Quotes About Economics

Your Gain Is My Pain: Negative Psychological Externalities of Cash Transfers.

John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison, the big three of modern liberalism

The greater threat lies in our letting down our guard against ourselves: in high-mindedly embracing authoritarianism in the name of fairness and compassion, as the Marxists did. Having been at last rousted out of politics and economics by the disaster of communism, the authoritarian Rasputin has now come calling on liberal science, and he already has his foot in the door.

Activists demanded that economists pay more attention to inequality, which economic development had often seemed to exacerbate.

becoming better off economically seemed to make people less satisfied.

richer people were happier than poorer people, but getting richer didn't make a country happier.

While everyone else is thinking about economics and politics, executive salaries and the future of the euro, do the opposite, even if it's hard. Invest in the spirit.

Which European leader today would not relish the wonder-working powers of a Moses? Budget deficit? Unpopular cuts? How about just a little miracle, an overnight increase in gold reserves, a new oil field, or the next world-changing communications technology? Surely that's not too much to ask.

That is why the market and the state, the fields of economics and politics are arenas of competition, while morality is the arena of cooperation. A society with only competition and very limited cooperation will be abrasive and ruthless, with glittering prizes for the winners and no consolation for the losers.

It appears that no one is so unfortunate that he or she is exempt from spending cuts, while at the same time no one is so fortunate as to be ineligible for a tax cut

Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.

The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems.

To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad.

Much of what Tea Party candidates claimed about the world and the global economy during the 2010 elections would have earned their adherents a well-deserved F in any freshman economics (or earth science) class.

The logic of Michelangelo's David, Beethoven's quartets and Einstein's physics had been replaced by that of the Stock Exchange Year Book and Hitler's Mein Kampf.

bankers love to lend money they haven't got to their creditors so that the creditors can pay back what they don't really owe

The evolutionary economist Richard Nelson of Columbia University has pointed out that there are in fact two types of technology that play a major role in economic growth. The first is Physical Technology; this is what we are accustomed to thinking of as technology, things such as bronze-making techniques, steam engines, and microchips. Social Technologies, on the other hand, are ways for organizing people to do things.

And yet, something has changed for the better. We have rediscovered that capitalism is not the answer, but the question.

Hitler presented himself as a man of moderation and peace, as someone devoted to the German people, and as someone who publicly claimed to be following "God's will." He promised to lead Germany out of the economic hell into which it had fallen, and to lift the deep shame that Germans felt at having lost the First World War.

Postwar debts differed from prewar borrowing. New World borrowers spent nineteenth-century British loans on railroads and ranches, building the capacity to repay their lenders. Belligerent borrowers spent wartime American loans on shot and shell, destroying that capacity. Nations wounded in war borrowed more money to repay their debts, sometimes borrowing from America to pay other belligerents who in turn paid America.

dot-com flameouts that erroneously believed that they could lose money on each customer but, as the old joke goes, make it up in volume.

It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work.

Later in the 1700s, the preeminent economist Adam Smith actually wrote The Wealth of Nations in a coffeehouse, after having repeatedly circulated drafts for input among the regulars there. Beyond

The income of the world's 500 richest people exceeds the cumulative income of the world's 416 million poorest people. —UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM