Word: wisdom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Routing conventional wisdom...
...people are capable of doing so, at least not in a way that will make them happy. This leads to the static quality of his books: nothing much ever changes except to get a little worse. Some of the evidence Vonnegut offers is rigged: Starbuck comes to believe that wisdom does not exist and hence can not be used to improve the lot of man kind. "Who was the wisest man in the Bible, supposedly?" he asks and answers: "He was King Solomon, of course. Two women claiming the same baby appeared before Solomon, asking him to apply his legendary...
According to the cabbies of American fiction, Philip Roth has a great glove but can't hit the long ball. The fans will always yearn for the big shot that resounds with bulging affirmations and conventional wisdom. Roth even parodied this expectation in The Great American Novel (1973), a 400-page indulgence of his gifts for lampoon and mimicry...
...State Department briefing, Young declared that he "didn't have much to offer in the way of advice" about what the U.S. should do in the Middle East; but he questioned the wisdom of the rigidity of U.S.-P.L.O. contacts. At one time, he said, we all thought "that the P.L.O. would go away. They have not gone away. They seemingly have increased in their political influence and potential economic strength. And I don't think it's in anybody's interest to ignore those kinds of forces...
True, Keynes argued that excessive demand and price rises could be countered by reversing the cycle?that is, by reducing government spending. But that required a degree of wisdom seldom seen in the spend-and-spend, elect-and-elect politicians of a democracy. Apostles of Keynes contended that to maintain the proper level of demand, the Government regularly had to "fine-tune" the economy with just the right amount of stimulus, either tax cuts or spending increases, or maybe both at once. As Feldstein puts it, the nonstop jiggling and juggling amounted to "an embellishment of Keynes beyond anything that...