Quotes About Economics

Not surprisingly Wells places the City of London—the international center of banking culture—and its financial credit as responsible for knitting together world economic life over the previous hundred years. With these innovations in communications and finance, but also with the frustrations and wars inherent (so he says) in the existence of independent national states and sovereignties, came about the gradual dawning of the idea of the World-State.

Mayer Rothschild believed his oft-repeated quote, "Permit me to control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.

Vereinigte Stahlwerke and

Yet today, religion has waned, especially in highly developed nations. Now the favored method of control is through money.

Market positions are either profitable or unprofitable, period.

bought into Milton Friedman's 1970 New York Times essay "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits

People are so cheap. Everyone wants quality, no one wants to pay for it. Here's the suburban dream-- to hire great workers who are such meek morons that they don't have the guts to ask for a living wage.

Performance, Porter argues, must be defined in terms that reflect the economic purpose every organization shares: to produce goods or services whose value exceeds the sum of the costs of all the inputs. In other words, organizations are supposed to use resources effectively. The financial measure that best captures this idea is return on invested capital (ROIC).

In the oft-told joke, one economist says to another, "Sure, it works in reality. But will it work in theory?" Porter's work endures—and is so widely cited and used—because it works in both realms, theory and practice.

The five forces framework explains the industry's average prices and costs, and therefore the average industry profitability you are trying to beat.

The five forces framework zeroes in on the competition you face and gives you the baseline for measuring superior performance. It explains the industry's average prices and costs, and therefore the average industry profitability you are trying to beat. Before you can make sense of your own performance (current and potential), you need insight into the industry's fundamental economics.

Powerful buyers will force prices down or demand more value in the product, thus capturing more of the value for themselves.

If rivalry is intense, companies compete away the value they create, passing it on

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.

The purpose of studying economics is to learn how not to be deceived by economists.

The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

In some ways the most striking novelty in Keynesian doctrine was that (abstracting from effects on foreign trade) an all-round reduction in wages would not reduce unemployment and (introducing Kalecki's elaboration) would actually be likely to increase it. [p. 129]

Indeed, on a high plane of generality there is nothing very much for economic theory to say to the planner, except: Do not listen to those who say you want this rather than that — agriculture, not industry; exports, not home production; light industry, not heavy. You always want both. [p. 113]

At the end of the nineteenth century, economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman complained that housework was the only job that had not been modernized.)

these conglomerates, the zaibatsu, were coordinated by finance capital, not production:

There is no upside to downward financial mobility,

The khñum debt slavery scenario sounds brutal until you consider that most capitalist cultures in the West use a similar system. In the United States, it's not unusual for people to graduate from college with so much debt that they have to work their whole lives to pay it off.

Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to the face of Imperialist warmongers.