Could politics ever be anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly? - Kim Stanley Robinson

Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.

One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.

A change in the form of government, why should that make a difference in the way he lived?