Best 930 quotes in «economics quotes» category

I think the very best attitude for anyone investing in the stock market is to make up his mind to lose money.” — The Duchess Gloriana XII

It is a curious thought that the earliest description of the steam-engine in antiquity describes its use for the magic opening of the temple doors, when the priests lit the fires on the altars, to deceive the populace into ascribing to a deity what was the work of the engineer. In much the same way today, the almost boundless fecundity of the creative scientific discoveries and inventions of the age are being appropriated for the purpose of the mysterious opening of doors into the holy of holies of the temples of mammon by a hierarchy of imposters and humbugs, whom it is the first task of a sane civilization to expose and clear out.

It is a choice, and therefore within the province of economics.

It is a human tendency to take our recent past and project it in a linear fashion into the future. We are hardwired to think linearly and to expect any accelerations in the rate of change to be consistent, for exponential rates of change are hard for humans to comprehend. The next twenty years, we figure, will more or less unfold as the last twenty years have. Not a chance.

It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody things you are wrong.

It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody thinks you are wrong

It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.

it is easier to induce national governments to discriminate against foreign producers than to defend the interests of domestic consumers

It is illogical to say, as many etatists do, that liberalism is hostile to or hates the state, because it is opposed to the transfer of the ownership of railroads or cotton mills to the state. If a man says that sulphuric acid does not make a good hand lotion, he is not expressing hostility to sulphuric acid as such; he is simply giving his opinion concerning the limitations of its use.

It is natural that the appearance of pollution should have taken by surprise an economic science which has delighted in playing around with all kinds of mechanistic models. Curiously, even after the event economics gives no signs of acknowledging the role of natural resources in the economic process. Economists still do not seem to realize that, since the product of the economic process is waste, waste is an inevitable result of that process and ceteris paribus increases in greater proportion than the intensity of economic activity.

It is not in the power of governments to increase the supply of one commodity without a corresponding restriction in the supply of other commodities more urgently demanded by consumers. The authority may reduce the price of one commodity only by raising the prices of others.

It is quite wrong to assume that poor people are generally unwilling to change; but the proposed change must stand in some organic relationship to what they are doing already, and they are rightly suspicious of, and resistant to, radical changes proposed by town-based and office-bound innovators who approach them in the spirit of: "You just get out of my way and I shall show you how useless you are and how splendidly the job can be done with a lot of foreign money and outlandish equipment.

It is, perhaps, impossible to proportion exactly the price of labor to the profits it produces; and it will also be said, as an apology for the injustice, that were a workman to receive an increase of wages daily he would not save it against old age, nor be much better for it in the interim.

It is widely believed that politics and economics are separate and largely unconnected; that individual freedom is a political problem and material welfare an economic problem; and that any kind of political arrangements can be combined with any kind of economic arrangements. The chief contemporary manifestation of this idea is the advocacy of "democratic socialism" by many who condemn out of hand the restrictions on individual freedom imposed by "totalitarian socialism" in Russia~ and who are persuaded that it is possible for a country to adopt the essential features of Russian economic arrangements and yet to ensure individual freedom through political arrangements. The 8 CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM thesis of this chapter is that such a view is a delusion, that there is an intimate connection between economics and politics, that only certain combinations of political and economic arrangements are possible, and that in particular, a society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom.

It might be worthwhile to take a familiar question—why is there so much crime in modern society?—and stand it on its head: why isn't there a bit more crime? After all, every one of us regularly passes up opportunities to main, steal, and defraud. The chance of going to jail—thereby losing your job, your house, and your freedom, all of which are essentially economic penalties—is certainly a strong incentive. But when it comes to crime people also respond to moral incentives (they don't want to do something they consider wrong) and social incentives (they don't want to be seen by others as doing something wrong).

It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx.

It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.

It should be noted that the conception of wealth will be bound up with a general outlook on the universe, so that if this changes, so also will the conception of wealth also change. And since every age reveals a general outlook on the universe, it is easy to conclude that each age of history has its own particular idea of wealth and hence a special economic spirit.

It's almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns 'privately with the administration.' That's just a small sliver of Johnson's radicalism: replacing Feingold in the Senate with Ron Johnson would be a civil liberties travesty analogous to the economic travesty from, say, replacing Bernie Sanders with Lloyd Blankfein.

It's easy to make money when you have a lot of it.

It's WW2 and there are wage controls in place. Instead of health care, companies decide to offer employees shoes. Having absorbed those costs, they later lobby for every company to be required to offer shoes. That calls forth regulation and monopolization of the shoe industry. Shoes are heavily subsidized. Every shoe must be approved. Producers must be domestic. They must adhere to a certain quality. They can't discriminate based on foot size or individual need. Prices rise, and some people lack shoes, so the Affordable Shoe Act forces everyone to buy into an official shoe plan or pay a fee. Here we have a perfect plan for making shoes egregiously expensive. The entire country would be consumed with the fear of being shoeless if they lose their job. The left wing calls for a single shoe provider to offer universal shoes and the right wing meekly suggests that shoe makers be permitted to sell across state lines. Meanwhile, libertarians suggest that we just forget the whole thing and let the market make and deliver shoes of every quality to anyone from anyone. Everyone screams that this is an insane and dangerous idea.

It takes a pillage.

It took organized labor and the collective action of workers to make full-time employment in the semi-automated world of industrial manufacturing inhabitable. Unfortunately, the valorization and validation of full-time employment also made it easier for corporate interests to position piecework and, later, other forms of temporary or contract labor as expendable, that is, work that did not warrant protections.

It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.

It was the American middle class. No one's house cost more than two or three year's salary, and I doubt the spread in annual wages (except for the osteopath) exceeded more than five thousand dollars. And other than the doctor (who made house calls), the store managers, the minister, the salesman, and the banker, everyone belonged to a union. That meant they worked a forty-hour week, had the entire weekend off (plus two to four weeks' paid vacation in the summer), comprehensive medical benefits, and job security. In return for all that, the country became the most productive in the world and in our little neighborhood it meant your furnace was always working, your kids could be dropped off at the neighbors without notice, you could run next door anytime to borrow a half-dozen eggs, and the doors to all the homes were never locked -- because who would need to steal anything if they already had all that they needed?

I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano's Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. Once you see that you lose all hope.

I was reading in the paper today that Congress wants to replace the dollar bill with a coin. They’ve already done it. It’s called a nickel.

Machinery which is not used is not capital.

Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.

Man does not know most of the rules on which he acts; and even what we call his intelligence is largely a system of rules which operate on him but which he does not know.

Markets cannot meet the needs of the very poor. The desperately poor are not consumers who will create an immediate profit.

Man is smart - If money would have grown on trees, we would have used green leaves as money.

Many find in sex and economics the meaning of life and the reason of it all. The consequence of this is that the goal of life for many has become a relief of tension.

Marx's simultaneous critique of the categories of political economy, of utopian socialism and of Hegel does not aim to replace them with an improved set. He grasps them as expressions of the way that humanity is concealed within inhumanity. By tracing their logical interconnections, he finds the way to break their stranglehold on our consciousness and on our lives.

...material things become economically useful only as they receive man’s spiritual response.

Many people would also agree with Amartya Sen, the economist-philosopher and Nobel Prize Laureate, that poverty leads to an intolerable waste of talent. As he puts it, poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one’s full potential as a human being. 10 A poor girl from Africa will probably go to school for at most a few years even if she is brilliant, and most likely won’t get the nutrition to be the world-class athlete she might have been, or the funds to start a business if she has a great idea.

Matter of fact, the only certainty driving the economy is the certainty that boredom at faster and faster rates is inevitable.

Minimum standards to promote workers' wages, health and safety, to safeguard the community against pollution and degradation, and to ensure basic life goods for all as a basic contract for civil society was between 1945 and the mid-1970s, in fact, a rapidly evolving framework which inhibited the causes and effects of a corporate market system committed to an opposed goal.

Monopoly is a market, or part of a market, reserved to the exclusive possession of one or more sellers by means of the initiation of physical force by the government, or with the sanction of the government. Monopoly exists insofar as the freedom of competition is violated, with the freedom of competition being understood as the absence of the initiation of physical force as the preventive of competition. Where there is no initiation of physical force to violate the freedom of competition, there is no monopoly. The freedom of competition is violated only insofar as individuals are excluded from markets or parts of markets by means of the initiation of physical force. Monopoly is thus a market or part of a market reserved to the exclusive possession of one or more sellers by means of the initiation of physical force. It is thus something imposed upon the market from without—by the government. (Private individuals—gangsters—can initiate force to reserve markets only if the government allows it and thereby sanctions it.) Thus, monopoly is not something which emerges from the normal operation of the economic system, and which the government must control.

Money can cloud your vision. Sometimes, God takes away the money and uses times of adversity to refine us like gold.

Money can only be used to buy man-made goods.

Money is a powerful means of exploitation and oppression; but it is also the only means (apart from the most tyrannical dictatorship or the most idyllic accord) so far devised by human intelligence to regulate production and distribution automatically. For the moment, rather than concerning oneself with the abolition of money one should seek a way to ensure that money truly represents the useful work performed by its possessors. . . .

More pervasive and corrosive are the nearly invisible forms of time denial that are built into the very infrastructure of our society. For example, in the logic of economics, in which labor productivity must always increase to justify higher wages, professions centered on tasks that simply take time - education, nursing, or art performance - constitute a problem because they cannot be made significantly more efficient.

More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of the people, promoting collective effort.

Most of us try to do too much because we are secretly afraid we will not be able to do anything at all.

Neoclassical economics has effectively insulated itself from the great advances made in science and engineering over the last 40 years. This self-imposed isolation must come to an end. For while the concepts of neoclassical economics appear difficult, they are actually quaint in comparison to the sophistication evident in today's mathematics, engineering, computing, evolutionary biology and physics. In order to advance, economics must humbly submit to learning from disciplines that it has studiously ignored for so long. Some researchers in outside fields have called for the wholesale replacement of standard economics curricula, using at least the building blocks of modern thought inherent in other disciplines.

My sponsor is an ex-Navy guy. Buys me lunch on Christmas. I tell him, as long as I am drinking and I have money, things seem to be going well. Now, you just replace “am drinking” with “have oil” there you have the U.S. economy. When I don’t drink for a while… I get a little depressed and anti-Semitic. I tell him, as soon as the United States stops fucking up foreign democracies and stealing their oil, I’ll stop drinking. Unfortunately, looks like neither miracle is going to happen…

Neoliberalism is essentially an intentionally imprecise stand-in term for free market economics, for economic sciences in general, for conservatism, for libertarians and anarchists, for authoritarianism and militarism, for advocates of the practice of commodification, for center-left or market-oriented progressivism, for globalism and welfare state social democracies, for being in favor of or against increased immigration, for favoring trade and globalization or opposing the same, or for really any set of political beliefs that happen to be disliked by the person(s) using the term.

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)

No other system of economic organizing rewards merit, hard work and creativity the way Capitalism does.