Tommy

“In a social order where all the good things go to those who constitutionally and necessarily, watch, grab and clutch all the time, the quality of my father, the rich humour and imagination of my brother Frank, were shoved out of play and wasted altogether. In a world of competitive acquisitiveness the natural lot of my sort of people is to be hustled out of existence by the smarties and pushers. A very strong factor in my developing socialism is and always has been the more or less conscious impulses, an increasingly conscious impulse, to anticipate and disarm the smarty and the pusher and make the world safe for the responsive and candid mind and the authentic, artistic and creative worker.”
― H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography

“In theory everyone agreed that applied science was made for man and not man for applied science. In practice great masses of human beings have again and again been sacrificed to applied science. The conflict between science, as it has been applied up to the present, and human interests was clearly stated by Thorstein Veblen in his Science in the Modern World. In this essay Veblen distinguishes between what he calls the pragmatic and the scientific point of view. Pragmatically human beings know pretty well what is good for them, and have developed myths and fairy tales, proverbs and popular philosophies, behaviour-patterns and moralities, in order to illustrate and embody their findings about life. The findings of science—especially of science as applied for the benefit of the holders of centralized economic and political power—are frequently in conflict with humanity’s pragmatic values, and this conflict has been and still is the source of much unhappiness, frustration and bitterness.”
― Aldous Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace

“Common sense alone reveals the essential problem that economic theory ignores. Just imagine what would become of a firm that develops computer software or a new pharmaceutical if its product were priced at the cost of making another copy of its program! Bankruptcy would be certain.

To prevent such bankruptcy, we grant developers of software or pharmaceuticals protection through copyrights or patents, which limit competition. Because of the longstanding use of these monopolistic arrangements, we readily accept that they are consistent with the principles of free competition. In fact, they are not.

More and more, the existence of sunk costs makes industry resemble a software industry without the protection of copyrights or patents. For example, airline bankruptcies have become almost commonplace. Like the railroads of the nineteenth century or the software developer of the twentieth, an airline commits an enormous investment in an industry where the cost of servicing another customer is minimal. As competition drives prices down toward this level, the firm becomes unable to meet its financial commitments.

Economic theory as it stands today is irrelevant to understanding this process. Economists may employ scientific tools, such as mathematics and statistics, but they apply them in a context that is questionable at best. Economics purports to be scientific because it grounds its ideology on a rigorous theoretical foundation, but this foundation rests on wildly unrealistic assumptions.”
― Michael Perelman, The End of Economics

“It has not been bad values, false doctrines or wrong ideas so much as it has been bad operational thinking that has been responsible for the decline of the West in the 20th century. Thinking today for survival must be operational, not legalistic, moralistic, normative or doctrinal. The only economic, natural or other so-called laws that are valid and useful as bases for calculation may more accurately be termed operational imperatives. Thinking about current problems and challenges, to be useful, must turn around determinable possibilities and calculable probabilities, not legal, moral, or value certainties. What creates a legal certainty is a legal opinion. What creates a religious, a moral or a value certainty is faith. What the fate of western civilization and the survival of the human race in the nuclear age depend on is accurate calculation as to what is operationally possible and probable, and not as to what is morally certain. There is little that is operationally certain about the future but a great deal that is calculably probable.”
― Lawrence Dennis, Operational Thinking for Survival