मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Saturday, October 16, 2010

When Adam Smith sounds more like Arundhati Roy than Milton Friedman

Stefan Stern observes in FT 19 Jul 2010:

"...What does the future have in store for us? Short of some fantastic scientific innovation that uncovers vast new sources of clean and sustainable energy, it seems likely that the world faces many severe and related problems.

As Rich Lyons, the dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, points out, the straight line extrapolations on a number of important graphs lead you to a pretty scary place.

Over the next few decades the earth’s population looks set to climb to about 9bn. Temperatures and sea levels are rising. But we may not have enough habitable land, water, energy or food to cope with these changed circumstances. Future healthcare costs in a world of greatly increased longevity are daunting. See it human. The outlook is bad..."

They say today's capitalism stands on the foundation laid by Adam Smith.

Reading some of what I have quoted below, it's hard to believe.

James Buchan while reviewing Nicholas Phillipson's book 'Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life' says:

"...Phillipson argues that, having established sociability in The Theory, Smith had no need to take commercial society back to its root in The Wealth of Nations, but could content himself with a sort of shorthand (the non-benevolent butcher, brewer and baker; truck, barter and exchange one thing for another; invisible hand). Alas, the economists took these rather vulgar aphorisms as the foundation of their science and ignored those parts of Smith's system that concerned humanity's sociable, moral, intellectual and aesthetic nature..." (The Guardian, Saturday 14 August 2010 )

It's Mr. Smith who is supposed to have said:"...disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition...is...the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments..."

George Trfgarne writes:

“…….Adam Smith was so incensed that much of his subsequent work was dedicated to attacking not just big government, but big corporations in general and the East India Company in particular. Through its monopoly on Indian trade it had, he said, contrived to raise prices to customers while reducing them for suppliers. It was rife with fraud, cruelty and corruption and was “a nuisance in every respect”.…..

Nick Robins demonstrates that the East India Company was the first recognisable multinational and claims that Plassey is a classic example of a large corporation becoming too un-wieldy and being hijacked by greedy, egomaniacal executives. Clive was a brilliant general, but he enriched himself at the expense of shareholders by pocketing a large chunk of Bengal’s tax revenues and siphoning off deals for himself. East India company also succumbed to hubris, by assuming state-like responsibilities in Bengal and embarking on expensive military campaigns. When the region suffered a horrific famine, the company made things worse by continuing to levy hefty taxes while its employees drove up the price of grain and rice by trading on the side...” (The Spectator, Oct 28, 2006)

Now this sounds more like what The Economist, Reader's Digest of many of India's thought-leaders (neocons?), might call Arundhati Roy's polemic rather than Milton Friedman's sermon!


On which foundation does today's capitalism stand?

An answer:


Artist: Charles Barsotti, The New Yorker