Quotes of the day

... as a research-driven company grows larger, everything scales except research productivity.--Derek Lowe

Far from indicating a country on the ropes, the foreigners seeking both legal and illegal entry into the U.S. in the last decade are a market signal pointing to a nation doing far better than elite thinking around the world has suggested. Simply put, countries that attract the washed and unwashed the world over are pictures of success; the countries that lose their limited human capital are failures. Cuba, North Korea and Zimbabwe do not have immigration "problems."--John Tamny

[Organized public works] are not capable of sufficiently rapid organisation (and above all cannot be reversed or undone at a later date), to be the most serviceable instrument for the prevention of the trade cycle.--John Maynard Keynes

Larry Summers famously said that in order to be effective, fiscal stimulus must be "timely, targeted, and temporary." The Democrats' plan is none of those things. Instead, it is an enormous Galbraithian transfer from the private sector to the public sector. While I can understand their enthusiasm for this transfer, I cannot share in their glee.--Arnold Kling

However, this demand [for government debt] can be satisfied in far greater quantity, much more quickly, much more reversibly, and without the danger of a fiscal collapse and inflation down the road, if the Fed and Treasury were simply to expand their operations of issuing treasury debt and money in exchange for high-quality private debt and especially new securitized debt. --John Cochrane

Nobody cared that most of those CIA excesses were done under orders from American presidents, that it was really the sainted John F. Kennedy who spilled the blood that splashed on Dad. It didn't fit into the sixties script: The hard old men were the bad guys, and, by repudiating them, America would somehow become innocent again.--John H. Richardson

The Golden Globes were stained for years by awarding Pia Zadora one of its gleaming statuettes. Now, the Oscars risk a similar stain if they give their highest honors to two deeply undeserving actors (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie), at least for their 2008 work.--Christian Toto