Best 930 quotes in «economics quotes» category

best practices are useful reference points, but they must come with a warning label : The more you rely on external intelligence, the less you will value an internal idea. And this is the age of the idea

Be they pharaohs or freeholders, barons or farmers, landowners have been the most capable, most intrepid, and most assertive members of civilized society.

Billions of dollars, trying unsuccessfully to keep drugs out of the world’s most porous border? One-tenth of the anti-drug budget going into education and treatment, nine-tenths of those billions into interdiction? And not enough money from anywhere going into the root causes of the drug problem itself. And the billions spent keeping drug offenders locked up in prison, the cells now so crowded we have to give early release to murderers. Not to mention the fact that two-thirds of all the “non-drug” offenses in America are committed by people high on dope or alcohol. And our solutions are the same futile non-solutions—build more prisons, hire more police, spend more and more billions of dollars not curing the symptoms while we ignore the disease. Most people in my area who want to kick drugs can’t afford to get into a treatment program unless they have blue-chip health insurance, which most of them don’t. And there’s a six-month-to-two-year waiting list to get a bed in a subsidized treatment program. We’re spending almost $2 billion poisoning cocaine crops and kids over here, while there’s no money at home to help someone who wants to get off drugs. It’s insanity.

Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower. The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the minimum wage—which sets a floor for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today, it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15.

Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economiesーbut to an increasing degree, all economies. They cause misery because human happiness is always caught up in a sense of having effects on the world; a feeling which most people, when they speak of their work, express through a language of social value. Yet at the same time they are aware that the greater the social value produced by a job, the less one is likely to be paid to do it.

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.

But this is your home' 'Not any longer, my poppet. Women make nests but men make bequests and scatter them. Heigh-ho!

But the economy's out of control. Money just doesn't need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way.

But the purpose of agriculture is quite different from that of a factory. It has to provide food in order that the race may flourish and persist. The best results are obtained if the food is fresh and the soil is fertile. Quality is more important than weight of produce. Farming is therefore a vital matter for the population and ranks with the supply of drinking water, fresh air, and protection from the weather. Our water supplies do not always pay their way; the provision of green belts and open spaces does not yield a profit; our housing schemes are frequently uneconomic. Why, then, should the quality of the food on which still more depends than water, oxygen, or warmth be looked at in a different way? The people must be fed whatever happens. Why not, then, make a supreme effort to see that they are properly fed? [...] The financial system, after all, is but a secondary matter. Economics therefore, in failing to insist on these elementary truths, has been guilty of a grave error of judgement.

By and large, the poor do not want some small life. They don't want to game the system or eke out an existence; they want to thrive and contribute.

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine)

By this means the government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.

Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights.

Capitalism is Altruistic, and it requires a certain altruism of each of us.

Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth century what Marx did for the proletariat of the nineteenth.

Campaign donors buy a get out of jail pass... essentially, fraud has been decriminalized.

Capital does not participate where no profit can be made. Humanity is not quoted on the stock exchange.

Careers increasingly come with a reboot button, and companies that realize this early possess a competitive talent advantage

. . .cash is highly effective at slashing the poverty rate. Moreover, GiveDirectly argues that cash is more valuable to its recipients than in-kind gifts, such as food or bed nets or sports equipment. If you’re hungry, you cannot eat a bed net. If your village is suffering from endemic diarrhea, soccer balls won’t be worth much to you.

Considering what is at stake politically, economically and technically for most organizations; usually justifying IT governance deployment based on one viewpoint narrows suitability and expected benefits.

Chinese commentaries stress the opportunity that the investments and aid they offer presents to developing countries to avoid the hazards of reliance on Western dominated financial institutions: austerity programs that call for severe cuts in state-subsidized social welfare, deregulation of state-owned facilities, trade liberalization, and an open door for multinational corporation investment.

Consider the recent financial crisis and its link to faulty reward systems. President Bill Clinton's objective of increasing homeownership by rewarding potential home buyers and lenders is one example. The Clinton administration "went to ridiculous lengths" to increase homeownership in the United State, promoting "paper-thin down payments" and pushing lenders to give mortgage loans to unqualified buyers according to Business Week editor Peter Coy.

CONFIDENCE is not showing off your VANITY, it’s about to be HUMBLED and KIND to others what are you truly SKILLED and PROFESSIONAL about…

[Conventional wisdom] very heavily tends to reflect the preferences and the interests of the elite.

Corporations barely pay taxes. The corporate tax rate is already very low, but corporations have worked out an array of complicated techniques so they often don't have to pay taxes at all... The scale of sheer robbery by corporate power is enormous.

Deleting welfare didn't eliminate poverty itself. We might as well have expected to conquer aging by overturning Social Security.

Creativity is a form of superhuman magic that transforms the ordinary, mundane or merely functional into something more dynamic, fun, spirited, sensory, useful and beautiful. It is the result of a ginormous human imagination coalescing with dirty stubborn, real world problems in order to give birth to something mind-blowing distinctive, original and godlike.

Das Spiel ist der Inbegriff demokratischer Lebensart. Es ist die letzt uns verbliebene Seinsform. Der Spieltrieb ersetzt die Religiosität, beherrscht die Börse, die Politik, die Gerichtssäle, die Pressewelt, und er ist es, der uns seit Gottes Tod mental am Leben hält.

Democracy is supposed to be ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Capitalism is ‘of the capitalist, for the capitalist’. Period.

Economic crises breed war.

Don't you know there's another bubble as well? An expectations bubble. Bigger houses, private planes, yachts... stupid salaries and bonuses. People come to desire these things and expect them. But the expectations bubble will burst as well, as all bubbles do.

Economic experts tell us that the women of America spend 80 per cent of the national income, and the largest part of this expenditure is made for the necessities and the small luxuries of life.

Economics (...) is not a matter of discovering laws: it is essentially a question of design.

Economics, when you strip away the guff and mathematical sophistry, is largely about incentives.

El hombre es un artefacto determinista metido en un universo probabilístico

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say the present-day relations--the relations of bourgeois production--are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.

Economics has made good on its promise to deliver prosperity and democratic freedom to much of the world, but in doing away with the age-old problems of humanity, it has opened up a crisis of an entirely new variety.

Economics. "Something humans invented and then lost control of, it isn't real, it's not like gravity and we could evolve the economic process to make sense, but can't because we would all lose money if we did. Hysterical scientific exerts aside, it doesn't exist outside of our collective heads. So at best its a pseudo science of religious proportions, at worst, it will turn us into a globally warmed suicide cult en mass. ;-)

Economics also has to become a fundamentally monetary discipline—from the consideration of how individuals make market decisions through to our understanding of macroeconomics. The myth of "the money illusion" (which can only be true in a world without debt) has to be immediately dispelled, while our macroeconomics have to reflect a monetary economy in which nominal magnitudes matter, precisely because they are the link between the value of current output and the financing of accumulated debt. The dangers of excessive debt and deflation simply cannot be comprehended from a neoclassical perspective. The discipline must also become fundamentally empirical, in contrast to the faux empiricism of econometrics. By this I mean basing itself on the economic and financial data first and foremost—the collection and interpretation of which has been the hallmark of contributions by econophysicists—and by respecting economic history, a topic which has been systematically expunged from economics departments around the world.

Economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions.

Economics is only considered the dismal science because economists are so often called on to clean up after innumerate politicians.

Economics ought to be a magpie discipline, taking in philosophy, history and politics. But heterodox approaches have long since been banished from most faculties, claims Tony Lawson. In the 1970s, when he started teaching at Cambridge, the economics faculty still boasted legends such as Nicky Kaldor and Joan Robinson. "There were big debates, and students would study politics, the history of economic thought." And now? "Nothing. No debates, no politics or history of economic thought and the courses are nearly all maths." How do elites remain in charge? If the tale of the economists is any guide, by clearing out the opposition and then blocking their ears to reality. The result is the one we're all paying for.

Every time the politicians we elect attempt to increase our standard of living or employment prospects by increasing government spending to stimulate economic activity (‘Keynesian economics’ as it is called); and every time a national bank tries to increase our standard of living or employment prospects by stimulating economic activity by increasing the money supply (‘quantitative easing’ as it is called), each of those actions has its ideological origins in the ideas contained in John Law’s Money and Trade Considered, and the actions of John Law’s Mississippi Scheme.

Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist within Europe among the capitalist States – and will so long as these exist – the most violent struggles of competition and antagonisms, and secondly the European States can no longer get along economically without the non-European countries. ... At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. ... And if the idea of a European union in the economic sense has long been outstripped, this is no less the case in the political sense. .... Only were one suddenly to lose sight of all these happenings and manoeuvres, and to transfer oneself back to the blissful times of the European concert of powers, could one say, for instance, that for forty years we have had uninterrupted peace. This conception, which considers only events on the European continent, does not notice that the very reason why we have had no war in Europe for decades is the fact that international antagonisms have grown infinitely beyond the narrow confines of the European continent, and that European problems and interests are now fought out on the world seas and in the by-corners of Europe.

Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal.

Even Adam Smith's "invisible hand" occasionally needs a slap on the wrist.

Evening work is economical. Power comes most cheaply by night.

Even though men have very little interest in wearing women’s clothes, this has not prevented a gigantic industry from arising, dedicated to satisfying women’s desires in fashion. Industries which provide makeup, hair styling, nail polish, hair removal, and weight loss services are similarly “biased” in the direction of females: they disproportionately serve women. These phenomena would be very difficult to understand on the feminist model that female wants are ignored or deprecated in the male’s favor.

Everyone has a need to feel a sense of self-worth and self-actualization – that he or she believes his or her existence is meaningful. Unfortunately, the Industrial Revolution wrongfully instilled a social norm that self-worth should primarily come from work ethic – if you work hard, you will be rewarded. But because of AI, jobs based on repetitive tasks will soon be gone forever. We need to redefine the idea of work ethic for the new workforce paradigm. The importance of a job should not be solely dependent on its economic value but should also be measured by what it adds to society. We should also reassess our notion that longer work hours are the best way to achieve success and should remove the stigma associated with service professions.

Exchange, fair or unfair,always presupposes and includes the rule of the bourgeoisie.