Economic Input Quotes

And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain. ~ Alain De Botton

Our people can draw on the tremendous strides made in recent years, not only in terms of advancing themselves spiritually and materially, but also in having weathered social and economic turbulence, triggered, in the main, by factors not of their own creation. ~ Denzil Douglas

In Craig Blomberg's survey of the Mosaic laws of gleaning, releasing, tithing, and the Jubilee, he concludes that the Biblical attitude toward wealth and possessions does not fit into any of the normal categories of democratic capitalism, or of traditional monarchial feudalism, or of state socialism. The rules for the use of land in the Biblical laws challenge all major contemporary economic models. They "suggest a sharp critique of 1) the statism that disregards the precious treasure of personal rootage, and 2) the untrammeled individualism which secures individuals at the expense of community."38 ~ Timothy Keller

Markets do not automatically generate trust, cooperation or collective action for the common good. Quite the contrary: it is in the nature of economic competition that a participant who breaks the rules will triumph - at least in the short run - over more ethically sensitive competitors. ~ Tony Judt

I have spoken about deficits, and I think deficits are important because they address broad economic and financial stability. We need to talk about that. ~ Ben Bernanke

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today`s shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift. ~ Gabor Mate

The concurrence of two elements is necessary for bringing about a revolution; and by revolution I do not mean the street warfare, nor the bloody conflicts of two parties - both being mere incidents dependent upon many circumstances - but the sudden overthrow of institutions which are the outgrowths of centuries past, the sudden uprising of new ideas and new conceptions, and the attempt to reform all political and economical institutions in a radical way - all at the same time. Two separate currents must converge to come to that result: a widely spread economic revolt, tending to change the economical conditions of the masses, and a political revolt, tending to modify the very essence of the political organisation - an economical change, supported by an equally important change of political institutions. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business. ~ Clayton Christensen

It's about getting a more democratic Wales for the purpose of improving our economic performance, for improving the delivery of health care, for raising educational standards. ~ Ron Davies

Our present tax system ... exerts too heavy a drag on growth ... It reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking ... The present tax load ... distorts economic judgments and channels an undue amount of energy into efforts to avoidtaxliabilities. ~ John F. Kennedy

Let's think about how we can bring economic development, let's see if people could learn a little more of the rule of law, rather than the rule of man, which is kind of what you see in China. ~ John Kasich

The third of the biblical Ten Commandments instructs humans never to make wrongful use of the name of God. People tend to understand this in a childish way, as a prohibition on uttering the explicit name of God (as in the famous Monty Python sketch 'If you say Jehovah...'). Perhaps the deeper meaning of this commandment is that we should never use the name of God to justify our political interests, our economic ambitions, or our personal hatreds. As a resident of the Middle East I am keenly aware how often people break this commandment. The world would be a much better place if we followed it more devotedly. You want to wage war on your neighbours and steal their land? Leave God out of it, and find yourself some other excuse. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

College has been oversold. It has been oversold to students who end up dropping out or graduating with degrees that don't help them very much in the job market. It also has been oversold to the taxpayers, who foot the bill for subsidies that do nothing to encourage innovation and economic growth. ~ Alex Tabarrok

There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation. ~ Frederic Bastiat

This economic pie that is getting ready to explode before our eyes is going to be shared equally. ~ Ray Nagin

How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scares by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred - by economic inequity - faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices. ~ Howard Zinn

If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior. ~ D. A. Carson

It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out. ~ Niall Ferguson

When you do children's TV or one episode [guest] stuff, you have to listen, which is also a great thing to learn. But you don't have individual input. ~ Yasmin Paige

Turkey is a model of economic and social development, especially in terms of human resources and regional cooperation. ~ Victor Ponta

One thing that's important to point out is that this kind of populism has a long and mixed history. It's part of this tradition of problematic anti-elitism where the elites are always the liberal class - the intellectuals, the professors, the artists - and not the economic elites. Why are we so mad and aggrieved at newspaper editors but not at corporate executives? I think we need to look more at the latter, at economic elites. ~ Astra Taylor

So far we have seen the weakening and collapse of small and medium-sized states in Africa and the Middle East. But quasi-anarchy in larger states like Russia and China, on which the territorial organization of Eurasia hinges, could be next - tied to structural economic causes linked, in turn, to slow growth world-wide. ~ Robert D. Kaplan

