Michael

“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
― Peter Drucker

“The mathematical economists have commonly been mathematicians first and economists afterward, disposed to oversimplify the data and underestimate the divergence between their premises and facts of life.”
― Frank H. Knight, Ethics of Competition and Other Essays

“[The]...feeling for what one should want, in contrast with actual desire, is stronger in the unthinking than in those sophisticated by education. It is the later who argues into the ‘tolerant’ (economic) attitude of de gustibus non est disputandum [in matters of taste, there can be no disputes]; the man in the street is more likely to view the individual whose tastes are ‘wrong’ as a scurvy fellow who ought to be despised if not beaten up or shot.”
― Frank H. Knight, Ethics of Competition and Other Essays

“Formalism, in opting for the functional mode making possible precise quantitative determinations within a closed system of variables, forgoes the possibility of making meaningful statements about human action.”
― Ludwig Lachmann, Capital, Expectations, and the Market Process: Essays on the Theory of the Market Econony