Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle’s joke lands because it’s not really about economists; it’s about the kind of thinking that gets crowned as wisdom in an industrial age. The line is built like a party trick: reduce a whole profession to two magic words, then imply that the profession itself has done the same to human life. “Teach a parrot” is the insult with teeth. A parrot can repeat terms flawlessly while understanding nothing, so the barb isn’t that economists are stupid, but that their authority can be performative: fluent in abstractions, indifferent to lived reality.

The target is classical political economy in the wake of the factory system, a moment when “supply and demand” began to function as both explanation and alibi. Carlyle, steeped in moral and spiritual critique, hears in that tidy mechanism a way to launder cruelty into inevitability. If wages are low or poverty persists, the parroted logic can shrug: the market spoke. His subtext is that language like this disciplines empathy, replacing ethical responsibility with a neutral-sounding law of nature.

It also works because it’s aggressively asymmetric: two words versus an entire field. That exaggeration is the satire. Carlyle isn’t arguing economics has no insights; he’s accusing it of becoming a faith that mistakes vocabulary for vision. The quip still stings today because our culture still rewards the confident recital of frameworks - especially ones that promise a clean, amoral answer to messy human problems.