Economics Quotes - Page 3

The markets make a good servant but a bad master, and a worse religion.
Amory B. Lovins
They ask - "How much money is too much money?"The answer always is - "A little more!
Anonymous
Minimum standards to promote workers' wages, health and safety, to safeguard the community against pollution and degradation, and to ensure basic life goods for all as a basic contract for civil society was between 1945 and the mid-1970s, in fact, a rapidly evolving framework which inhibited the causes and effects of a corporate market system committed to an opposed goal.
John McMurtry
Ban short-selling, high speed trading and all other instruments of pure speculation
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
Nynaeve shook her head. She supposed it was one way to find money for the poor. Simply rob anyone who was not poor. Of course, that would just make everyone poor in the end, but it might work for a time
Robert Jordan
Two mystic states can be dissociated: the ecstatic-beneficent-and-benevolent, contemplation of the divine love, the divine splendour with goodwill toward others.And the bestial, namely the fanatical, the man on fire with God and anxious to stick his snotty nose into other men's business or reprove his neighbour for having a set of tropisms different from that of the fanatic's, or for having the courage to live more greatly and openly.The second set of mystic states is manifest in scarcity economists, in repressors etc.The first state is a dynamism. It has, time and again, driven men to great living, it has given them courage to go on for decades in the face of public stupidity. It is paradisical and a reward in itself seeking naught further... perhaps because a feeling of certitude inheres in the state of feeling itself. The glory of life exists without further proof for this mystic.
Ezra Pound
All types of societies are limited by economic factors. Nineteenth century civilization alone was economic in a different and distinctive sense, for it chose to base itself in a motive rarely acknowledged as valid in history of human societies, and certainly never before raised to the level of justification of action and behavior in everyday life, namely, gain. The self-regulating market system was uniquely derived from this principle. The mechanism which the motive gain set in motion was comparable in effectiveness only to the most violent outburst of religious fervor in history. Within a generation the whole human world was subjected to its undiluted influence.
Karl Polanyi
In the Soviet Union you weren’t allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors.
Kalle Lasn
Even Adam Smith's "invisible hand" occasionally needs a slap on the wrist.
Bill Mech
Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation – "It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?"Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.
Frédéric Bastiat
Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from the goal of full production and taken as an end in itself
Henry Hazlitt
Fear is a subject that I have become increasingly aware of—the result of a period that I call post-divorce. Admittedly aware of the general concerns about “falling” too, I am more concerned about the burdens of a non-custodial—the dilemma of parental alienation with absolute liability for financial support. If any 'positive' aspect could be extracted from the non-custodial lifestyle, it is the accelerated-track toward financial distress and familial disparity. What may have occurred in the 1930s in a mass economic-downward spiral of society has similarity to the consequences of the divorce—as I see it.
H. Kirk Rainer
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
Rand had changed a number of laws in Tear, especially those that weighed heavily on the poor, but he had been unable to change everything. He had not even known how to begin. Lews Therin began to maunder on about taxes and money creating jobs, but he might as well have been spilling out words at random for all the sense he made.
Robert Jordan
Economics has made good on its promise to deliver prosperity and democratic freedom to much of the world, but in doing away with the age-old problems of humanity, it has opened up a crisis of an entirely new variety.
Philip Roscoe
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
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
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
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
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
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
In the first instance, it is probably true that in general the higher the education and intelligence of individuals becomes, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values. It is a corollary of this that if we wish to find a high degree of uniformity and similarity of outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and "common" instincts and tastes prevail. This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values are very similar are the people with low standards. It is, as it were, the lowest common denominator which unites the largest number of people. If a numerous group is needed, strong enough to impose their views on the values of life on all the rest, it will never be those with highly differentiated and developed tastes -it will be those who form the "mass" in the derogatory sense of the term, the least original and independent, who will be able to put the weight of their numbers behind their particular ideals.
Friedrich A. Hayek
What is called economic power, while it can be an instrument of coercion, is in the hands of private individuals never exclusive or complete power, never power over the whole life of a person. But centralised as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Something needs to be said about the role of anonymity and digital pseudonyms. This is a topic for an essay unto itself, of course. Are true names really needed? Why are they asked for? Does the nation state have any valid reason to demand they be used? People want to know who they are dealing with, for psychological/evolutionary reasons and to better ensure traceability should they need to locate a person to enforce the terms of a transaction. The purely anonymous person is perhaps justifiably viewed with suspicion. And yet pseudonyms are successful in many cases. We rarely know whether someone who presents himself by some name is “actually” that person. Authors, artists, performers, etc., often use pseudonyms. What matters is persistence and nonforgeability. Crypto provides this.
Peter Ludlow
A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in atotally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the true name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive rerouting of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.
Peter Ludlow
It's easy to make money when you have a lot of it.
Max Tegmark
Adapt and adopt the peer-to-peer and open source models to wider implementation in organisations
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
CEOs should be measured by the value they create into the community, the shareholders and the members of the company.
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.
Pew Research Center
There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.
Nicholas Carr
In families one can’t choose one’s siblings. Within regions one doesn’t choose one’s neighbors. And if you are one of the world’s leading producers of a critical industrial resource like copper, in the end you can’t really choose your customers. China and Zambia will just have to get along.
Howard W. French
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Economics. "Something humans invented and then lost control of, it isn't real, it's not like gravity and we could evolve the economic process to make sense, but can't because we would all lose money if we did. Hysterical scientific exerts aside, it doesn't exist outside of our collective heads. So at best its a pseudo science of religious proportions, at worst, it will turn us into a globally warmed suicide cult en mass. ;-)
Steve Merrick
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
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
The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.
Richard Davenport-Hines
At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.
Richard Davenport-Hines
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
Protectionism does not produce wealth, and free trade and economic openness are ultimately in everyone’s interest
Thomas Piketty
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
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
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
...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
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
Economic crises breed war.
Alex Callinicos
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
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
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

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