“If you’re a preacher, you talk for a living, so even if you don’t make sense, you learn to make nonsense eloquently.“ — Andrew Young [link]
“It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.” — John Kenneth Galbraith [link]
These two quotes sit nicely side by side. The Galbraith one is particularly juicy, and richly sardonic, taken from his early work, The Affluent Society and refers to his theory of The Dependence Effect in economics which can be summarised roughly as –
…the final focus on production in economics amongst all else; alongside the observation that maximisation of production is sought chiefly not for the goods it produces, but to obtain full employment. The Dependence Effect further undermines our focus on production, claiming that the demand for this new production is created by the production itself… (more…)