Again, with a nod to Tyler Cowen, I present two excellent quotations I came across today.

First one comes from the recently late Samuel Huntington’s magnificent Political Order in Changing Societies:

“The abjectly poor, too,” Eric Hoffer observed, “stand in awe of the world around them and are not hospitable to change… There is thus a conservatism of the destitute as profound as the conservatism of the privileged, and the former is as much a factor in the perpetuation of a social order as the latter.”

Some might read this passage as a call to try harder at changing the world. Huntington, of course, is not having any of that. If you, like me, have been putting off tackling this moderately dense book, don’t put it off any longer.

Next up, Martin Wolf attributes the following to Hyman Minsky:

“A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.”

Zing! So much for the brilliance of financiers. Wolf’s article is worth reading in full, by the way: the chief economics commentator of the stalwart Financial Times has discovered his inner Keynes.

What’s that? You’re not worried about what’s been going on with the economy? Surely you religiously read Martin Wolf? You know, the guy at the Financial Times, probably one of the best economic analysts writing for any publication today. Perhaps you’ve read his most recent, widely circulated column on the possible death of Anglo-Saxon-style finance?

Well if you haven’t, and you don’t really feel like working through a well structured argument, surf on over to Radio Free Europe and check out this wide-ranging interview with the man. It’s hard to excerpt any one part to give you a proper sense of scale to the problems facing us today. It’s staggering.

And as you read it, remember, Martin Wolf is hardly one of those bearish chicken little types. If he’s rattled to this severe an extent, we should all be very concerned.