Quotes About Economics

The economics favour one-man comedy shows: all you need is one person, a microphone and a PA system. But I'm pleased so many people are making a living out of comedy - it's a wonderful business to be in.

Regardless of how it's done, transaction costs will continue to plummet as computers get more powerful. Low transaction costs are a wonderful thing if you're in the transaction business. They're wonderful for consumers too, making it cheaper and easier to buy things and creating new things to buy.

I always loved retail. I love the ideas behind it. I think small-business retail is one of the areas where capitalism works so wonderfully well.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

I don't think Brian Cox does 'The Wonders of the Solar System' because he believes the world would be a better place if people understood about the rings of Saturn; I just think he finds physics extremely interesting. It brings him joy, and he wants to spread the love. I feel the same about economics.

When someone needs copper, or wood or an ag product, and they invest capital somewhere to make that happen, and people get jobs from that, and that good gets introduced to the world stage and it gets traded and moved, the whole world benefits.

What I think of as 'freakonomics' is mostly storytelling around an idea - not a theme but an idea. I like ideas much more than themes. Themes are boring. Themes are, 'Wool is back,' but ideas are, 'Why is wool back?'

Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.

Socialism's not a word that I use. I say 'social democracy' because I don't think the government needs to own all the means of production.

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

One man's wage increase is another man's price increase.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

The difficulty for the Government is there's this ideological straitjacket of the market will provide, let the market rip and everything will work out... It's back to trickle-down economics, which, it's plain to see, have not delivered.

The reality about being economically dependent on someone else usually doesn't work out for women in the end. It's about being an adult and being responsible for your life. Most women have to work, so let's just get on with it.

Economists report that a college education adds many thousands of dollars to a man's lifetime income - which he then spends sending his son to college.

Communists are great capitalists, so there is no threat anymore.

Bolshevism presented itself as an economic threat to themselves at the same time that Nazism presented itself as a political threat to their countries.

I think inequality has gone past the point where it's helping us all get rich, and it's really becoming a serious threat.

Europe advises, sometimes threatens, and tells us, 'You should make a budget of 10 billion euros in taxes.' Are they joking? The last thing that Italy needs is taxes.

There is a kind of woman who is economically powerful, professionally powerful, who threatens a white male grip on power that has a long historic precedent in the country. Independent women living outside of marriage threaten all kinds of things about the way power is supposed to work.

One of the frequent blind spots for economic libertarians, speaking as one who has personally dealt with this log in the eye, is a tendency to allow principles of how economies work and the beauty of trade to make us ignore perceived threats animating people who value more than just the power to buy and sell.

The real challenge was to model all the interest rates simultaneously, so you could value something that depended not only on the three-month interest rate, but on other interest rates as well.

Throughout this evolution from left to right, Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces.