"It was in this world that we found in its most striking form a social disease which is perhaps the commonest of all world-diseases - namely, the splitting of the population into two mutually unintelligible castes through the influence of economic forces." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)
"Science fiction is, very strictly and literally, analogous to science facts. It is a convenient analog system for thinking about new scientific, social, and economic ideas - and for re-examining old ideas." (John W Campbell Jr., "Prologue to Analog", 1962)
"Politics is the enemy of a sound economic entity." (Philip K. Dick, "The Crack in Space", 1965)
"When a country’s economy was in rotten shape, the easiest dodge was to start a war as a pretext for gagging everyone immediately." (Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky, "Prisoners of Power", 1969)
"He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)
"Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result." (John K Galbraith, "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went", 1975)
"It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result - collapse, ruin and famine." (Douglas Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", 1980)
"That’s a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful." (Kim S Robinson, "Red Mars", 1992)
"History, as every mature Aten knew, was simply the evolution of economics." (Ralph A Sperry, "On Vacation", 1998)
No comments:
Post a Comment