c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
This book is an essay in what is derogatorily called "literary economics," as opposed to mathematical economics, econometrics, or (embracing them both) the "new economic history." A man does what he can, and in the more elegant - one is tempted to say "fancier" - techniques I am, as one who received his formation in the 1930s, untutored. A colleague has offered to provide a mathematical model to decorate the work. It might be useful to some readers, but not to me. Catastrophe mathematics, dealing with such events as falling off a height, is a new branch of the discipline, I am told, which has yet to demonstrate its rigor or usefulness. I had better wait. Econometricians among my friends tell me that rare events such as panics cannot be dealt with by the normal techniques of regression, but have to be introduced exogenously as "dummy variables." The real choice open to me was whether to follow relatively simple statistical procedures, with an abundance of charts and tables, or not. In the event, I decided against it. For those who yearn for numbers, standard series on bank reserves, foreign trade, commodity prices, money supply, security prices, rate of interest, and the like are fairly readily available in the historical statistics.
— Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises
Neoclassical economics is precisely the theory one would expect a vastly complex system of international corporations, world markets, and interconnected currencies to create to sustain, justify, explain, and predict "itself." And classical economics, correspondingly, was a predictable expression of an earlier European capitalism.
— Roger M. Keesing, Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective
In Chapter 5 we consider swindles and defalcations. It happens that crashes and panics often are precipitated by the revelation of some misfeasance, malfeasance, or malversation (the corruption of officials) engendered during the mania. It seems clear from the historical record that swindles are a response to the greedy appetite for wealth stimulated by the boom. And as the monetary system gets stretched, institutions lose liquidity, and unsuccessful swindles are about to be revealed, the temptation to take the money and run becomes virtually irresistible. It is difficult to write on this subject without permitting the typewriter to drip with irony. An attempt will be made.
— Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises
In the case of patentable ideas such as the wheelbarrow, the idea of unpriced spillovers is more plausible. Yet there is no reason to believe that it is of practical importance. Indeed, there is a modern example of the wheelbarrow – that of Travelpro – the inventor of the modern wheeled roll-on suitcase with a retractable handle. Obviously such an idea can not both be useful and be secret – and once you see a wheeled roll-on suitcase it is not difficult to figure out how to make one of your own. Needless to say, Travelpro was quickly imitated – and so quickly you probably have never even heard of Travelpro. Never-the-less – despite their inability to garner an intellectual monopoly over their invention – they found it worthwhile to innovate – and they still do a lucrative business today, claiming “425,000 Flight Crew Members Worldwide Choose Travelpro Luggage.
— Michele Boldrin, Against Intellectual Monopoly
It is certainly true that imitation is everywhere, from sport to business, from dancing to dressing, from driving to singing. In fact, imitation is at the heart of competitive behavior and of almost any kind of social interaction. Like the fixed cost cum marginal cost argument that, as we pointed out earlier, is so powerful an argument that it can be applied to any and every thing, imitation is so widespread that, when taken literally, it is also everywhere. By this token one should see unpriced externalities in every market where producers imitate each other, thereby concluding that all kinds of economic activities should be allowed some form of monopoly power. Restaurants imitate each other, as coffee shops, athletes, real estate agents, car salesmen, and even bricklayers do, but we would certainly find it foolhardy to grant to a firm in each of these businesses monopoly power over one technique or another. This suggests that equating imitation with unpriced externalities leads us into a dark night in which all cows are gray.
— Michele Boldrin, Against Intellectual Monopoly
Although the view that, once discovered, ideas can be imitated for free by anybody is pervasive, it is far from the truth. While it may occasionally be the case that an idea is acquired at no cost—ideas are generally difficult to communicate, and the resources for doing so are limited. It is rather ironic that a group of economists, who are also college professors and earn a substantial living teaching old ideas because their transmission is neither simple nor cheap, would argue otherwise in their scientific work. Most of the times imitation requires effort and, what is more important, imitation requires purchasing either some products or some teaching services from the original innovator, meaning that most spillovers are priced.
— Michele Boldrin, Against Intellectual Monopoly
While there are certainly informational spillovers as ideas move from person to person, it is hard to see why in most instances they are not priced. Although it is possible to imagine examples such as the wheelbarrow where an idea cannot be used without revealing the secret, relatively few ideas are of this type. For copyrightable creations such as books, music, plays, movies and art, unpriced spillovers obviously play little role. A book, a CD or a work of art must be purchased before it can be used, and the creator is free to make use of his creation in the privacy of his home without revealing the secret to the public at large. Similarly with movies or plays. In all cases, the creation must effectively be purchased before the “secret” is revealed.
