Economics Quotes

Design is a way of life, a point of view. It involves the whole complex of visual communications: talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge. Aesthetics and economics, technology and psychology are intrinsically related to the process. ~ Paul Rand

I gradually became persuaded that the subjects, without intending to, had revealed to me a basic truth about markets that was foreign to the literature of economics. ~ Vernon L. Smith

We all know how 'modern democracies take loaves from the wealthy.' It's the slipups in the 'pass them out to the poor' department that inspire a study of Economics. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and the richest nation in the history of the world was talking about how to keep a budget. ~ Walter Mosley

One conceit of economics is that markets as a whole can perform fairly rationally, even if many of the participants within them are irrational. But irrational behavior in the markets may result precisely because individuals are responding rationally according to their incentives. ~ Nate Silver

Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant. ~ Friedrich Hayek

Recognize that good economics cannot be divorced from good politics: this is perhaps a reason why the field of economics was known as political economy. ~ Anonymous

The equal and sustainable right of access to the Earth's bounty seems one of the most transcendent truths a human being can contemplate. Yet, this right is missing from the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The fact that this single principle is violated on an ongoing basis is quite possibly the root cause of many, if not most, other human rights violations. ~ Martin Adams

I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring. ~ Albert Jay Nock

People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn't. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs. ~ Nick Hanauer

Except to the insane narrow-mindedness of industrial economics, selfishness does not pay. ~ Wendell Berry

Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

It appears - because it has been the case for twenty years - that every problem is solvable ... that no matter how badly the world economy slumps there is a pain-free way out of it. Once the realization dawns that there is not, and that the pain will be severe, the question is posed that has not really been posed for twenty years: who should feel it? ~ Paul Mason

Economics is the continuation of energy/resources by other means. ~ Michael Ruppert

The dream of a planned, fair, moral, ethical, cash-free society remains strong, particularly among socialists and liberals. It clearly represents a fundamental human instinct. But feudalism just did not work very well, if only because powerful people will not always obey moral imperatives. ~ Terence Kealey

Everyone in the United States is so intense about maintaining a separation between Church and State when the real concern should be about keeping a separation between Corporations and State
because in America (and most of the rest of the Western World, for that matter) economics is the real religion. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

And more than the quality of its institutions, what distinguishes a developed country from a developing one is the degree of consensus in its politics, and thus its ability to take actions to secure a better future despite short-term pain. ~ Raghuram G. Rajan

Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do. ~ Aldous Huxley

Everybody feels better about himself, his community, and his country if employers are paying workers well. Economics, though, teaches that if every employer is pressured to raise wages, some labor will be priced out of the market. ~ Edmund Phelps

Thirty years ago, if you said the country was living beyond its means, people would have thought about economics. Now, if you talk about the country, or the planet living beyond its means, you think about the environment. We are taking out more than we are giving back. We are consuming energy, water, and other natural resources in a way that is leading to huge and often irreversible damage to the planet. So too are most other developed nations. And so too will China and India if they follow the same path of economic development as us ~ David Miliband

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

But now, I, August Comte, have discovered the truth. Therefore, there is no longer any need for freedom of thought or freedom of the press. I want to rule and to organize the whole country. ~ Auguste Comte

It is ironic that Keynesianism originated as a weapon to combat depression, but became universally accepted and "successful" only during (and because of!) the postwar expansion. At the first sign of renewed world recession, Keynesian theory has proved itself to be a snare and a delusion that has gone into immediate bankruptcy. The resulting "post-Keynesian synthesis" is also the theoretical reason for the reactionary exhumation of the simplistic, neoclassical, and monetarist economic theory of the 1920s. This revival of old theory is highlighted by the award of Nobel prizes in economics to Friedrich von Hayek, whose theoretical work was done before the Great Depression, and Milton Friedman, whose lone voice echoed in the wilderness until the new world economic crisis put his unpopular and antipopulist theories on the agenda of business board rooms and government cabinet rooms in one capitalist country after another. The real reason for the recent interest in fifty-year-old theories is that capital now wants them to legitimize its attack on the welfare state and "unproductive" expenditures on social services, which capital claims to need for "productive" investment in industry, including armaments. ~ Andre Gunder Frank

Whenever land is bought and sold, three stakeholders automatically vie for a cut from the revenue that can be had from land: the community, the property owner, and the institutions that finance property ownership. With land-use rights, the revenue from land value increases is primarily recycled back to the community rather than captured by banks and property owners. ~ Martin Adams

My background is economics and maths. I think one of the reasons I studied humanities at all, or even went into journalism, is because, like, science and maths wasn't cool in England when I was growing up. No one ever talked to the engineering students at Oxford. ~ Nick Denton

There is no room at all for independent enterprise under any variety of State Socialism. Prices are to be regulated authoritatively; authority is to fix what is to be produced, and how, and in what quantities. There is to be no speculation, no 'excessive' profit, no loss. There is to be no innovation unless it be decreed by authority. The official is to direct and supervise everything. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

I would go one step further and say that the willingness to challenge professional economists - and other experts - should be the foundation of democracy. When you think about it, if all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having a democracy at all? Unless we want our societies to be run by a body of self-elected experts, we all have to learn economics and challenge professional economists ~ Ha-Joon Chang

Miss Climpson," said Lord Peter, "is a manifestation of the wasteful way in which this country is run. Look at electricity, Look at water-power. Look at the tides. Look at the sun. Millions of power units being given off into space every minute. Thousands of old maids, simply bursting with useful energy, forced by our stupid social system into hydros and hotels and communities and hostels and posts as companions, where their magnificent gossip-powers and units of inquisitiveness are allowed to dissipate themselves or even become harmful to the community, while the ratepayers' money is spent on getting work for which these women are providentially fitted, inefficiently carried out by ill-equipped policemen like you. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Yet if anyone cares to read over the now crumbling minutes giving an account of the meetings at which the Italian Fasci di Combattimento were founded, he will find not a doctrine but a series of pointers ... It may be objected that this program implies a return to the guilds (corporazioni). No matter! ... I therefore hope this assembly will accept the economic claims advanced by national syndicalism. ~ Benito Mussolini

Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses
like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work
that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster. ~ Lawrence Lessig

I've felt for some time that economics needs to be taught differently by economists who actually have had experience making a payroll or investing on Wall Street. When economics is taught by pure academics, watch out. ~ Mark Skousen

In California, the state's huge dairy herd produces twenty-seven million tons of manure a year, the particulates and vapors from which have helped to make air quality in the argiculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley worse than it is Los Angeles. ~ Paul Roberts

There is a small minority of well-educated people with relatively sensible views on economics, and an extremely tiny minority of economists with highly sensible views. Then there's everybody else ... To win, a politician needs to please the median voter. It makes little difference if a few thousand economists think you a fool. ~ Bryan Caplan

But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics. ~ Joseph Stiglitz

All of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers, thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. It has never come about through permanent unemployment, but temporary unemployment, in the process of shifting people from one area to another. ~ Milton Friedman

Natural science, economics, and politics depend on literature, philosophy, and religion for educating the imagination... we cannot oppose facts to values, but... all facts are integrated into meaningful wholes through a personal commitment to some kind of vision of how things ought to be. If this universal hermeneutic claim is true, then the shaping of our imagination through historical, philosophical, and literary texts in the humanities is indeed paramount. ~ Jens Zimmermann

I work in the field of art, and you know how during a period of Marxist ideology, fewer people are inclined to believe in the power of the culture as a whole: they believe in the revolutionary potential of economics, class struggle theory ... Therefore it's time to show that art means the power of creativity, and it's time to define art in a larger way, to include science and religion too..(1973 ~ Joseph Beuys

The individualism of current economic theory is manifest in the purely self-interested behavior it generally assumes. It has no real place for fairness, malevolence, and benevolence, nor for the preservation of human life or any other moral concern. ~ Herman E. Daly

The number of hypotheses and theories about climate change are numerous. Quite naturally they have caught the public attention, as any proof of past climactic change points to the possibility of future climate change, which inevitably will have significant implications for global economics. ~ Eduard Bruckner

But no moral philosopher, from Aristotle to Aquinas, to John Locke and Adam Smith, divorced economics from a set of moral ends or held the production of wealth to be an end in itself; rather it was seen as a means to the realization of virtue, a means of leading a civilized life. ~ Daniel Bell

I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as, roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything. ~ Lars Peter Hansen

The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272) ~ Victor Davis Hanson

I'd call it a new version of voodoo economics, but I'm afraid that would give witch doctors a bad name. ~ Geraldine Ferraro

