Economic Sociology Quotes

While much of postmodernist analysis should be credited with theoretical imagination, as well as talent for capturing something of the Zeitgeist, this type of analysis nonetheless misses some crucial facts about consumption: that consumption is vitally linked to production; consumption is anchored in concrete relations; and the driving force in consumption is individual interest, as encouraged and often shaped by profit interests. ~ Richard Swedberg

Throughout this book I have tried to point out why interest, especially as it has been used by people such as Hume, Smith, Tocqueville, and Weber, is still a very useful concept. One reason why the concept of interest imparts a distinct dynamic to the analysis is that it is mainly interest which makes people takes action. It supplies the force that makes people get up at dawn and work very hard throughout the day. Combined with interests of others, it is a force that can move mountains and create new societies. ~ Richard Swedberg

The conventional way of understanding taste, according to Distinction, is to view it as a capacity for aesthetic judgments in areas such as music, art, and literature. Though rarely made explicit, it is well understood that taste can be found only among the elite, and that the lower classes lack it. Bourdieu argues that it is imperative to break with this concept of taste and replace it with one that is sociological in nature. In order to do so, Bourdieu expands the concept of taste from including only "aesthetic consumption" to including "ordinary consumption," that is, the consumption of clothing, furniture, and food ([1979] 1986:100). He also extends the concept of taste to all social classes, and shows that what constitutes "good taste" is very much part of the struggle for domination in society. ~ Richard Swedberg

Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn't want you to know something, it won't be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up. ~ George Carlin

As far as male and female are concerned, difference is a biological fact, whereas equality is a political, ethical and social concept. No rule of nature or of social organization says that the sexes have to be the same or do the same things in order to be social, political and economic equals. ~ Alice S. Rossi

While this number puts the economic fragility of America's families in a new light, the shocking statistic is that nine out of every ten black Americans will encounter poverty during their working adult years. ~ Thomas M. Shapiro

The social and racial conflict, which springs from the redistribution ideology, may deepen as economic output is shrinking and transfer 'entitlements cause budget deficits to soar. The U.S. dollar, which has become a mere corollary of government finance, is likely to survive the soaring deficits. ~ Hans F. Sennholz

It seems to me probable that of all our economic life the element on which we are inclined to place too low an estimate is advertising. ~ Calvin Coolidge

People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions, or when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence cases to have any point of meaning ~ Aldous Huxley

The Obama administration seems to be following what might be called 'the Detroit pattern increasing taxes, harassing businesses, and pandering to unions. In the short run, it got mayors re-elected. In the long-run, it reduced Detroit from a thriving city to an economic disaster area, whose population was cut in half, as its most productive citizens fled. ~ Thomas Sowell

I'll bet you didn't think a handful of economists could save the world, did you? You thought the world would end with nuclear war or something? No, it's much more basic than that. It's more likely going to be from a disruption in the water supply, power, and from lack of food due to an economic collapse. Either that or a financial war. ~ Kenneth Eade

The larger unit can borrow more easily in proportion than the smaller. It can especially tap bank credit more easily and bank credit is, to-day, the chief factor in economic activity of all kinds. ~ Hilaire Belloc

This was the very role of the bicycles that wheeled over this same topography Just as seawater defined the tidal lands, the bicycles revealed America's economic and social systems by floating though its bloodstream and coloring-with sparkling chrome, metallic paints, a whir of spokes and flicker of handlebar ribbons-the murkiest corners and furthest reaches. ~ Kimball Taylor

I am asserting that those who love the wilderness should not be wholly deprived of it, that while the reduction of the wilderness has been a good thing, its extermination would be a very bad one, and that the conservation of wilderness is the most urgent and difficult of all the tasks that confront us, because there are no economic laws to help and many to hinder its accomplishment. ~ Aldo Leopold

A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess. ~ A. Philip Randolph

The yearning after equality [in economic outcome] is the offspring of envy and covetousness, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else than rob A to give to B; consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization. ~ William Graham Sumner

Generations will continue to meet the same fate unless the perennial oppressor-Britain-is removed, for she will unashamedly and mercilessly continue to maintain her occupation and economic exploitation of Ireland to judgment day, if she is not halted and ejected. ~ Bobby Sands

The secret of real prosperity in the church is to teach God's people principles of economic empowerment ~ Sunday Adelaja

If China don't free up the political side, its economic growth will come to an end - while it is still at a very low level. ~ Milton Friedman

By failing seriously to confront the most predicable economic crisis in our nation's history, the President's policies are committing us and our children to a diminished future. ~ Paul Ryan

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

I wish politicians the world over would stop claiming credit for economic growth that happens despite them, not because of them. Grow up ... ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

Education remains one of the black community's most enduring values. It is sustained by the belief that freedom and education go hand in hand, that learning and training are essential to economic quality and independence. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

Every individual is representative of the whole ... and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology. ~ Anais Nin

Without Russia's contribution, prices would rise even more. Some members of the EU meet 90% of their demands for gas with the help of Russian hydrocarbons and have no complaints so far. Everybody is happy. Russia is a reliable partner and has never failed her partners in Europe, even in the hardest times of its economic development. ~ Vladimir Putin

Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their 'particles') the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.

It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confi ~ Owen Barfield

No one must ever let power or social, economic, or political interest turn him or her away from other human beings, from the attention they deserve and the respect they are entitled to. nothing must ever lead to a person to compromise this principle or faith in favor of a political strategy aimed at saving or protecting a community from some peril. The freely offered, sincere heart of a poor, powerless individual is worth a thousand times more in the sight of God than the assiduously courted, self-interested heart of a rich one. ~ Tariq Ramadan

It takes centuries for sense to become common ~ Anthony Steyning

The skills and productivity of American Workers, not to mention the taxes they pay, are the greatest economic resource our country has. To condemn large numbers of them to unemployment, to deprive the Treasury of their tax contributions and to force them to live on unemployment at public expense is the most expensive luxury any society ever chose to buy. ~ Lane Kirkland

Small businesses are vital contributors to our economy. They are the economic engine that is creating jobs, exploring innovation, and expanding opportunities for Americans in every community across the Nation. ~ Allyson Schwartz

Our courts provide a neutral forum for the adjudication of disputes under the law, not based on economic or political power, on race, on sex or any other personal characteristics. ~ Jon Kyl

We have now managed to acquire bases all over the world - islands distant as the Australian Archipelago which President Roosevelt seized in 1938 without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress. There is no part of the world where trouble can break out where we do not have bases of some sort of which, if we wish to use the pretension, we cannot claim our interests are menaced. Thus menaced there must remain when the war is over continuing argument in the hands of the imperialists for a vast naval establishment and a huge army ready to attack anywhere or to resist an attack from all the enemies we shall be obliged to have. Because always the most powerful argument for a huge army maintained for economic reasons is that we have enemies. We must have enemies, They will become and economic necessity for us. ~ John T. Flynn

In pure Capitalism (never fully achieved even in America), the government's only role is to protect individual rights, property, and transactions from force or fraud by others via the police and/or courts and to protect the nation and its citizens against foreign aggression via the military. Period. As imperative as it is to understand morality, immorality, and amorality it is vital to understand that capitalism is the only social-political-economic-moral system that protects the individual from all force and fraud, including force or fraud from the government itself. ~ Alexandra York