It's Calvino's idea of the quickest way between two points is the circuitous line, not the straight line.

And there were the most circuitous grand plans that had to do with long term infrastructure and rebuilding the entire city.

But fear not, claim advocates of unconventional monetary policy. What central banks cannot achieve with traditional tools can now be accomplished through the circuitous channels of wealth effects in asset markets or with the competitive edge gained from currency depreciation.

I can start any number of places, because this process is also I think very different from some of the morning sessions, which you had such a kind of very clear, such a lineal idea, like the last one, say, with Howard, that I think the creative process in architecture, the design process, is extremely circuitous. It's labyrinthine.

BERKELEY Via a circuitous Internet chain Paul Krugman of Princeton University quoting Mark Thoma of the University of Oregon reading the Journal of Economic Perspectives I got a copy of an article written by Emmanuel Saez, whose office is 50 feet from mine, on the same corridor, and the Nobel laureate economist Peter Diamond. Saez and Diamond argue that the right marginal tax rate for North Atlantic societies to impose on their richest citizens is 70 .