Sublime

“They have hired astronomers; they have hired mathematicians; they have hired physicists; they have even hired theologists. They never even interviewed an economist.”

in the real world, there is no such thing as an externality.

Printing money is a stealth tax on wealth that disincentivizes holding money, as above. It has the same first-order effect on wealth transfers but has hidden second-order effects of misdirecting capital due to political expediency and cowardice.

Scientific models that seek to predict the consequences of human actions with some reasonable accuracy—such as game theoretical models of economic behavior—for the most part ignore human individuality in favor of aggregated outcomes.

mercantilist

falling public expenditures on research and development (R&D) as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), especially in information technology.

The idea that more trade is good (on balance) is deeply engrained in anybody who went to graduate school in economics. In May 1930, over a thousand economists had written a letter encouraging President Hoover to veto the Smoot-Hawley bill. And yet there is something else economists do know but tend to keep closely to themselves: the aggregate gains

Today Gates is better known as a philanthropist than a technologist.