Sublime

This is not at all mysterious if we realize that engaging with markets requires individuals to compress the economic signal nascent in the n-dimensions of their information, heuristics, judgments, and stakes, and project it onto the single dimension of price, and that markets do not project the aggregates; they aggregate the projections.

than be slaves to market forces (Du Bois 1933b).

people at all times and places tend to respond to incentives. Not always as mechanically as economists imagine, but they do respond. Costs and rewards matter. Changes in external conditions that raise the rewards or lower the costs of certain behavior will lead to more of that behavior, other things being-equal.

throughout this book—attend to the details, understand how people decide, and be willing to experiment—applies as much to politics as it does to everything else.

And the institutions we have built to operate that economy, to safeguard ourselves, protect our homes, care for and educate our families, have all grown into large and powerful pieces of social machinery which suddenly seem not so much protective as actually threatening.

In the language of economics, human well-being is affected not only by the mean (the prosperity of the average citizen) but also by the variance (the increasing dispersion between rich and poor). In plainer English, the incentives and equal opportunity afforded by free trade simultaneously improve the overall welfare of mankind and increase sociall

This action of individual exertions, joined to that of the public authorities, frequently performs what the most energetic central administration would be unable to execute.

In all, it was an elegant, free-market solution to a dilemma that has dogged societies for centuries: how to align people’s pursuit of self-interest with the needs of their community.

Saying we are all really pursuing our own self-interest provides a way to cut past the welter of passions and emotions that seem to govern our daily existence, and to motivate most of what we actually observe people to do (not only out of love and amity, but also envy, spite, devotion, pity, lust, embarrassment, torpor, indignation, and pride) and