Quotes About Economics

but she had certainly learned about not having enough money, which is different from being poor.

Of the estimated 12.5 million Africans sold into slavery in the Americas, more than half were sold between 1701 and 1800, and of that 52.4 percent, tens of thousands more were sold during the second half of the eighteenth century than during the first.

All new markets are inefficient at first

We're not born to be selfish. And the economics of living in community make it clear that short-term hustle rarely benefits anyone. But when you're flailing and looking for something (anything) to stand on, there's pressure to choose the selfish path. To a drowning man, everyone else is a stepping-stone to safety.

Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (iron ore or oil) into something you could hold. Today, fewer than half of the companies on the list do that. The rest make unseemly profits by trafficking in ideas.

The New York Times was offered a deal with Amazon during the 1990s. It would have transformed the economics of the paper and delivered billions of dollars in revenue over time. According to former CFO Diane Baker, senior management turned it down. They were worried that they would upset Barnes & Noble, which at the time was a big advertiser. Management had nostalgia for a future with steady increases in their current business, and felt threatened by a radical shift in that future.

You may be surprised to learn that it's been estimated to cost up to $635 billion a year in the United States alone,8 a figure greater than the costs associated with conditions like heart disease and cancer.

What economic libralisation needs, if it is to succeed , is a general acceptance that reforms are for the general good, that they might seem to help some more than others, but that in the long run everyone will benefit from them. Such attitude is far from being realized

The East India Company created, for the first time in Indian history, the landless peasant, deprived of his traditional source of sustenance.

had exported an average of £13,000,000 worth of goods to Britain each year from 1835 to 1872 with no corresponding return of money; in fact, payments to people residing in Britain, whether profits to Company shareholders, dividends to railway investors or pensions to retired officials, made up a loss of £30 million a year.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration

For better or worse, civil litigation is generally driven by economics. If somebody thinks they've been wronged, they go to court and ask for money.

In secrecy, in silence, a whole race may be destroyed without notice. Whole cultures and species have been destroyed while men smiled and spoke of economics, of employment, of progress, of the welfare of mankind. Is a threat less deadly because it does not scream and rage and threaten force of arms?

Doesn't an Indian tribe finally surrender to colonization by becoming as capitalistic as our conquerors? Isn't indigenous economic sovereignty one of the sneakiest damn oxymorons of all time?

Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day, when a woman could earn a decent wage by selling her body instead?

Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting.

All political spendings for purposes beyond the protection of life and property are a snare and a delusion.

As an economist, I'm aware that life is full of trade offs.

Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result.

Value is the life-giving power of anything; cost, the quantity of labour required to produce it; its price, the quantity of labourwhich its possessor will take in exchange for it.

I am not a politician but I have dedicated the biggest part of my professional life to economic policy both in Greece and Europe.

Business is a means- the only means- to increase the quantity of goods available for preserving life and rendering it more agreeable.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.

Pointing out the possible, and expensive, entanglements that could come with widespread commercial enterprise, the author calculates the Great Britain was at war half the time between 1689 and 1783.