Quotes About Economics

Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it's a subject below their social standing.

For economic safety for the future, you must have multiple skills and languages. Success is basically being the best that you can be.

Experimentation has been the key factor in the success of Western capitalism

I think in American culture, we put value on economic success but tell people you don't have to be economically successful to be happy.

Slavery had very little to do with the economic success of the West. Just look at the facts and figures and how much slavery actually contributed to development.

As I look at it, a millionth part of a railway is worth fully as much as an acre of waste land on the banks of the Ohio.

The three wealthiest people in the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries!

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

While I am interested both in economics and in philosophy, the union of my interests in the two fields far exceeds their intersection

The World Bank has not invariably been my favorite organization. The power to do good goes almost always with the possibility to do the opposite, and as a professional economist, I have had occasions in the past to wonder whther the Bank could not have done very much better.

The purely rational economic man is, indeed, close to being a social moron.

TARIFF, n. A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic producer against the greed of his consumer.

Similarly, at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.

Naturally, as soldiers, you all are prone to be sentimental about warfare. But fighting is only any use when it's cheaper than the alternatives.

Now, if you're Al Gore, you can afford $10 a pop for squiggly-pig-tailed fluorescent light bulbs. But if you're mainstream America, two or three kids, mom and dad working outside the home, that's not a very good deal.

Any business model based around poor people making bad decisions out of ignorance and desperation always works.

But the blame for the resultant situation, in as much as it needs to be attributed, belongs with politicians not with businessmen. It is the politicians' job to defend society's interests.

Although over the short term, Mr. Market may set stock prices based on emotion, over the long term, it is the value of the company that becomes most important to Mr. Market.

companies that achieve a high return on capital are likely to have a special advantage of some kind. That special advantage keeps competitors from destroying the ability to earn above-average profits.

Although over the short term Mr. Market may price stocks based on emotion, over the long term Mr. Market prices stocks based on their value.

In explaining his shift away from Maoist economics, Deng Xiao Ping, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, described his market-oriented changes as "socialism with Chinese characteristics." Today, American businesses, as well as the media and academic establishments that serve them, increasingly embrace what can best be described as "Chinese capitalism with American characteristics.

Not so much a trickle down as a dragging-along.

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson's research into these questions—distilled in their book The Spirit Level

Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who was the pope of the neoliberal right, and a leading critic of the drug war.