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One thing we’ve learned from the economic events of the past two years is that macroeconomics, or at least the part of macroeconomics that studies the business cycle, is a weak field. With only a few exceptions, macroeconomists, including the most illustrious, did not anticipate the current depression.

— Richard Posner The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (2010)

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More quotes by Richard Posner

Jurisprudence addresses the questions about law that an intelligent layperson of speculative bent — not a lawyer — might think particularly interesting.

The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990)

The future of the nation depends in no small part on the efficiency of industry, and the efficiency of industry depends in no small part on the protection of intellectual property.

This book is written in the conviction that economics is a powerful tool for analyzing a vast range of legal questions but that most lawyers and law students-even very bright ones-have difficulty connecting economic principles to concrete legal problems.

Economic Analysis of Law (2007)

If judges are pragmatic, as I think they largely are in our system, it can only be in the everyday sense of the term. But immediately the counterexample of Holmes, a gifted and serious though not systematic philosophical thinker, comes to mind.

Although there are other heresies in The General Theory, along with puzzles, opacities, loose ends, confusions, errors, exaggerations, and anachronisms galore, they do not detract from the book's relevance to our present troubles. Economists may have forgotten The General Theory and moved on, but economics has not outgrown it, or the informal mode of argument that it exemplifies, which can illuminate nooks and crannies that are closed to mathematics. Keynes's masterpiece is many things, but "outdated" it is not.

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