Quotes About Economics

Trickle-up economics can work, even when trickle-down economics doesn't. Even

The eurozone was flawed at birth.

Unfortunately, the dominant inclination among economists has not been to expand the model of rational action, but rather to drop the rationality postulate entirely, in favor of evolutionary or behavioral models of action. Thus cooperation often gets mentioned in the same breath as cognitive biases, framing effects, bounded rationality, and other well-known instances in which individuals are clearly violating the canons of ideal rationality.

As soon as there was profit, there were people who wanted to make it, more than they wanted to make anything else.

His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce.

As you get capital, its increase becomes easier and more rapid.

The wonder of the Exodus narrative is that the role of pharaoh continues to be reperformed in many times and many places. "Pharaoh" reappears in the course of history in the guise of coercive economic production. In every new performance, the character of Pharaoh makes claims to be absolute to perpetuity; the character is regularly propelled by fearful greed; the character imposes stringent economic demands on a vulnerable labor force.

doing economic justice for the vulnerable in generous, intentional ways, is communion with God.

Restitution costs: "He shall restore it in full, and shall add a fifth to it." Restitution costs twenty percent according to Leviticus. Guilt requires not simply equity and an even balance, but gift beyond affront. It requires surplus compensation. Such a rule is both economically shrewd and psychologically sound. Israel is required to move beyond grudging restoration, until it is "pressed down and running over.

The store-house cities are an ancient parallel to the great banks and insurance houses where surplus wealth is kept among us. That surplus wealth, produced by the cheap labor of peasants, must now be protected from the peasants by law and by military force.

There are many farm handouts; but let's call them what they really are: a form of legalized theft. Essentially, a congressman tells his farm constituency, "Vote for me. I'll use my office to take another American's money and give it to you.

Some say it's wrong to profit from the misfortune of others. I ask my students whether they'd support a law against doing so. But I caution them with some examples. An orthopedist profits from your misfortune of having broken your leg skiing. When there's news of a pending ice storm, I doubt whether it saddens the hearts of those in the collision repair business. I also tell my students that I profit from their misfortune—their ignorance of economic theory.

Social Security is unsustainable because it is not meeting the first order condition of a Ponzi scheme, namely expanding the pool of suckers.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. (Quoting Adam Smith)

What our nation needs is a separation of "business and state" as it has a separation of "church and state." That would mean crony capitalism and crony socialism could not survive.

One of the things that economics brings to the analysis is explicit recognition that people will not engage in activities—including racial discrimination—no matter what the cost.

The federal minimum wage is complemented by state laws that sometimes exceed the federal requirements. Federal and state minimum wage laws represent deliberate governmental intervention in the labor market to produce a pattern of results other than that produced in a free labor market.

The economic effects of minimum wage legislation have been analyzed in numerous statistical studies.[44] While there is a debate over the magnitude of the effects, the weight of research by academic scholars points to the conclusion that unemployment for some population groups is directly related to legal minimum wages and that the unemployment effects of the minimum wage law are felt disproportionately by nonwhites.

How stupid is it of us to ask those who brought us "affordable" housing to now turn their attention to bringing us "affordable" health care?

Congress will raise taxes and/or slash promised Social Security benefits. Each year the situation will get worse since the number of retirees is predicted to increase relative to the number in the workforce paying taxes. In 1940, there were forty-two workers per retiree, in 1950 there were sixteen, today there are three, and in twenty or thirty years there will be two or fewer workers per retiree.

The switch from sales ladies behind each counter in five-and-dime stores to checkout lines, from waiter-served to self-service and fast-food restaurants, from full-service to self-service gasoline stations are among the responses to higher labor costs. So, too, are the absence of movie theater ushers and the wide use by restaurants of plastic utensils and paper plates, because they do not require dishwashing.

Before the do-gooders "helped," they forgot to ask, why would anyone work ten hours per day for the paltry sum of $2 or $3 an hour? Would they have selected such a job if they had superior alternatives? The only conclusion is that the low-paying sweatshop job might be their best alternative. Such a person is indeed unfortunate, but they are by no means made better off by the destruction of that low-paying job.

We have come to have no idea of profit other than financial profit. The delusion is that cheapness leads to plenty. But what use is plenty of rubbish?

Capitalism has proved incapable of transcending fundamental weaknesses such as underutilization of productive capacity, the persistence of a permanent sector of unemployed, and periodic economic crises related to the concept of "market"—which is concerned with people's ability to pay rather than their need for commodities. (11)