David

“Talking about one's stories is a little too much like nailing a dog to the floor -- you can get it to stay put that way but it doesn't do much for the dog.”
― Brian Evenson, Altmann's Tongue: Stories and a Novella

“To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, economic history is a deaf man answering questions no economist has put to him.”
― Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes

“Long dismissed as ideological representatives of the dominant powers, liberal economists have never experienced the pessimism of many modern Marxists regarding economic development of the periphery. It has come as something of a shock to Marxian writers that the empirical evidence on economic growth in the periphery since the Second World War has borne out much of the liberal case. Those countries which adopted strategies of export-oriented growth have achieved the most spectacular performance, while countries favouring self-sufficiency have done relatively poorly. Countries which have resisted distorting market prices have out-performed the heavily interventionist backward economies, which have in varying degrees emulated the Soviet model and and replaced economic mechanisms with direct controls and administrative allocation.”
― Michael Charles Howard, A History of Marxian Economics Volume II, 1929-1990

“The radical nature of the primacy of politics under National Socialism, however, was rooted in the specific historical disintegration of bourgeois German society (1929-33), of German capitalism (1936-8), and of international politics in the 1930s. The immense political scope of the National Socialist government was not based on the confidence of a politically and economically homogeneous society; on the contrary, it was a result precisely of the disintegration of society. The coincidence of this with the collapse of the international order in the 1930s enabled the National Socialist state to achieve a degree of independence of society which is unparalleled in history.”
― Timothy W. Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class