Reading

(On 'Nature and Significance', by Lionel Robbins) ... Robbins wants to free economics proper as much as possible from psychology, and as much as possible from policy. However, the point here is that intentions, biases etc. are not what is at issue but instead the more foundational logic of economic rationality itself. Economic rationality displaces political sovereignty with economic sovereignty. Thus the political significance of economic rationality is that through this displacement struggles against domination or any other form of conflict and cooperation over shared space are reframed: they are reframed as problems of domestic and social administration, problems in Robbin's terms, of more harmonious government. In this way, the logic of more-or-less rational allocative choice limits political understanding and straight-jackets collective action. Such constraints are convenient for dominant classes and interests, but they are particularly ill-suited to the scale and character of multiple contemporary crises. The attempt to address these crises through economic government necessarily falls short, and it engenders more of the problems that economic rationality is so ill-suited to solve. Engelmann, S. 2022: Economic Rationality. New Jersey. Polity Press. p. 103.

... Professor Marcus Nadler of New York University, who was an Austrian refugee, taught a night course on financial markets, a big lecture course with almost two hundred students. (Charles) Simon enrolled. He got Rudolf Smutny to go with him, and then Billy Salomon, for a few weeks. "We wanted to know," Simon recalled, "why when Uncle Sam borrowed so much money [over time] his credit rating didn't decline. Why did rates go down [over time] rather than up? Nadler explained that the more the government borrowed, the more money there was. This was stunning to those of us who had no background. Nadler's great ability to teach inspired those of us who had never gone to college. Smutny had no education and didn't really want an education; he went because he wanted to know why I idolized Nadler.

... I was very privileged to have that time with the old man." ... Simon soon learned that there was a lot more to bond trading than whether there were more sellers or more buyers. (Charles Simon, circa 1950s) Mayer, M. 1993: Nightmare on Wall Street: Salomon Brothers and the Corruption of the Marketplace. New York. SIMON & SCHUSTER. p. 73.