"Libertarians will blanch at lumping their revered Vons—Mises and Hayek—in with the nutters and the shills. But between them, Von Hayek and Von Mises never seem to have held a single academic appointment that didn't involve a corporate sponsor. Even the renowned law and economics movement at the University of Chicago was, in its inception, heavily subsidized by business interests. ("Radical movements in capitalist societies," as Milton Friedman patiently explained, "have typically been supported by a few wealthy individuals.") Within academia, the philosophy of free markets in extremis was rarely embraced freely—i.e., by someone not on the dole of a wealthy benefactor. It cannot be stressed enough: In the decades after the war, a kind of levee separated polite discourse from free-market economics. The attitude is well-captured by John Maynard Keynes, whose scribble in the margins of his copy of The Road to Serfdom reads: "An extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam.""

"This strongly suggests that conservatives face epistemic closure, at least on this issue. The more conservatives ‘know,’ the more likely they are to be wrong."

"Anyone covering Washington, not excluding me, will sooner or later turn to a phrase like “refocus its image” or “a perception that the President has come to look” or “a pitch-perfect recital of the populist message,” because they come so easily, and because they make it unnecessary to say anything substantial, which means thinking hard and perhaps suffering the consequences. Still, as an exercise in accountability, political journalists should ask themselves from time to time: Would I write this about a war, or a depression? In the same vein, a government official once told me that the best way to cover Washington is as a foreign capital—as Baghdad, or Kabul."

"Florida assured Tessa that Detroit's plight "is not something I'm particularly happy about." He told her his wife is from Detroit. And then he told her that his friends who live in Detroit are making it as "freelancers" who "commute on an irregular basis" to work on projects somewhere else. He had recently given a speech to Detroit airport officials, who told him that the airport would remain viable. "That airport provides connective fiber," he told her. "Finding local employment is going to be a lot harder. So you either have to say, can I commute to work, by plane perhaps, or do I have to look for a place that has a better set of opportunities for me?"

There was no way to know if the answer was satisfactory: Tessa from Detroit was off the air."

"Our reports reviewed, systematically, 13 models of learning styles and concluded that this area of research is theoretically incoherent and conceptually confused. I listed in the reports 30 dichotomies, such as “activists” versus “reflectors”, “globalists” versus “analysts”, and “left brainers” versus “right brainers”. We should stop using these terms. There’s no scientific justification for them. You can check that. Shake your head gently. Does the left hemisphere of your brain move independently from the right? Or do they seem connected?"

"In fact, their dismissal of history is a direct consequence of their version of Darwinism, which is focused on demonstrating how the actions of literary characters provide illustrative examples of human biological nature. While they give no end of homage to the idea that actual human behavior is subject to environmental influence – as far as I can tell, no one seriously doubts this – they seem to have no interest in investigating how behaviors and environments amplify into history. Literary Darwinism is paradoxically static, the examination of flies caught in amber, and Darwin himself has become a Platonic fetish to ward off the evils of change, of history."