To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

The issue of false consciousness is a genuinely difficult problem that has no definite solution. We should not approve of an unequal and brutal society because surveys show that people are happy. But who has the right to tell those oppressed women or starving landless peasants that they shouldn't be happy, if they think they are? Does anyone have the right to make those people feel miserable by telling them the —truth'? There are no easy answers to these questions, but they definitely tell us that we cannot rely on —subjective' happiness surveys to decide how well people are doing.

Cheap booze is a false economy.

On a grander scale, when a society segregates itself, the consequences affect the economy, the emotions, and the ecology. That's one reason why it's easy for pro-lifers to eat factory-raised animals that disrespect everything sacred about creation. And that is why it's easy for rabid environmentalists to hate chainsaws even though they snuggle into a mattress supported by a black walnut bedstead.

You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.

If you see your country going through economic problems, the best thing to do is to come up with a strategy, plan and vision of how to affect the economy of the nation, rather than simply fixing your own individual economic problem.

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose your own.

Economy is half the battle of life; it is not so hard to earn money as to spend it well.

Economy is too late at the bottom of the purse.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

Inflation: when nobody has enough money because everybody has too much.

Economy is of itself a great revenue.

Expenditure rises to meet income.

I learned more about the economy from one South Dakota dust storm than I did in all my years at college.

In economics the majority is always wrong.

I wonder what purpose junk mail has in the grand scheme of things?

A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year.

The economy is a thoughtless weather system.

Since nostaglia is fueled by inflation, could it be that inflation is the result of a conspiracy by the people who are trying to palm off McGovern buttons and Howdy Doody puppets and their Aunt Thelma's toaster as antiques.

Economists are people who work with numbers but who don't have the personality to be accountants.