— Michele Boldrin, Against Intellectual Monopoly
History, practical experience, common sense and economic theory all agree: economic competition is probably one of the greatest ideas humans ever came up with. When people compete to achieve the same goal, great things seem to happen that otherwise would not. Things get done faster, cheaper, and better; new methods for lifting a weight or quenching a thirst are invented; the average guy ends up with more of the stuff he likes at a lower price than before. That is why, in the end, socialism collapsed like a rotten wall: it did not allow its people to compete and, as a result, it not only made their economic life miserable, but strangled their hearts and souls.
— Michele Boldrin, Against Intellectual Monopoly
Then the shit hit the fan.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times
In a basic agricultural society, it's easy enough to swap five chickens for a new dress or to pay a schoolteacher with a goat and three sacks of rice. Barter works less well in a more advanced economy. The logistical challenges of using chickens to buy books on Amazon.com would be formidable.
— Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science
The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the base classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence with respect to these stimulants, except in countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost. From archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal regime it has been the office of the women to prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among some peoples freely recognised as manly attributes. It has even happened that the name for certain diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble" or "gentle". It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks of a superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command the deference of the community; but the reputability that attaches to certain expensive vices long retains so much of its force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation visited upon the men of the wealthy or noble class for any excessive indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds force to the current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on the part of women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced peoples of today. Where the example set by the leisure class retains its imperative force in the regulation of the conventionalities, it is observable that the women still in great measure practise the same traditional continence with regard to stimulants.
— Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.
— Kalle Lasn
Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.
— Paul A. Samuelson
Our hopes of avoiding the fate which threatens must...[be to make]adjustments that will be needed if we are to recover and surpass our former standards...and only if every one of us is ready to individually obey the necessities of readjustment shall we be able to get through a difficult period as free men who can choose their own way of life. Let a uniform minimum be secured to everybody by all means
—  but let us admit at the same time that with this assurance of a basic minimum all claims for a privileged security for particular classes must lapse....
Raising interest rates is voo-doo. You can't deal with a global system problem by trying to solve it with this.
— Stafford Beer
The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply to the price level-is easy for the unlearned and may even be aided by a mildly enfeebled intellect. The requirement that there be ability to master difficult models, including ones for which mathematical competence is required, is a highly useful screening device.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics Peace and Laughter
A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
The fact that the United States has political, economic, and legal structures that do indeed create incentives to control hazards (in the workplace) is one the reasons the corporations have moved to Latin America and Asia.
— Vincent A. Gallagher, The True Cost of Low Prices: The Violence of Globalization
That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They require names. Education in economics is, in considerable measure, an introduction to this terminology and to the ideas that it denotes. Anyone who has difficulties with the ideas should complete his education or, following an exceedingly well-beaten path, leave the subject alone. It is sometimes said that the economist has a special obligation to make himself understood because his subject is of such great and popular importance. By this rule the nuclear physicist would have to speak in monosyllables.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics Peace and Laughter
You can't fool Mother Nature, and you can't fool market forces (at least not for long)
— Richard McKenzie
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.
— Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government
When I was an undergraduate studying economics under Professor Arthur Smithies of Harvard, he asked me in class one day what policy I favored on a particular issue of the times. Since I had strong feelings on that issue, I proceeded to answer him with enthusiasm, explaining what beneficial consequences I expected from the policy I advocated. “And then what will happen?” he asked. The question caught me off guard. However, as I thought about it, it became clear that the situation I described would lead to other economic consequences, which I then began to consider and to spell out. “And what will happen after that?” Professor Smithies asked. As I analyzed how the further economic reactions to the policy would unfold, I began to realize that these reactions would lead to consequences much less desirable than those at the first stage, and I began to waver somewhat. “And then what will happen?” Smithies persisted. By now I was beginning to see that the economic reverberations of the policy I advocated were likely to be pretty disastrous— and, in fact, much worse than the initial situation that it was designed to improve. Simple as this little exercise might seem, it went further than most economic discussions about policies on a wide range of issues. Most thinking stops at stage one.
— Thomas Sowell, Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One
In the late Middle Ages the stupefying simplicity of the heliocentric model was used as an argument to discredit the new astronomy. Its elegance was interpreted as naivete...Just as the legendary inquisitor refused to look through Galileo's telescope, so most modern economists refuse to look at an analysis that might displace the conventional centre of their economic system.
— Ivan Illich, The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies
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.
— Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice Opposed to Agrarian Law, and to Agrarian Monopoly; Being a Plan for Meliorating the Condition of Man
The values of commodities are directly as the times of labour employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labour employed.
— Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit
What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. this is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Laws, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his labouring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.
— Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit
Employing yourself costs less than employing someone else but more than working. The marginal cost/revenue of education.
— Mark Sherman Smeester
they'll reregulate within ten years. There'll be a string of crashes, and they'll do it. the free marketeers will scream, but the fact is, free markets don't provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have an SEC. And you want safe airlines, you better regulate them too. Believe me, they will.
— Michael Crichton
OURSOCIETY ISCONTROLLED BY LAWYERSAND FINANCIERS"PROBLEMMAKERS WE NEED TO EVOMETO A SOCIETY LEAD BYCREATORS, ENGINEERS, SCIENTISTS PROBLEMSOLVERS. SURELY WE WILLHAVE MORE INGENUITYCOOPERATION ANDPEACE
— Miguel Reynolds Brandao, The Sustainable Organisation - a paradigm for a fairer society: Think about sustainability in an age of technological progress and rising inequality
Because we bump into reinforcing loops so often, it is handy to know this shortcut: The time it takes for an exponentially growing stock to double in size, the “doubling time,” equals approximately 70 divided by the growth rate (expressed as a percentage).Example: If you put $100 in the bank at 7% interest per year, you will double your money in 10 years (70 ÷ 7 = 10). If you get only 5% interest, your money will take 14 years to double.
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Preindustrial living standards are predictable based on knowledge of disease and environment. Differences in social energy across societies were muted by the Malthusian constraints. They had minimal impacts on living conditions. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, we have entered a strange new world in which economic theory is of little use in understanding differences in income across societies, or the future income in any specific society. Wealth and poverty are a matter of differences in local social interactions that are magnified, not dampened, by the economic system, to produce feast or famine.
— Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World
*THE COMMONS, which are creative - so unleash their potential*The commons are shareable resources of society or nature that people choose to use and govern through self-organising, instead of relying on the state or market for doing so. Think of how a village community might manage its only freshwater well and its nearby forest, or how Internet users worldwide collaboratively curate Wikipedia. Natural commons have traditionally emerged in communities seeking to steward Earth's 'common pool' resources, such as grazing land, fisheries, watersheds and forests. Cultural commons serve to keep alive a community's language, heritage and rituals, myths and music, traditional knowledge and practice. And the fast-growing digital commons are stewarded collaboratively online, co-creating open-source software, social networks, information and knowledge. ...In the 1970s, the little-known political scientist Elinor Ostrom started seeking out real-life examples of natural commons to find out what made them work - and she went on to win a Nobel-Memorial prize for what she discovered. Rather than being left 'open access', those successful commons were governed by clearly defined communities with collectively agreed rules and punitive sanctions for those who broke them...she realised, the commons can turn out to be a triumph, outperforming both state and market in sustainably stewarding and equitably harvesting Earth's resources... The triumph of the commons is certainly evident in the digital commons, which are fast turning into one of the most dynamic areas of the global economy.(p.82-3)
— Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
Broadly speaking, there are only two ways human beings can make an income: ...by contributing to society or they can extract an income from society
— Martin Adams, Land: A New Paradigm for a Thriving World
Due to its inherently limited supply for each location, land obtains its value from the natural, social, and cultural wealth that exists in its surrounding environment.
— Martin Adams, Land: A New Paradigm for a Thriving World
Democracy, we now know, is more than periodic elections in some countries, such elections have been used to legitimize essentially authoritarian regimes and deprive large parts of the citizenry of basic rights.
— Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
Suppose someone were to describe a small country that provided free education through university for all of its citizens, transportation for schoolchildren, and free health care - including heart surgery - for all. You might suspect that a country is either phenomenally rich or on the fast track to fiscal crisis.
— Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.
— Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
That’s because they don’t know,’ said Tyburn. ‘It’s like economics. Everybody’s got a theory, and some people make it their religion.
