Galun.com

Labor augmenting — augmenting means biggifying.

It's hard to move the Rock of Gibraltar. I mean, it's big.

Cause the tellers don't even know what the price of anything is, they just go 'wonk, wonk, wonk.'

This stuff [Pokemon] is really addictive. Crack-cocaine's got nothing on it.

Rules can be changed and people can get used to them, that's why sociology is an important subject. [pause] Could be an important subject.

If you lived in Western Europe — where they should all be taken out and shot.

I'm not blaming the biology people just because darkness is their culture.

If 49 of the states spend more the 50th state is going to have a little boom, so if the 50 states spend more the 51st state will have a boom, but don't tell Quebec I said that.

Y in the United States, as compared to all our pathetic trading partners...

We used to think that we had a trade deficit because we were incompetent, but now we know we have a trade deficit because everyone else is incompetent.

Why are we buying more of their stuff than they're buying of ours? One possible explanation that we don't get into in this course is that our stuff is shit.

No. No. No. Did I say yes? No.

Let's say the Hick's mural room has no aesthetic value. [pause] Which you could argue.

...that doesn't mean you should look around for worthless things to do, that's called World War II.

This is true in the same way that babies come from hospitals. Babies do come from hospitals. But there's a deeper and more meaningful explanation of where babies come from, which is what we're going to do now. Well, sort of.

If P_k is greater than P_V, do not buy. If P_k is less than P_V, buy. That's it. That's probably like 12 courses in business school.

We should run this course like that terrible bus movie [Speed] — which I never actually saw but was victimized by at the coming attractions.

It's like the English Civil War, society is taken over by Puritans — you know, Cromwell — and they just want to save — well, actually, they just didn't want to dance.

That's the great thing about intellectual life. You can take something that's basically nothing and make it totally incomprehensible.

Ronald Reagan, who was president before you were born...

Barbers are what are called non-traded goods.

When two lines don't intersect economists have trouble sleeping.

You'll get a value for Y that's a function of a whole bunch of garba—important variables.

The first edition of this book was like 12 times harder than this, but then they didn't sell any copies so they made it easier. The next edition is going to have Pokemon.

Alan Greenspan says 'I don't like bonds cause they don't have a picture of Alexander Hamilton' — who is my daughter's favorite American...I don't know what I'm talking about.

[The one dollar bill] says Federal Reserve note. How did it get in my wallet? Well, I don't know, it's sort of a long, sordid story.

Nobody likes my analogies. Well too bad, I'm too old to find new analogies.

There is no Thursday this week. This is week is without a Thursday. It's a leap week.

Now who has the higher standard of living? Us. Let's not get all emotional about pastoral antiquity.

The mid-term will be back on Wednesday, barring any unforeseen obstacles, but I don't foresee any unforeseen obstacles.

Future generations will be in Alpha Centauri anyway, so to hell with them, let's eat all the food now!

You can't hit two targets with one arrow, unless the two targets are right behind each other and you have a really strong arrow. But that's really like one target.

[The Vietnam War] wasn't a discretionary stabilization policy, it was a big, like, discretionary war.

If [LBJ] were George Bush, and the Gulf War had lasted for more than, like, 4 minutes.

Lenders are the type of people who have more than they know what to do with. They have a bunch of wealth, but they don't have any clever ideas about investment projects or fancy vacations.

Economists call this Says Law. It's not really clear if he really said this, although it's in French so who really knows?

In fact, if anyone went to the talk, where [Stephen Golub] beat up 5 political scientists at once...ok, maybe that's not the view that political scientists took out of it, but certainly per capita he beat them up.

There have been 4 peaks: 1901, 1929, 1966, and 2000. And you'll notice that 2000 is way peakier than the other 3.

I'm not going to insult any underdeveloped countries by using the name of their currency — also I don't know the names of any of their currencies.

I won't tell you how much money [is in his 401K pension plan]. Let me just put it this way: I could marry half a woman on 'Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire.'

Sargent had been a Keynesian Jedi Knight before being seduced by the Dark Side of rational expectations.

The deepest ideas are not equations. The deepest ideas are just deep.

In order to really know the value of things like mountains, you'd have to ask the people who haven't been born yet. And we don't have the technology to do that. Even with stem cells.

The problem with game theory is that it assumes people are as smart as game theorists. But they're not. Only like 2 percent of the population is as smart as game theorists, and the rest of us are just muddling through.

The New York Times Magazine is a genre which is fundamentally uninteresting to me. Basically it's just gossip, only about important people. It's like Melrose Place for policy wonks.

All there are in the world are good years and bad years. There are more good years than bad years. That's why it's nice to be alive.

This is my attempt at making you Secretary of the Treasury. Don't say I never did anything for you.

There's only one Pavarotti. He's called Pavarotti.

I hate to tell you, but your life's not worth a dime.

If you golf everyday, you're a disaster waiting to happen.

I'm inherently snide.

Law school practices a form of subtle brainwashing.

Will the right amount of punching occur if we assign the rights to the puncher?

One of the problems with God is he does whatever the hell he wants and people still pray to him. In my view, religion is just a protection racket.

The whole reason why people go to court, go on strike, go to war, whatever is that they're too optimistic about their chances. Like this guy, Omar blah blah from Afghanistan, says he's going to destroy the United States. I would call that overly optimistic.

In utility terms, poor people might value money more than rich people. But you know in Kaldor-Hicks terms a dollar is still a dollar no matter who you are. Even a homeless person wouldn't go up to Bill Gates and say 'I'll give you $1.10 for that dollar because I value it more.' If he did that, he'd deserve to be homeless.