The economic dimension is very clear. I was at a dinner party, a mother got up, who's a very distinguished scientist, and said she had to get home and help her daughter with her homework. The two waiters, their faces changed. They were working their second jobs, they couldn't get home to help their kids with homework. ~ Donna Shalala

The world has also learned that economic growth, by itself, cannot close the gap between rich and poor. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

If democracy is justified in governing the state,then it must also be justified in governing economic enterprises, and to say that it is not justified in governing economic enterprises is to imply that it is not justified in governing the state. ~ Robert A. Dahl

By seeing the problem of poverty merely in terms of assistance, we overlook that our enormous economic advantage is deeply tainted by how it accumulated over the course of one historical process that has devastated the societies and cultures of four continents. ~ Thomas Pogge

Not only does the liberal paradigm not even come close to agreeing with the social and economic reality on the ground today, worse, it has largely congealed into a political religion ... ~ John Steele Gordon

In the eighties and nineties, the innovation agenda was exclusively focused on enterprises. There was a time in which economic and social issues were seen as separate. Economy was producing wealth, society was spending. In the 21st century economy, this is not true anymore. Sectors like health, social services and education have a tendency to grow, in GDP percentage as well as in creating employment, whereas other industries are decreasing. In the long term, an innovation in social services or education will be as important as an innovation in the pharmaceutical or aerospatial industry. ~ Diogo Vasconcelos

The problem is, if at all, in the different view of the economy, of economic growth. Growth is too low, even for us. That needs to change: More investments, a stronger role by the European Central Bank. Otherwise, there are no tensions between Italy and Germany. But on this point, compromises must be reached and we will reach them. ~ Paolo Gentiloni

German economic salvation has been brought about solely through the efforts of the German people and the experience they have gained. Countries abroad have contributed nothing to this. ~ Adolf Hitler

By contrast, the traditional revolutionary demand for council forms of organization (what Hannah Arendt describes as "the revolutionary heritage") does not break completely with the terrain of hierarchical society. Workers' councils originate as class councils. Unless one assumes that workers are driven by their interests as workers to revolutionary measures against hierarchical society (an assumption I flatly deny), then these councils can be used just as much to perpetuate class society as to destroy it. We shall see, in fact, that the council form contains many structural limitations which favor the development of hierarchy. For the present, it suffices to say that most advocates of workers' councils tend to conceive of people primarily as economic entities, either as workers or nonworkers. This conception leaves the onesidedness of the self completely intact. Man is viewed as a bifurcated being, the product of a social development that divides man from man and each man from himself.
Nor is this one-sided view completely corrected by demands for workers' management of production and the shortening of the work week, for these demands leave the nature of the work process and the quality of the worker's free time completely untouched. If workers' councils and workers' management of production do not transform the work into a joyful activity, free time into a marvelous experience, and the workplace into a community, then they remain merely formal structures, in fact, cla ~ Murray Bookchin

Imposition of the death penalty is arbitrary and capricious. Decision of who will live and who will die for his crime turns less on the nature of the offense and the incorrigibility of the offender and more on inappropriate and indefensible considerations: the political and personal inclinations of prosecutors; the defendant's wealth, race and intellect; the race and economic status of the victim; the quality of the defendant's counsel; and the resources allocated to defense lawyers. ~ Gerald Heaney

Strike not for a few cents more an hour, because the price of living will be raised faster still, but strike for all you earn, be content with nothing less. ~ Lucy Parsons

It seems not to matter that we are at the brink of a war that may spread beyond Afghanistan and Iraq to Iran and Georgia and then where? To Syria? To North Korea? To China? That we in America are in economic doldrums and are seeing small businesses fold and houses reclaimed by banks and a smouldering panic that is palpable everywhere. ~ Richard Schiff

The perfect pop song is a 20th-century creation; it's not a sonnet, it's not an opera, it's something short - three and a half minutes by nature - and has this ability to travel and to defy class and economic structures. ~ Doug Aitken

Our country today is at a cross-point of several crises that were triggered by three groups of causes: the effects of the 2008 world crisis, the external political and economic pressure, and the internal problems and constraints that have built up in our economy ~ Dmitry Medvedev

The socialist system, however, forbids this fundamental freedom to choose one's own career. Under socialist conditions, there is only one economic authority, and it has the right to determine all matters concerning production. ~ Ludwig Von Mises