asked him to contribute. If I'd been 30, he might have said no, but I was a 15-year-old with passion and he was charmed. Making money was always just a side product of having a good time and creating things nobody'd seen before.
The number one problem in today's generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.
It should be possible to emphasize to students that the level of employment is a macroeconomic issue, depending in the short run on aggregate demand and depending in the long run on the natural rate of unemployment, with microeconomic policies like tariffs having little net effect. Trade policy should be debated in terms of its impact on efficiency, not in terms of phoney numbers about jobs created or lost.
If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.
Anyway that's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful
No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.
A colleague saw the same model-calibrating the elasticity of demand facing a Cournot oligopolist as a function of the number of firms in the industry--described at the University of Chicago and at M.I.T. A Chicago economist derived the formula and said, "Look at how few firms you need to get close to infinite elasticities and perfect competition." An M.I.T. economist derived the same formula and said, "Look at how large n has to be before you get anywhere close to an infinite elasticity and perfect competition."
The danger of tautological propositions is considerable in discussions of the concept of normal profits. Because supernormal profits seem to invite newcomers to an industry and sub-normal profits seem to drive away those who are in an industry, some writers are inclined to define normal profits as the earnings of the fixed resources in an industry which neither grows nor declines in size or number of firms. It should be clear that such a definition is useless: it muddles together attractiveness and actual afflux, desirbility of entry and ease of entry, zero profits and monopoly rents.
...quantity is not necessarily synonymous with quality and brilliant ideas are not a function of the number of titles printed.
A news conference is a device by which the establishment keeps large numbers of reporters from covering the news every place else.
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest... The latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man.
Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the number of people included in the term 'we' or 'us' and at the same time decreases those labeled 'you' or 'them' until that category has no one left in it.
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