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Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith QUOTES

Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith QUOTES

1 " On a personal level, all of us have to come to terms with the fact that, sooner or later, we will die. And yet today no aspect of human existence, not even the ending of it, is immune to the hegemonic pretensions of neoclassical economic thought. Not only the intellectual poverty, but also the emotional poverty, of what it has to say about death give us little reason to believe that it will be able to face up to the fact of its own mortality. 4. "

― Jean-Pierre Dupuy , Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith

2 " the author of the chapter in question, entitled “Of the Nature of Self-Deceit” in the original English, is known today not only as an economist, but as the founding father of modern economics. He is none other than Adam Smith, about whom the most arrant nonsense has been written for more than three hundred years. And yet at the time he composed The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in 1759, he was not yet the economist he was to become over the course of the next two decades while composing An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Smith started out as a moral philosopher, teaching at Glasgow, and became a foremost representative of the Scottish Enlightenment. His Theory—the womb from which, as Smith himself insisted, the Inquiry sprang—remains the most complete statement of his thinking about man and society. Wealth, he holds, attracts the envious notice of others, because they wish to be wealthy themselves; and if they desire wealth, it is so that they themselves may be noticed in their turn. The poor man suffers less from being poor than from the fact that no one pays attention to him. If, "

― Jean-Pierre Dupuy , Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith

3 " In this world economics dooms itself to extinction at the same moment that it condemns politics to the same fate. 3. "

― Jean-Pierre Dupuy , Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith

4 " 4. I come back in the fourth part to the metaphysical problem of coordinating individual behaviors by means of the future. This leads me to consider two paradoxes that have yet to be satisfactorily resolved: one a paradox of historical and religious anthropology associated with Max Weber, having to do with the curious affinity between the emergence of the capitalist spirit and the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, at least in the interpretation given to it by the Puritan settlers of New England; the other, a logical and metaphysical paradox due, it is said, to the physicist William Newcomb. "

― Jean-Pierre Dupuy , Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith

5 " On this view, God is the cause of physical evil. The question arose, then, whether He is also the cause of sin and of moral evil; and, if so, how He could have invented the very thing that corrupts His creation. The attempt to vindicate God's will was called theodicy in Greek, and it is this term that is traditionally used to refer to all human attempts to justify the existence of evil in a world that has been perfectly made. Theodicies "

― Jean-Pierre Dupuy , Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith