Are you firmly resolved... to despise the honors, riches... and all the vain pleasures of this world... in order to prepare for a closer union with God?

The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame worthiness.

The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame worthiness.

It is no longer a question of a scourge limited to rich countries and populations seeking new thrills in response to society apos s shortcomings today, we are all affected.

Beyond a certain point which most of the world is still far from having reached the accumulation of wealth offers only substitute pleasures for the real losses to human relations that it exacts.

Even Adam Smith, who told us that it is not from the butcher s benevolence that we get our dinner, but from his regard for his self interest, described the imagined pleasures of wealth as a deception (though one that rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind ).