Quotes About Economics

Government doesn't "intrude" on the "free market." It creates the market. The rules are neither neutral nor universal, and they are not permanent. Different societies at different times have adopted different versions. The rules partly mirror a society's evolving norms and values but also reflect who in society has the most power to make or influence them.

Hitler was one of the shrewdest manipulators of the scapegoating mechanism. He brought the deeply divided German nation of the 1930s together precisely by assigning the Jews as a scapegoat for the country's economic, political, and cultural woes.

U.S. Internal Revenue Service: an agency modeled after the revenue raising concepts of the 19th century economist, Jesse James.

Using the official $1 per day line, we estimate that [from 1970 to 2006] world poverty rates have fallen by 80 percent.

These developments were not due to a conspiracy among the rich nor simply to colonialism (although it played a role). They were the result of one of the fundamental principles of economics – comparative advantage.

The cost of automating acceptance tests is so small in comparison to the cost of executing manual test plans that it makes no economic sense to write scripts for humans to execute.

Confronted with urgent practical problems centering in the need to industrialize without delay, the collective party leadership shifted the center of gravity more to economics than to "culturalizing." The party debate on how best to build socialism in Russia turned largely into a debate about industrialization,

We must make ourselves study as deeply as possible the technology we use, the functioning of the group we work in, the economics of our field, its lifeblood. We must constantly ask the questions—how do things work, how do decisions get made, how does the group interact?

Price fixing is a bit like jumping off a tall building shouting, "I abolish the law of gravity." You cannot simply decree that something is worth more than anyone will pay for it or less than sellers will accept for it.

More important, such events share a second feature, one that is absent from an increase in taxes: they reduce our own incomes while leaving others' incomes unaffected. Higher taxes, in contrast, reduce all incomes in tandem. This difference holds the key to understanding the mother of all cognitive illusions.

Fear is historically the strongest emotion in economics. Remember FDR in the Great Depression? It's the most famous quote in financial history: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In fact fear is probably the strongest human emotion, period. Whoever woke at four in the morning because they were feeling happy?

TANSTAAFL There ain't no such thing as a free lunch) by Robert Heinlein from his book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

We need to incorporate the contagion of narratives into economic theory. Otherwise, we remain blind to a very real, very palpable, very important mechanism for economic change, as well as a crucial element for economic forecasting. If we do not understand the epidemics of popular narratives, we do not fully understand changes in the economy and in economic behavior.

Trying to understand major economic events by looking only at data on changes in economic aggregates, such as gross domestic product, wage rates, interest rates, and tax rates, runs the risk of missing the underlying motivations for change. Doing so is like trying to understand a religious awakening by looking at the cost of printing religious tracts.

traditional economic approaches fail to examine the role of public beliefs in major economic events—that is, narrative. By incorporating an understanding of popular narratives into their explanations of economic events, economists will become more sensitive to such influences when they forecast the future. In doing so, they will give policymakers better tools for anticipating and dealing with these developments.

En el futuro, va a tener más sentido pagarle a la gente para que se quede en casa.

El papel moneda no es riqueza.

laws of economics. It creates aggressive competition within its own ranks, but does its best to remove all outside competitors. That's what multi-nationals are all about

The philosophy of a conglomerate is to buy as far and as wide as possible and diversify its markets. It both uses and refutes the Malthusian

We can anticipate Mises's ultimate conclusion: There is no viable third system. People must choose between capitalism and socialism.

the Yankee dollar and Confederate dumbness combined to heal the wounds of four years of fratricidal strife. . .

That old unionism was, however, very different from the kind we live with now. We do not live with an ideal, sometimes on the defensive, of union. We live with the overriding, overwhelming fact, a fact so technologically, economically, and politically validated that we usually forget to ask how fully this fact represents a true community, the spiritually significant communion which the old romantic unionism had envisaged.

To think about fairness, think of economic life as a game - a serious game. All ideas about fairness can be divided into two broad groups. They are: - It isn't fair if the result isn't fair. - It isn't fair if the rules aren't fair.

Many reasons had been given, and every man adopted the rationale which suited his own particular emotionality. But what seemed obvious at the time became less so as the years passed. Professors of history argued, experts in economics demurred, psychologists begged to differ, and anthropologists felt it necessary to point out.