Quotes About Economics

although within a country rich people were generally happier than poor people, richer countries did not have happier citizens than poor countries. Since then the 'Easterlin paradox

Whether the oil will last long enough is a different subject and one I tackle later in the book: briefly my answer is that substitutes will be adopted if the price rises high enough.)

The first railways were far more expensive than the existing canals and far less reliable. Only gradually and with time does the new invention bring down its own costs or raise its efficacy to the point where it can match the old.

So this is what poverty means. You are poor to the extent that you cannot afford to sell your time for sufficient price to buy the services you need

Richard Dawkins that 'money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism' –

The characteristic signature of prosperity is increasing specialisation.

The more human beings diversified as consumers and specialised as producers, and the more they then exchanged, the better off they have been, are and will be.

Whenever you see the word equilibrium in a textbook, blot it out.' It is wrong because it assumes perfect competition, perfect knowledge and perfect rationality, none of which do or can exist.

Depending on whose estimate you choose, and how you correct for inflation, the average person alive in the world today earns in a year between ten and twenty times as much money, in real terms, as the average person earned in 1800. Or rather, he or she can afford ten or twenty times as many goods or services.

The ten most violent countries in the world in 2014 – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and North Korea – are all among the least capitalist. The ten most peaceful – Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Japan, Belgium and Norway – are all firmly capitalist.

Ultimatum Game

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain and the United States made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. 'The industrialised nations whose governments invested least in science did best economically,' says Kealey, 'and they didn't do so badly in science either.

Harsher methods of producing animal commodities are always more cost-efficient than kinder ones - in the space and type of food and degree of human care afforded to them - just as harsher labor conditions are often the most economical. When no country is willing to make concessions, and thereby risk losing a market, the only alternative is to drop the subject of animal welfare entirely, and exactly this is happening.

Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history—a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world—from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

What it does guarantee is that a monopolist whose high profits are caused by high prices, rather than low costs, will soon meet competition originated by the capital market.

The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need.

Child labor was not ended by legislative fiat; child labor ended when it became economically unnecessary for children to earn wages in order to survive—when the income of their parents became sufficient to support them. The emancipators and benefactors of those children were not legislators or factory inspectors, but manufacturers and financiers.

Oh, I don't think he approves of marriage. Not that he preaches anything immoral, but he's always told me marriage is old-fashioned, an economic device to perpetuate the institution of private property, or something like that or anyway that he doesn't like it.

In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Un sistema social es un conjunto de principios moral-político-económicos encarnados en las leyes, las instituciones y el Gobierno de una sociedad que determinan las relaciones, las condiciones de asociación, entre los hombres que viven en un área geográfica determinada.

To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the "right" to "redistribute" the wealth produced by others is claiming the "right" to treat human beings as chattel.

There is no such thing as a natural monopoly, any more than there is a natural crime. There isn't a single profession or service of a productive nature that should be a monopoly , enforced by law. If any one businessman in a given field can successfully provide all the services and best products at the best price, you could loosely call that a natural monopoly, but it's not a monopoly in the usual sense—that is, it isn't coercive.

But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.

We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt.