With credit to Google’s “Quotes of the Day” widget (which is fed by “The Quotation Page”) — and with apologies to all economists everywhere — this remark, more than 200 years old, struck me as remarkably relevant to our circumstances today, given NBER’s announcement of the obvious, earlier this week:

“An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.” – Nicholas Chamfort