Sitting in the cab of a $350,000 John Deere tractor pulling a $150,000 Deere corn planter, Greg Carson embodies modern American agriculture. It’s capital-intensive, high-tech, efficient — and now immensely profitable. Looking for a bright spot in the U.S. economy? The farm belt is it.

— Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina”

We ought to leave “happiness” to novelists and philosophers — and rescue it from the economists and psychologists who think it can be distilled into a “science” and translated into pro-happiness policies. Fat chance. Government can often mitigate sources of unhappiness (starvation, unemployment, disease), but happiness is more than the absence of misery. If we could manufacture happiness, we could repeal the “human condition.”

Amid election-year furor over high gasoline prices, something significant has happened to America’s energy outlook. We are steadily reducing our dependence on imported oil — a long-ago Nixon goal. In 1973, he proposed being free of imports by 1980. It didn’t happen, and although politicians of both parties frequently echoed Nixon’s popular call for “energy independence,” most experts considered it a joke.

I don’t say this as a preference one way or the other — I have reached the stage in my journalistic career when I disapprove of most politicians — but simply as a matter of fact and logic.

— L.P. Hartley, English novelist

It must now be obvious that, economically speaking, we’re in another country. Things we once took for granted no longer apply; things we never imagined occur all the time. We’ve entered a zone of ignorance where familiar experience and ideas count for less. “Thirty years ago, if you’d said that the United States and Europe were going to be the centers of financial crises, people would have thought you were crazy,” says economist Fred Bergsten. The unforeseen is now routine.

— John Maynard Keynes, 1936

The eclipse of Keynesian economics proceeds. When Keynes wrote “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” in the mid-1930s, governments in most wealthy nations were relatively small and their debts modest. Deficit spending and pump priming were plausible responses to economic slumps. Now, huge governments are often saddled with massive debts. Standard Keynesian remedies for downturns — spend more and tax less — presume the willingness of bond markets to finance the resulting deficits at reasonable interest rates. If markets refuse, Keynesian policies won’t work.

Created in 1945 — and reflecting the breakdown of global cooperation in the Great Depression — the International Monetary Fund was intended to prevent a few countries’ problems from dragging down the world economy. Countries that got in trouble would borrow temporarily from the IMF. Under IMF supervision, they would adjust their economies gradually so that they wouldn’t destabilize the entire system. Well, that’s exactly the danger now posed by Europe.

The supercommittee — the 12 members of Congress charged with devising a plan to close mammoth deficits — cannot succeed without public support for its proposals. And public opinion won’t come along if it embraces fairy tales.