— Ben Aaronovitch, The Hanging Tree
To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.
— Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular
More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of the people, promoting collective effort.
— Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
There lies another power in man. That power is Moral: Its name is CHOICE! Within this one word, Choice, lies the story of man’s world. It stands for the secret poise within him. It reveals as a flashlight all his imagings, his phantasies, his willful thoughts, his deeds, from the greatest to the least, even in this gliding hour we call today. This one word, Choice, stands for the sole and single power; it is the name of the mystery that lies behind the veil of all human appearances. A word that dissolves the enigma of men’s deeds. A word, a light that not only illuminates all his obvious works, all the inner springs and motives of his civilizations, but a light whose rays reach within the sanctuary of the secret thought of each and all, thus revealing the man of the past and the man of today, starkly in personal status as a social factor of beneficence or wore. Need we know man’s thoughts? View his works, his deeds; they tell his choice.
— Louis Sullivan
They did not understand that by liberalizing imports, the government was also promoting exports.
— Jeffrey D. Sachs
world is not a zero-sum struggle in which one country's gain is another's loss.
— Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty
sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty
— Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty
Knowing that an economy is in decline is not enough. We must know why the economy is failing to achieve economic growth if we are to take steps to establish or reestablish it.
— Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty
But things have been so admirably arranged by the Divine inventor of social order that in this, as in everything else, political economy and morality, far from clashing, agree; and the wisdom of Aristus is not only more dignified, but still more profitable, than the folly of Mondor. And when I say profitable, I do not mean only profitable to Aristus, or even to society in general, but more profitable to the workmen themselves—to the trade of the time.
— Frédéric Bastiat, That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen
It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody things you are wrong.
— Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular
It is an economic fact that predicting the future is most valuable when everybody thinks you are wrong
— Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular
Relative poverty is when you have more taste than money.
— Neel Burton
In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society
Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists say 'on hand...', then 'but on the other...
— Harry Truman
Fierce, and what capitalists sometimes call 'ruinous' competition tends, therefore, to produce leap-frogging innovations that more often that not lead capitalists to fetishise technological and organisational innovations as the answer to all their prayers
— David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism
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.
— Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
The theory of Economics must begin with a correct theory of consumption.
— William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy
In each case, the relative cost of postponing the purchase for buyer and seller determines the intensity of competition between the [past and future] selves of the seller. If the buyer has a lower cost of postponing the purchase (delay, making do with an interior model) than the seller (inventory, staff salaries) the buyer has the bargaining power.
— Rakesh V. Vohra, Principles of Pricing: An Analytical Approach
The reader who thinks that rationality does not require a definition should ponder the following: I'll give you a million dollars to do something irrational.
— Lakshman Krishnamurthi, Principles of Pricing: An Analytical Approach
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.
— Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011
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.
— Daniel McFadden
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Misconceptions of business are almost inevitable in a society where most people have neither studied nor run businesses. In a society where most people are employees and consumers, it is easy to think of businesses as “them” – as impersonal organizations, whose internal operations are largely unknown and whose sums of money may sometimes be so huge as to be unfathomable.
— Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states’ loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name.If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will growth return. In the case of Greece and Italy in 2011, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it.The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. Second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors—pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led.
— Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
it is easier to induce national governments to discriminate against foreign producers than to defend the interests of domestic consumers
— George W. Stocking
Save the trees! Return to the gold standard!
— Ron Brackin
Inflation consists of subsidizing expenditures that give no returns with money that does not exist.
— Jacques Rueff
This resulted in a model of the macroeconomy as consisting of a single consumer, who lives for ever, consuming the output of the economy, which is a single good produced in a single firm, which he owns and in which he is the only employee, which pays him both profits equivalent to the marginal product of capital and a wage equivalent to the marginal product of labor, to which he decides how much labor to supply by solving a utility function that maximizes his utility over an infinite time horizon, which he rationally expects and therefore correctly predicts. The economy would always be in equilibrium except for the impact of unexpected ‘technology shocks’ that change the firm’s productive capabilities (or his consumption preferences) and thus temporarily cause the single capitalist/worker/consumer to alter his working hours. Any reduction in working hours is a voluntary act, so the representative agent is never involuntarily unemployed, he’s just taking more leisure. And there are no banks, no debt, and indeed no money in this model.You think I’m joking? I wish I was.
— Steve Keen, Debunking Economics - Revised and Expanded Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?
