Paul Krugman

I like smart people. Even when they get so technical I can barely follow, I follow anyway in the hope that some sort of osmosis will occur and I'll get at least some of it.
Paul Krugman's like that. I am chart-averse, but I read him anyway.

The other day, he wrote about George Orwell, another smart person.

Everything in the essay is memorable, but the section that influenced me most was Orwell’s translation of a passage from the King James Bible into Greenspanspeak. The original:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

The modern version:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.