Quotes About Economics

Friedrich Hayek advanced the view that the common law contributed to greater economic welfare because it was less interventionist, less under the tutelage of the state, and was better able to respond to change than civil legal systems; indeed, it was for him a legal system that led, like the market, to a spontaneous order.

Most of the so-called robber barons got rich by cutting the price of goods, not raising them.

The obsession with which those on the right resist Charles Darwin's insight – that the complexity of nature does not imply a designer – matches the obsession with which those on the left resist Adam Smith's insight – that the complexity of society does not imply a planner.

With increasingly money-based interactions among strangers, people increasingly began to think of neighbours as potential trading partners rather than potential prey. Killing the shopkeeper makes no sense.

Economists are quick to speak of 'market failure', and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from 'government failure'.

This isn't about auctions,' said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, 'in fact it's not about economic warfare. It's the opposite.' It was survival of the nicest.

From the perspective of today, or from that of a Cobden-Mill-Smith liberal, there is not a great deal of difference between the various -isms of the twentieth century. Communism, fascism, nationalism, corporatism, protectionism, Taylorism, dirigisme – they are all centralising systems with planning at their heart.

I forecast that the twenty-first century will show a continuing expansion of catallaxy – Hayek's word for spontaneous order created by exchange and specialisation.

They had stumbled on what Friedrich Hayek called the catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by a growing division of labour.

People increased their birth rate in response to high child death rates. Make them richer and healthier and they would have fewer babies, as had already happened in Europe, where prosperity had led birth rates down, not up.

each person 'intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention'. Yet

Modern philosophers who aspire to rise above the sordid economic reality of the world would do well to recall that this trade made possible the cross-fertilisation of ideas that led to great discoveries.

The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.

Free-market commerce is the only system of human organisation yet devised where ordinary people are in charge – unlike feudalism, communism, fascism, slavery and socialism.

Falling consumer prices is what enriches people (deflation of asset prices can ruin them, but that is because they are using asset prices to get them the wherewithal to purchase consumer items). And, once again, notice that the true metric of prosperity is time. If Cornelius Vanderbilt or Henry Ford not only moves you faster to where you want to go, but requires you to work fewer hours to earn the ticket price, then he has enriched you by granting you a dollop of free time.

the state has socialised the cost and privatised the reward. That

Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.

if commercial behaviour might make people more moral.

In the 1950s it took thirty minutes work to earn the price of a McDonald's cheeseburger; today it takes three minutes.

if life needs no intelligent designer, then why should the market need a central planner?

So one way to raise your standard of living would be to lower somebody else's: buy a slave. That was indeed how people got rich for thousands of years. Yet

Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.

Technology was made possible by division of labour: market exchange calls forth innovation.

Or, as one economist put it: 'The hippies were right all along'.