My hunch is that as the importance of a decision grows, the tendency to rely on quantitative analyses done by others tends to shrink. When the championship or the future of the company is on the line, managers tend to rely on their gut instincts.
— Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
But this is your home''Not any longer, my poppet. Women make nests but men make bequests and scatter them. Heigh-ho!
— Joan Aiken, Eliza's Daughter
The Socialist system requires that each individual act out of selfless, altruistic motives. It sounds nice, but the only way that could happen is if Man were innately centered on others.
— Mark David Henderson, The Soul of Atlas
Economic crises breed war.
— Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Road To Socialism
In those meetings, I learned that even economic diagrams needn’t be linear. Ours was a nest of concentric circles, and an enterprise was measured by its value to each circle, from the individual and family to the community and environment. I realized that Rebecca and her colleagues were trying to do nothing less than transform the System of National Accounts, the statistical framework here and in most countries for measuring economic activity. For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment. This group was inventing a new way of measuring profit and loss. By the end of our days together, I understood economics in a whole new way. A balance sheet really could be about balance.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
An older generation, chastened by one depression, is afraid to be optimistic; and a younger generation, accustomed to security, is inexperienced at being pessimistic.
— Warren W. Wiersbe, God Isn't In A Hurry
A fool believes that the society of the future will transcend the laws of economics. A person of reason hopes that it will finally learn to respect them.
— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Whatever Latin America sells—raw materials or manufactures—its chief export product is really cheap labor.
— Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Microeconomists are wrong about specific things and macroeconomists are wrong about things in general!
— Yoram Bauman, The Cartoon Introduction to Economics: Volume One: Microeconomics
In my experience, economists rarely believe passionately in, or care passionately for, the free market. They are generally more concerned to reveal the market's imperfections, to further their own professional importance.
— Terence Kealey
Theory of public goods. Theory that if I take you euro (as an elected state government) and give fifty cents back... you will be happier and I will be satisfied.
— Radovan Kavický
Now, in the modern money economy everything in the nature of a social-economic occurrence consists in human actions and behaviour.
— Oskar Morgenstern
...the facts of economic life cannot be comprehensively described in terms of statistics.
— Oskar Morgenstern, The Limits of Economics
Our knowledge of dynamic processes is necessarily inferior to our ability to describe stationary conditions.
— Oskar Morgenstern, On The Accuracy Of Economic Observations
Orthodoxy builds a rococo logical palace on loose empirical sand.
— Richard R. Nelson
Too many economists excuse their practical failure by saying "the politicians (or bureaucrats) didn't do exactly what I recommended." Just as medical practitioners must allow for the fact that their patients may not take all the pills they prescribe, or follow all the advice they are given, so economics practitioners need to foresee political and administrative pressures and make their plans robust to changes that politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists are likely to impose.
— Paul Klemperer
Anything which is physically possible can be made financially possible, if the people of a state desire it.
— Robert A. Heinlein
... it will appear that there is no such thing as fixed capital; there is nothing useful that is very old except the precious metals, and all life consists in the conversion of forms. The only capital which is of permanent value is immaterial--the experience of generations and the development of science.
— David Ames Wells
He wants to focus on what he calls 'cultural issues.' That makes sense, because when you're going to rob people blind you don't want to have them focus their attention on economic issues.
— Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian
lthough the basic principles of economics are not very complicated, the very ease with which they can be learned also makes them easy to dismissed as "simplistic" by those who do not want to accept analyses which contradict their cherished beliefs. Evasions of the obvious are often far more complicated than the facts. Nor is it automatically true that complex effects must have complex causes. The ramifications of something very simple can become enormously complex.
— Thomas Sowell
Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy.
— Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't
Even in recent times, the empirical evidence does not support the claim that trade liberalization or incentive neutrality leads to faster growth. It is true that higher manufacturing growth rates have been typically associated with higher export growth rates (mostly in countries where export and import shares to GDP grew), but there is no statistical relation between either of these growth rates or degree of trade restrictions. Rather, almost all of successful export-oriented growth has come with selective trade and industrialization policies. In this regard, stable exchange rates and national price levels seem to be considerably more important than import policy in producing successful export-oriented growth
— Anwar Shaikh, Globalization and the Myths of Free Trade: History, Theory, and Empirical Evidence
In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.
— Rudiger Dornbusch
Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.
— Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes
He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.
— Richard Davenport-Hines
Our society gives its economy priority over health, love, truth, beauty, sex and salvation; over life itself. Whatsoever is given precedence over life will take precedence over life, and will end in eliminating life. Since economics, at its most abstract level, is the religion of our people, no noneconomic happening, not even one as potentially spectacular as the Second Coming, can radically alter the souls of our people.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.
— Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes
At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.
— Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes
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
— Leonard Wibberley
In boom times companies have high profits. They increase production to satisfy demand for goods. This leads to excess supply. Companies cut prices to compete for customers. leading to lower profits, lay-offs, and economic depression. Eventually lower prices lead to an increase in demand and profits go back up. The economy is a yo-yo.
— Niall Kishtainy, The Economics Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained
Protectionism does not produce wealth, and free trade and economic openness are ultimately in everyone’s interest
— Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
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.
— Melvin Gurtov
I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional. We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy. They're not a decade old, and they're being thrown these kinds of questions that can absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about. It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it.
— Thomas Sowell
Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything––nothing else 'answered;' and Lydgate supposed that 'if things were done at all, they must be done properly'–he did not see how they were to live otherwise. If each head of household expenditure had been mentioned to him beforehand, he would have probably observed that 'it could hardly come to much,' and if any one had suggested a saving on a particular article–for example, the substitution of cheap fish for dear–it would have appeared to him simply a penny-wise, mean notion.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
There was nothing so special about First Class, apart from the amount of uncalled for, almost disturbing, attention I got from the various six-feet tall heavily made up air hostesses, that I would come back for more given the steep price tag.
— Vann Chow, Shanghai Nobody
By now, they rank people by income level or wages roughly the same: The bottom seventy per cent or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.
— Noam Chomsky
To bring our human population in line with the biocapacity of the planet and transform our society from scarcity to sustainable abundance, we will need to address the great disparity in ecological footprint between the rich and poor, while simultaneously lowering the overall human population on Earth.
— Jeremy Rifkin
Today, reports of the day’s events are conveyed to the viewing public by way of alternate universes, The Fox News cable channel conveys its version of reality, while at the other end of the ideological spectrum MSNBC presents its version. They and their many counterparts on radio are more the result of an economic dynamic than a political one. Dispatching journalists into the field to gather information costs money; hiring a glib bloviator is relatively cheap, and inviting opinionated guests to vent on the air is entirely cost-free. It wouldn’t work if it weren’t popular, and audiences, it turns out, are endlessly absorbed by hearing amplified echoes of their own biases. It’s divisive and damaging to the healthy functioning of our political system, but it’s also indisputably inexpensive and, therefore, good business.
— Ted Koppel
Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky
The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.
— Jean-Paul Kauffmann
Be careful... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility
— Eliezer Yudkowsky
...an' there never yet was speculation but in the long run, it meant smash. Ye run so hard that ye fall ower yoursel
— Neil M. Gunn
What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.
— Steven D. Levitt
,It must be pretty awful for a white man to learn that one of the things wrong with this society is that it is not based on dollars directly or alone, but dollars denied men who are black so dollars can go into the pockets of men who are white. It must make white men ponder a kind of weakness that will make them deny work to black men so that work can be done by men who are white.
— John A. Williams
They all had a thousand good economic and political reasons why they couldn’t stop. I’m not a politician or a businessman; how am I supposed to persuade them about these things. What are we supposed to do; quite likely the world will collapse and disappear under water; but at least that will happen for political and economic reasons we can all understand, at least it will happen with the help of science, technology and public opinion, with human ingenuity of all sorts! Not some cosmic catastrophe but just the same old reasons to do with the struggle for power and money and so on. There’s nothing we can do about that.
— Karel Čapek, War with the Newts
Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual, are essential and unavoidable consequences of this basic premise, and the collectivist can admit this and at the same time claim that his system is superior to one in which the "selfish" interests of the individual are allowed to obstruct the full realisation of the ends the community pursues.
— Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose the former every time. The ruler, then, maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the overall wealth of the realm and its subjects.
— James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
when security is understood in too absolute a sense, the general striving for it, far from increasing the chances of freedom, becomes the gravestthreat to it.
— Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for.
— Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
So what’s your alternative?” people say, as if that’s logic. We don’t have to have an alternative, that’s not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you’re welcome, but if we don’t that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labor.
— China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion