Crooked Timber » » The Challenge of Affluence

From Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence, perhaps the best first paragraph of an academic book:

Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well-being. This is the core of my argument. For detail and evidence, go directly to the chapters; for implications, to the conclusion, which also has chapter summaries.

that is very good. statement of argument. placed, explicity ('this is the core of my'). imperative. (how to use this book, what it does). first rate.
Other great academic first paragraphs?

nice, this is working for me much better than the offerings on the metafilter post (pointing to this), the first comment is one I think about and appreciate:
Tractatus 1. The world is everything that is the case.

yay this is good too:

David Lewis, Counterfactuals: `If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over’ seems to me to mean something like this: in any possible state of affairs in which kangaroos have no tails, and which resembles our actual state of affairs as much as kangaroos having no tails permits it to, the kangaroos topple over. I shall give a general analysis of counterfactual conditionals along these lines.

and (seems like dB wld like):

Another Wittgensteinian one, from “Culture and Value:”

We tend to take the speech of Chinese for inarticulate gurgling.

oh, and this, dB:

36. “Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.” - David L. Goodstein, States of Matter

My vote so far is for #36, which I have read before but had suppressed, along with all other memories of statistical mechanics.

huh, my Grasshopper book:

“It was clear that the Grasshopper would not survive the winter, and his followers had gathered around him for what would no doubt be one of their last meetings. Most of them were reconciled to his approaching death, but a few were still outraged that such a thing could be allowed to happen. Prudence was one of the latter, and she approached the Grasshopper with a final plea. ‘Grasshopper,’ she said, ‘a few of us have agreed to give up a share of our food to tide you over till spring. Then next summer you can work to pay us back.’
“’My dear child,’ responded the Grasshopper, ‘you still don’t understand. The fact is that I will not work to pay you back. I will not work at all. I made that perfectly clear, I thought, when the ant turned me away from his door. My going to him in the first place was, of course, a mistake. It was a weakness to which I shall not give in again.’”

The first two paragraphs of Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, one of the loveliest philosophy books of the 20th century (and a special treat for Wittgenstein-haters).

and another of my:

“When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child. Every event, every deed was defined in given and expressive forms and was in accord with the solemnity of marriage, death – by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of the divine mystery. But even the lesser events – a journey, labor, a visit – were accompanied by a multitude of blessings, ceremonies, sayings, and conventions.” J. Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages

and

As the night sky, mathematics has two hemispheres: the archimedean hemisphere and the non-archimedean hemisphere. For some reasons okay yes, the latter hemisphere is usually under the horizon of our world, and the study of it is historically always behind the study of the former. Kazuya Kato, Lectures on the approach to Iwasawa theory for Hasse-Weil L functions via BdR

“In 1321, we read in the chronicle of the monastery of St. Stephen of Condom, a great deal of snow fell during the month of February. The lepers were exterminated. There was another great snowfall before the middle of Lent; then came a great rain.”– Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies