Best 930 quotes in «economics quotes» category

Why does a public discussion of economic policy so often show the abysmal ignorance of the participants?

Why the transfer of decisions from those with personal experience and a stake in the outcome to those with neither can be expected to lead to better decisions is a question seldom asked, much less answered.

Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.

You can have a wages policy imposed by mass unemployment.

You can always get sympathy by using the word small. With little industries you feel as you do about a little puppy.

Yelling is a form of publishing

99 percent of all statistics only tell 49 percent of the story.

28. It is a capital evil with respect to the question We are discussing to take for granted that the one class of society is of itself hostile to the other, as if nature had set rich and poor against each other to fight fiercely in implacable war. This is so abhorrent to reason and truth that the exact opposite is true; for just as in the human body the different members harmonize with one another, whence arises that disposition of parts and proportion in the human figure rightly called symmetry, so likewise nature has commanded in the case of the State that the two classes mentioned should agree harmoniously and should properly form equally balanced counterparts to each other.

A black market is the part of a free market that refuses to knuckle under to government oppression.

acknowledging the relative and emotive nature of ‘worth’, a fair wage is nothing but an economic and emotional threshold at which an individual no longer worries about immediate financial security. It is the point at which the focus shifts from the pay, to the work itself

According to the economic story, you're free to enter and exit the world of markets as you please. As a buyer, you're free to choose whether to buy something or not. If you want something and can afford to pay for it, it's yours. If nothing pleases you, you can "vote with your dollar" and buy nothing. In practice, if you're less mobile than others in the world of markets somehow, perhaps because you're a child or a senior, or are poor, or have learning disabilities or mental health issues, you don't have the same access to the market as others do who are more independent Instead, you'll likely find it hard to identify your choices and make the best choice, which you need to be able to do for the market to operate efficiently, or you may not have enough money to enter the market to begin with. Sometimes your "best choice" isn't much of a choice at all; if your two options are to starve or to buy bread at extortion rates from the only seller in town, your "freedom" to enter or exit the market doesn't amount to much.

A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing ability without a pencil is no particular advantage.

Activity, effort, achievement, or service outside a hierarchical relationship and unmeasured by professional standards, threatens a commodity-intensive society.

Adapt and adopt the peer-to-peer and open source models to wider implementation in organisations

After hovering in the ethereal world of mathematics and geometry, economics was forced to crash-land and take its place in the real world of political debate. Do economists wish to pursue the Good Society in the spirit of the social contract tradition which started some time in ancient Greece, reasserted itself in Europe with J.-J.Rousseau and found its apotheosis in John Rawls? Or do they wish for a social contract which effectively rules the State out as anything other than a provider of order and security—a tradition which began with Thomas Hobbes and culminated in Robert Nozick’s theory? Or, indeed can economists think of something in between? Thus economics is back into the mire courtesy of Arrow’s third theorem, which dispels any hopes of a Rational Society springing from some form of advanced utility maximisation. Economics can no longer escape the political, philosophical debates which resonate across the humanities—from literature to sociology and from politics to moral philosophy. This is a good thing. At last, economics can become interesting again after a century of continuous pedantry.

After all, as Prokhorov said, "Money nowadays comes in two stories." What Westerners could comprehend "two-story money"? A lathe operator during the war received, after deductions, eight hundred rubles a month, and bread cost 140 rubles on the open market. And that meant that in the course of one month he did not earn enough for even six kilos of bread, over and above his ration. In other words, he could not bring home even seven ounces a day for his whole family! But at the same time he did… live. With frank and open impudence they paid the workers an unreal wage, and let them go and seek "the second story." And the person who paid our plasterer [at the Kaluga Gates prison camp] insane money [200 rubles] for his evening's work also got to the "second story" on his own in some particular way. Thus it was that the socialist system triumphed, but only on paper. The old ways—tenacious, flexible—never died out, as a result of either curses or persecution by the prosecutors.

Again in combination with the schools, the nation's media reflect the character of society impressed by the displays of power and opulence rather than the play of mind. The ancient Greeks admired in their art what they called the glittering play of "windswift thought." Pericles in his funeral oration boasted not of the weapons or statues collected in Athens, although these were many and beautiful, but of the character of the Athenian citizen--self-reliant, resourceful, public-spirited, loyal, skeptical, marked "by refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy.

Although most Americans do not realise it, their nations agricultural system has relied heavily on migrant labourers and slaves from Africa, Asia and south of the border for the last four centuries. The country’s agricultural sector has functioned to varying degrees on bondage and servitude from the beginning, which is no different fro agricultural sectors elsewhere in the world. From feudal times to the present day, the arrangements that characterise agricultural work have been remarkably resistant to change, including in the United States. Laws are passed, awareness is raised, workers protest, and lives are lost - but trafficking for slavery and bondage in America’s agricultural sector remains far more prevalent today than almost anyone cares to admit.

A good way to do econometrics is to look for good natural experiments and use statistical methods that can tidy up the confounding factors that Nature has not controlled for us.

All of us—employers, parents, schools, government agencies, and interns themselves—are complicit in the devaluing of work, the exacerbation of social inequality, and the disillusionment of young people in the workplace that are emerging as a result of the intern boom. Informal, barely studied, and little regulated, internships demand our scrutiny. We need a view of the entire sprawling system and its history, a glimpse of its curious blend of privilege and exploitation; we need to hear from interns themselves, and also from those who proffer internships, the people who sell them, the few who work to improve them, an the many who are unable to access them at all. only then can we consider ethical, legal alternatives to a system that is broken, a practice that is often poisonous.

All varieties of the producers' policy are advocated on the ground of their alleged ability to raise the party members' standard of living. Protectionism and economic self-sufficiency, labor union pressure and compulsion, labor legislation, minimum wage rates, public spending, credit expansion, subsidies, and other makeshifts are always recommended by their advocates as the most suitable or the only means to increase the real income of the people for whose votes they canvass. Every contemporary statesman or politician invariably tells his voters: My program will make you as affluent as conditions may permit, while my adversaries' program will bring you want and misery.

A long decade ago economic growth was the reigning fashion of political economy. It was simultaneously the hottest subject of economic theory and research, a slogan eagerly claimed by politicians of all stripes, and a serious objective of the policies of governments. The climate of opinion has changed dramatically. Disillusioned critics indict both economic science and economic policy for blind obeisance to aggregate material "progress," and for neglect of its costly side effects. Growth, it is charged, distorts national priorities, worsens the distribution of income, and irreparably damages the environment. Paul Erlich speaks for a multitude when he says, "We must acquire a life style which has as its goal maximum freedom and happiness for the individual, not a maximum Gross National Product." [in Nordhaus, William D. and James Tobin., "Is growth obsolete?" Economic Research: Retrospect and Prospect Vol 5: Economic Growth. Nber, 1972. 1-80]

A healthy Banking system is one of the vital parts of a nation's foundation.

All governments stress an employment-intensive force of production, but are unwilling to recognize that jobs can also destroy the use-value of free time. They all stress a more objective and complete professional definition of people's needs, but are insensitive to the consequent expropriation of life.

All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible.

All this self-styled spirituality, all these super-rational claims, if they are not rooted in charity, only lead in the end to animalism… If purity consists in a perfect abandonment to life according to the senses and the mechanism of the senses there is more of it in a brute beast than in a saint.

Al realizar predicciones y juicios en condiciones de incertidumbre, la gente no parece seguir el cálculo de probabilidades ni la teoría estadística de la predicción. Más bien se basa en un limitado número de heurísticas que a veces dan lugar a juicios razonables y otras veces conducen a graves y sistemáticos errores.

Americans “are stuck in a society that ensures none of the fundamental opportunities that people need to achieve even basic middle-class comforts. This condemns Americans to an anxiety-ridden battle where a person had better be special, because the alternative is not succeeding at all.

A micro-task is best described as a task which is simple, repetitive or highly algorithmic in nature. Each executed task lasts between a few minutes to a few hours, and this short life-cycle ensures that a task can be contracted, completed and paid for expeditiously, often within the transaction window itself

An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear.

America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.

Americans were happy to celebrate their super-rich and, at least sometimes, worry about their poor. But putting those two conversations together and talking about economic inequality was pretty much taboo.

And instead we go to Walmart and buy another piece of shit.

And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.

An environment of infinite economic expansion is unsustainable in a world of finite resources.

And yet all the gold is in England, it is dug up from Portuguese and Spanish mines, but it flows by some occult power of attraction to the Tower of London.” “Flows,” Caroline repeated. “Flows, like a current.” Sophie nodded. “And the English have grown so used to this that they use ‘currency’ as a synonym for money, as if no distinction need be observed between them.

An ever growing part of our major institutions’ functions is the cultivation and maintenance of three sets of illusions which turn the citizen into a client to be saved by experts...The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services. This illusion is due to an educated blindness to the worth of use-values in the total economy. In none of the economic models serving as national guidelines is there a variable to account for non-marketable use-values any more than there is a variable for nature's perennial contribution.

An item is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it

A revolutionary war of freedom, he said” Hiawatha responded crisply, “and I agree… does Superman ever fly to Thailand and free the kids slaving in the sweat shops owned by the rich corporations? No, he doesn’t. Does Batman ever break into prison and free the wrongfully convicted and over sentenced black man whose rights were trampled on when he was incarcerated? No, he doesn’t. Does Spider man ever break into a house in suburbia and beat up the abusive and violent husband? No, he doesn’t.” “Do the Fantastic Four ever fly out to third world countries and defend the rights of the poor civilians against greedy American corporations? No, they don’t,” said the Pirate, not to be outdone. “They’re all just tools used by the state to maintain the status quo,” said Hiawatha.

Apart from the economic value, money does have high moral value.

A progressive business advancement strategy enriches the businesses capacity to gain momentum in a hostile economy.

A religious theory of society necessarily regards with suspicion all doctrines which claim a large space for the unfettered play of economic self-interest. To the latter the end of activity is the satisfaction of desires, to the former the felicity of man consists in the discharge of obligations imposed by God. Viewing the social order as the imperfect reflection of a divine plan, it naturally attaches a high values to the arts by which nature is harnessed to the service of mankind. But, more concerned with ends than with means, it regards temporal goods as at best instrumental to a spiritual purpose, and its standpoint is that of Bacon, when he spoke of the progress of knowledge as being sought for ‘the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.

Armed with the new right to sell their products back to host societies, they can bleed both producing and buying populations at the same time. That is why under new international "free trade" agreements private corporations and businesses have increasingly demanded that governments deregulate and lower taxes so that they are not obliged to pay the cost of sustaining the life of host-societies or their environments.

As Thorstein Veblen correctly surmised over a century ago, the failure of economics to become an evolutionary science is the product of the optimizing framework of the underlying paradigm, which is inherently antithetical to the process of evolutionary change. This is the primary reason why the neoclassical mantra that the economy must be perceived as the outcome of the decisions of utility-maximizing individuals must be squarely rejected.

A person's right to a job is as specious as his boss' right to success in business. There is no right to a minimum wage, just as there is no right to success in self-employment.

Aren’t we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it? It not only ensures that we take care of ourselves better than we would if we had to be on top of every decision, but also, by freeing us from having to think about these issues, it gives us the mental space we need to focus on the rest of our lives. This does not absolve us of the responsibility of educating people about public health. We do owe everyone, the poor included, as clear an explanation as possible of why immunization is important and why they have to complete their course of antibiotics. But we should recognize—indeed assume—that information alone will not do the trick.

Arguing that the only problem with a free market is lack of competition, is like arguing that that the only problem with prostitution is that there aren't enough pimps.

As if it were Injustice to sell dearer than we buy; or to give more to a man than he merits. The value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors: and therefore the just value, is that which they be contented to give.

As long as government has the power to regulate business, business will control government by funding the candidate that legislates in their favor. A free-market thwarts lobbying by taking the power that corporations seek away from government! The only sure way to prevent the rich from buying unfair government influence is to stop allowing government to use physical force against peaceful people. Whenever government is allowed to favor one group over another, the rich will always win, since they can "buy" more favors, overtly or covertly, than the poor.

As times change and social mechanisms evolve, it seems to me, different survival instincts come into play. In social terms the Cultural Revolution was a simple era whereas today's society is complex and chaotic. One of Mao Zedong's remarks sums up a basic characteristic of the Cultural Revolution. 'We should support whatever the enemy opposes,' he said. 'and oppose whatever the enemy supports.' The Cultural Revolution was an era when everything was painted in black and white, when the eney was always wrong and we were always right; nobody had the courage to suggest that the enemy might sometimes be right and we might be sometimes be wrong. Deng Xiaoping, in turn, said something that captures the zeitgeist of our current age: 'A cat that catches the mouse is a good cat, no matter whether it is black or white.' In so saying, he overturned Mao's system of values and pointed out a fact long evident in Chinese society: right and wrong often coexist in a single phenomenon and interact in a dynamic of mutual displacement. At the same time, his comment put an end to the argument about where socialism and capitalism belong in China's economic development. So China moved from Mao Zedong's monochrome era of politics-in-command to Deng Xiaoping's polychrome era of economics above all.