Who Said This: “If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter”

A long time ago, I posted a collection of quotes, all of them expressing the same idea: If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter.

Today, I discovered a detailed article by Quote Investigator concerning those who have expressed this excellent idea.

The conclusion:

[T]he number of different people credited with this comment is so numerous that an explanatory appendix would have been required, and the letter was already too long. Here is a partial list of attributions I have seen: Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Voltaire, Blaise Pascal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Winston Churchill, Pliny the Younger, Cato, Cicero, Bill Clinton, and Benjamin Franklin. Did anybody in this group really say it? . . .

In conclusion, Blaise Pascal wrote a version of this saying in French and it quickly moved into the English language. The notion was very popular and variants of the expression have been employed by other notable figures in history. The saying has also been assigned to some prominent individuals without adequate factual support.

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Some Hope for Insulin Users, Courtesy of the Revived U.S. Antitrust Division

Excerpt from Matt Stoller's website:

[O]n Thursday, the FTC voted to resurrect the Robinson-Patman Act, a bill prohibiting corporate bribery and price discrimination by middlemen that hasn’t been meaningfully enforced since the 1970s. I wrote several chapters in my book on the titanic fight in the 1930s to tame chain stores with this law, and the equally vicious conflict in the 1970s to stop enforcing it. The end of RPA enforcement is why chain stores like Walmart and Amazon took over our retail space, and why dominant middlemen control every area of our economy at this point. It’s worth noting that Robert Bork’s most hated statute was the Robinson-Patman Act, and he considered it a tremendous victory that he helped end the enforcement of the law.

So what happened at the FTC? All five commissioners voted on a policy statement saying that the use of rebates by dominant middlemen in the insulin market were a potential violation of different laws under the jurisdiction of the FTC, including the Robinson-Patman Act. This vote is a signal to every private antitrust lawyer, state attorney general, and judge, that the Robinson-Patman Act can once again be dusted off and used.

Insulin is a great test case for this law, because everyone knows how unfair and inefficient the insulin market truly is. It’s a medication that has been around since 1922, and yet it has been increasing in cost every year for decades. And while the three main producers engage in all sorts of schemes to push up cost, most of the high cost of insulin is actually a result the middlemen named pharmacy benefits managers - CVS Caremark, Cigna (Express Scripts), and United Healthcare (OptumRx) - who manage and control how medicine is priced and sold. PBMs demand rebates of up to 70% for the right to have an insulin company sell their product to patients. These rebates in turn massively drive up the price of insulin.

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Heterodox Academy National Conference in Denver, Colorado

I am now back home after attending the national conference of Heterodox Academy in Denver. HxA's slogan is "Great Minds Don't Always Think Alike." Highlights included meeting many thoughtful people. This included a chance to talk with Jonathan Haidt. Presenters included Glenn Loury, Erec Smith, John McWhorter, Roslyn Clark Artis, Matt Yglesias and the HxA's new President, John Tomasi. I delivered a one-hour presentation, "When the “HxA Way” Collides with Brandolini’s Law." Here's the synopsis:

Brandolini’s Law, also known as the “bullshit asymmetry principle,” states that “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it.” When applied to daily interactions, this means that the longer some conversations go on, the less meaningful they become. While we may do our best to diligently practice the “HxA Way,” others may still fling ad hominem attacks or use weak arguments, false dichotomies, and uncharitable interpretations that drag things down. In this session, Erich Vieth will explore these common frustrations and offer strategies – drawn from his experience as a trial lawyer – to help keep contentious conversations on track.

Glenn Loury, Erec Smith and John McWhorter[/caption]


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