In my considered opinion, salary is payment for goods delivered and it must conform to the law of supply and demand. If, therefore, the fixed salary is a violation of this law - as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together and both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other only earns two thousand , or when lawyers and hussars, possessing no special qualifications, are appointed directors of banks with huge salaries - I can only conclude that their salaries are not fixed according to the law of supply and demand but simply by personal influence. And this is an abuse important in itself and having a deleterious effect on government service. ~ Leo Tolstoy

There is a bizarre notion according to which it is claimed that because men are corrupt, it is necessary to give certain of them all the more power ... on the contrary, they must be given less power. ~ Benjamin Constant

It is government policy to phase out subsidies to nationalised industries. In line with this, the government hopes that the coal industry will be able to operate without the need for assistance apart from social grants. ~ Tony Benn

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. ~ Ayn Rand

The error in this conclusion may be most simply demonstrated by means of an actual example. Let us select for this purpose the monetary history of Austria, which Laughlin also uses as an illustration. From 1859 onwards the Austrian National Bank was released from the obligation to convert its notes on demand into silver, and nobody could tell when the State paper-money issued in 1866 would be redeemed, or even if it would be redeemed at all. It was not until the later 'nineties that the transition to metallic money was completed by the actual resumption of cash payments on the part of the Austro-Hungarian Bank. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

I think green buildings are extremely important but it's only part of the equation. A lot of people think that if I put a green building everything is going to be fine, but actually it's not just the green buildings we need, but green businesses, green governments, green economics. We have to extend the greening of buildings to our business and our lifestyles - that is the most important thing to do next. ~ Ken Yeang

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything
evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing
it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing. ~ Michael Crichton

Of valid economics pre-dating the Power Age (steam and electricity), there remains not a vestige. Of valid economics pre-dating the intensive and extensive use of electricity there will soon exist only rags and tatters. We still have to thank Adam Smith for insisting 'Consumption is the sole end and purpose of production;' but the old form of the law of demand and supply is outmoded, since supply has become practically inexhaustible. ~ Harriet Boyd Hawes

I do not intend to defend capitalism or capitalists. They, like everything human, have their defects. I only say their possibilities of usefulness are not ended.
Capitalism has borne the monstrous burden of the war and today still has the strength to shoulder the burdens of peace ...
It is not simply and solely an accumulation of wealth, it is an elaboration, a selection, a co-ordination of values which is the work of centuries ...
Many think, and I myself am one of them, that capitalism is scarcely at the beginning of its story. ~ Benito Mussolini

There is a deeper truth expressed in the unity of the United States. Implicate in the union of our country is the union of all people. All people are essentially one. The world is interconnected not only on the material level of economics, trade, communication, and transportation, but innerconnected through human consciousness, through the human heart, through the heart of the world, through the simply expressed impulse and yearning to be and to breathe free. ~ Dennis Kucinich

What undercuts the power of women's anger in the end is not the melancholy that Butler charts, but material realities - economics, not psychology. While Em fantasizes about the possibility of Afro- and Euro-Jamaican women building partnerships to work for each other, she seems to understand that she has no concrete possibilities for realizing this fantasy in 1920s Jamaica. ~ Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

The intellectual's hostility to the businessman presents no mystery, as the two have, by function, wholly different standards. While the businessman's motto is the customer is always right, the intellectual's task is to preserve his perceived standards against the weight of popular opinion. ~ Bertrand De Jouvenel

What pays under capitalism is satisfying the common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for you. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Save the trees! Return to the gold standard! ~ Ron Brackin

The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Bin Laden comes out of a business background - he studied public administration and economics at university, and he worked for his family company, which was obviously a rather successful enterprise. ~ Peter L. Bergen

The first black borough presidents of Manhattan were West Indians. As late as 1970, the highest ranking blacks in New York's police department were West Indians, as were all the black federal judges in the city. The 1970 census showed that black West Indian families in the New York metropolitan area had 28 percent higher incomes than the families of American blacks. The incomes of second-generation West Indian families living in the same area exceeded that of black families by 58 percent. Neither race nor racism can explain such differences. Nor can slavery, since native-born blacks and West Indian blacks both had a history of slavery. ~ Thomas Sowell

The more propaganda ... conservatives spread for capitalist economics while at the same time preaching collectivism morally and philosophically , the more nails they'll drive into capitalism's coffin. ~ Ayn Rand

The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective on the Human Animal" by Jon D. Hanson and David G. Yosifon, along with its companion piece, "The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture." Situationism ~ Charles Eisenstein

