Quote preview background for Goh Keng Swee
Academics place much more importance on rigorous logic. There is also admiration in the profession for subtle reasoning. And mastery of the craft shows itself in the elegance of the intellectual super-structure_. The practitioner, on the other hand, uses economic theory only to the extent that he finds it useful in comprehending the problem at hand, so that practical courses of action will emerge which can be evaluated not merely in narrow economic cost-benefit terms, but by taking into account a wider range of considerations_. A practitioner is not judged by the rigour of his logic or by the elegance of his presentation. He is judged by results.
Goh Keng Swee
Turn into a Quote Card

Quote Detail

Academics place much more importance on rigorous logic. There is also admiration in the profession for subtle reasoning. And mastery of the craft shows itself in the elegance of the intellectual super-structure_. The practitioner, on the other hand, uses economic theory only to the extent that he finds it useful in comprehending the problem at hand, so that practical courses of action will emerge which can be evaluated not merely in narrow economic cost-benefit terms, but by taking into account a wider range of considerations_. A practitioner is not judged by the rigour of his logic or by the elegance of his presentation. He is judged by results.

Quick Answer

What this quote page tells you

This canonical quote page keeps the full saying, the attributed author, any linked work, and the topic tags together so the quote can be cited from one stable URL.

Related Quotes

More quote cards from the same area

"

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses _ especially the older ones _ functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop.