Quote of the Year

This was just too good to pass up. In today's WSJ, dead tree, on the editorial page, is a piece looking into the failure of the $825B stimulus bill which was supposed to get the economy rolling again. Two researchers went out and interviewed people who had actually received the money to find out what had actually happened to it. Executive summary:

"As is often the case when economic models are transferred from the blackboard to actual public policy, there was a gap between theory and practice."
Garret Jones, Daniel Rothschild

An apt enough restatement of the all too common observation: In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, however, the theory frequently falls short of expectations.