Just as Hegel is said to have understood his philosophy for the first time when he read its French translation, Vilfredo Pareto could have learned wh… - Paul Samuelson

Orthodox biologists are like orthodox economists. When confronted by tensions between their paradigms and reality, they work to explain away the aberrations.

After 1929 it was the sturdy middle classes, and not just the lumpen proletariat, who were down and out. It was not all that unfashionable or disreputable to be bankrupt. By the last Hoover years, the states and localities had run out of money for relief. In middle-class neighborhoods like mine, you constantly had children at the door, asking by mouth or with a note for a dime, a quarter, or a potato: saying, in a believable fashion, we are starving.

Years ago, I wrote aphoristically: “Inside a classical economist, you discern a neoclassical economist trying to get in.” My archetypical tableaux flesh out this heuristic perception. And, in my considered opinion, these explications cast cogent doubts on that view popular in the 1950s and early 1960s that “going back to the classics” somehow offered a different and better alternative to the post-neoclassical mainstream paradigms.