Academia Quotes
The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful, and first successful, was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were in fact smarter than everybody else, and could come up with something new and different, pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it, because they're smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.
Rick Santorum
The theories that I (and others) helped develop explained why unfettered markets often not only do not lead to social justice, but do not even produce efficient outcomes. Interestingly, there has been no intellectual challenge to the refutation of Adam Smith's invisible hand: individuals and firms, in the pursuit of their self-interest, are not necessarily, or in general, led as if by an invisible hand, to economic efficiency. The only question that has been raised concerns the ability of government to remedy the deficiencies of the market. Within academia, a significant fraction of economists are involved with developing and expanding on the ideas of imperfect information (and imperfect markets) that I explored. For instance, Edmund Phelps, this year's Nobel Prize winner, belongs to this "school" of thought. But in political discourse, simplistic "market fundamentalism” continues to exert enormous influence.
Joseph Stiglitz
At present and especially in academia, there is widespread doubt and agnosticism with respect to the very existence of God. But if we don't know that there is such a person as God, we don't know the first thing (the most important thing) about ourselves, each other and our world. This is because (from the point of view of the model) the most important truths about us and them, is that we have been created by the Lord, and utterly depend upon him for our continued existence. We don't know what our happiness consists in, and we don't know how to achieve it. We don't know that we have been created in the image of God, and we don't grasp the significance of such characteristically human phenomena as love, humor, adventure, science, art, music, philosophy, history, and so on.
Alvin Plantinga