No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves. ~ Matthew Desmond

The eighteenth century discovery that, in an institutional framework that facilitates voluntary exchanges among individuals, this process generates results that might be evaluated positively, produced 'economics,' as an independent academic discipline or science. ~ James M. Buchanan

God has given to men all that is necessary for them to accomplish their destinies. He has provided a social form as well as a human form. And these social organs of humans are so constituted that they will develop themselves harmoniously in the clean air of liberty. Away, then, with the quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!
And, now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works. ~ Frederic Bastiat

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem. ~ Clay Shirky

Making a show is also economics. Because the irony is, or the shame of it is, you cannot create a show instantaneously. It needs to be massaged. You need to see who is relating to who. How is it working with the audience? You need to give it a chance for the audience to find it, because there are so many outlets. And the audience doesn't know where to go. ~ Henry Winkler

I'm very lucky to be able to work in print and radio. I'm very lucky to be able to work at a time when finance and economics are really important. And the number of people who tell finance and economic stories in a kind of accessible storytelling way, there's much more demand than there is supply. ~ David Plotz

I am not against a little inflation. ~ Manny Shinwell, Baron Shinwell

There is no Death with Dignity when people choose to die because health care economics and the social services system prevent life with dignity. ~ Marta Russell

The theory of the IRS is rather repugnant to me because the assumption is made that I, the government, owns 100% of your income and I permit you to keep 5%, 10% or 20%. You're vulnerable, you've sold out. The government can take 80% if they want, which they did at one time. ~ Ron Paul

Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other. ~ Harry S. Truman

Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe. ~ Friedrich Hayek

The proposal that the human household originated in competition over food presents a challenge to conventional thinking because it holds economics as primary and sexual relations as secondary. ~ Richard W. Wrangham

In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves. ~ Walter E. Williams

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. ~ Milton Friedman

Roughly speaking, I think it's accurate to say that a corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system as well, at least in very large measure. ~ Noam Chomsky

Now there are heavy houses everywhere and more of them are being built. In fact, it is only when more houses are being constructed that some countries consider their economics healthy. Yet each house is a heavy footprint on the Earth. Just as all our possessions represent-if we cannot learn ways of sharing them-a weight and clutter that often means the faces of future generations will look up into darkness and the pressure on the Earth of "things." ~ Alice Walker

Economics graduate students are far more likely to free-ride than other students. ~ John Brockman

We need to revise our economic thinking to give full value to our natural resources. This revised economics will stabilize both the theory and the practice of free-market capitalism. It will provide business and public policy with a powerful new tool for economic development, profitability, and the promotion of the public good. ~ Paul Hawken

Rights are something made up by governments to make you feel like you're buying something with your taxes. ~ Stefan Molyneux

No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Contrary to economists' beliefs, the informal sectors of the world's economies, in total, are predominant, and the institutionalized, monetized sectors grow out of them and rest upon them, rather than the reverse. ~ Hazel Henderson

The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker. ~ Nick Hanauer

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century. ~ Stephen Hawking

The ideal-worker standard and norm of work devotion push mothers to the margins of economic life. And a society that marginalizes its mothers impoverishes its children. That is why the paradigmatic poor family in the United States is a single mother and her child. ~ Joan C. Williams

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, LL. D. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Everybody thinks of economics whether he is aware of it or not. In joining a political party or in casting his ballot, the citizen implicitly takes a stand upon essential economic theories. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy. ~ Christopher Lasch

Only a true faith that applies God's Word to everything-incl uding economics-will lead to the revival and reformation our culture needs so badly. ~ R.C. Sproul

In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Economists tell us that the 'price' of an object and its 'value' have very little or nothing to do with one another. 'Value' is entirely subjective economic value, anyway while 'price' reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a 'fair price' betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process. ~ L. Neil Smith

The lesson from behavioral economics is that people only save if it's automatic. ~ Richard Thaler

Inflation takes from the ignorant and gives to the well informed. ~ Venita VanCaspel

When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly. ~ Paul Krugman

Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave. ~ Ellen Willis

Human Nature is not a problem that can be fixed by rules and regulations. All solutions to the existing problems must be based on how people behave, not on how we think they should behave. ~ Kirk Chisholm

As an economics professor I am by nature inclined to the view that the truth isn't out there, it's in here - that usually you learn a lot more by thinking really hard about the data than you do by sniffing around for supposedly inside information. ~ Paul Krugman