Both conservative and liberal economists, in other words, continue to frame economics the way Lionel Robbins defined it, as the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends, which has rightfully earned the discipline the description of being the dismal science. For both schools, efficiency remains the prime consideration. Rather, the economic problematique should be, according to Deaton, the way his fellow Cambridge economist Keynes defined it: “how to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty.”
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51