Quotes About Economics

Sports has always been a pass-through. You pay for something, and then you pass it through to television, you pass it through to advertisers, or you pass it through to season-ticket holders, luxury boxes and then the fans. Then it all adds up, and you take in more than you pass out.

We developed microfinance to fight loan sharks - I was telling people don't go to loan sharks - not trying to take advantage and make money for myself. I would be a junior loan shark if I did... It is not a panacea.

I believe that businesses will do what is best for their business. I don't know that the government needs to be stepping in and telling them, 'This is what you will do.'

I'm old enough to remember when Republicans loved the CBO because it tells the conservatives the thing that matters most to them which is how much is it going to cost taxpayers.

We have a structural problem because you can simultaneously understand the medium to long-term risks of climate change and also come to the conclusion that it is in your short-term economic interest to invest in oil and gas. Which is why, you know, anybody who tells you that the market is going to fix this on its own is lying to you.

Competition is the final price determinant and competitive prices may result in profits which force you to accept a rate of return less than you hoped for, or for that matter to accept temporary losses.

My friends' thirty dollars wouldn't go far with gas at thirty-six cents a gallon.

War never can be the interest of a trading nation any more than quarreling can be profitable to a man in business. But to make war with those who trade with us is like setting a bull-dog upon a customer at the shop-door.

Marriage, like money, is still with us and, like money, progressively devalued.

In short both the things we feel we need and the things available for us to buy depend largely—beyond some point, almost entirely—on the things that others choose to buy.

Homo economicus would cheat only if he stood to benefit by enough and if the odds of being caught were sufficiently low. So the mere fact that he does not have a reputation for being a cheat tells us only that he's been prudent.

Before Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren went into politics, she and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, coauthored a book in which they asked why most one-earner couples could live comfortably within their budgets in the 1950s, yet the two-earner couples that had become the norm by the 1990s often struggled to make ends meet.9 Their answer was that the second paycheck went largely to fuel a bidding war for houses in better school districts.

the effects of a decline in any one person's after-tax income are dramatically different from those of an across-the-board decline. If you alone experience an income decline, you're less able to buy what you want. But when everyone's income declines simultaneously, relative purchasing power is unaffected. And it's relative purchasing power that determines who gets things that are in short supply.

Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.

After leaving the Arts Council in 2009, he pointed out that, in the official portraits of past Council chairmen, John Maynard Keynes was the only one smiling. That was because Keynes died before ever having to chair a Council meeting.25

The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.

Robert J. Shiller

Koopmans pointed out, 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.

The world solidly abandoned the gold standard in 1971. Since then, countries have used fiat money—that is, money not backed by anything.

unlike economists, the general public believed in a wage lag hypothesis: the idea that wage increases would forever lag behind price increases, and therefore that inflation had a direct and long-term negative impact on living standards. In short, the wage-price spiral offered a geometrical mental image of one's economic status spiraling down for as long as strong aggressive demands of labor kept it happening.

Narrative economics demonstrates how popular stories change through time to affect economic outcomes, including not only recessions and depressions, but also other important economic phenomena. The idea that house prices can only go up attaches to the stories of rich house flippers seen on television. The idea that gold is the safest investment attaches to stories of war and depression. These narratives have a contagious element, even if their attachment to any given celebrity is tenuous.

International order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others- in this case, the domination of liberal principles of economics, domestic politics, and international relations over other, nonliberal principles. It will last only as long as those who imposed it retain the capacity to defend it.

[The great economists] can be called the worldly philosophers, for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of all of man's activities—his drive for wealth.

Nevertheless these first readings will give us a chance to think about a matter that we would certainly consider to be at the heart of economics—the drive to gain wealth.