But alongside the collectors, who are no doubt greening the world, the ideology of the equally high-minded declutterers is still going strong.

Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month.

admit not of that attention, mora, and propendency of actions

[…] in a genre dominated by loud beats and wailing pleas, Mr. Thicke is a hard-core murmurer.