Click on any chart to engorge it

Click on any chart to engorge it

When Priests Become Hermits

In Frozen Desire (1997), James Buchan wrote: "I have watched the most able men and women in my generation, who might have created unexampled monuments in moral philosophy, mathematics, or engineering, waste their time in a prattle of non-accelerating inflation rates of unemployment.... [E]conomics...has retreated into algebra. A profession that begins with priests [alchemists]... ends with hermits. Political economy is now, I suspect, in the same condition in which Scholastic learning found itself on the eve of the Discoveries. It is about to explode."


From Fred Sheehan