Quotes About Economics

Why have so many good ideas flourished in the fourth quadrant, despite the lack of economic incentives? One answer is that economic incentives have a much more complicated relationship to the development and adoption of good ideas than we usually imagine. The promise of an immense payday encourages people to come up with useful innovations, but at the same time it forces people to protect those innovations.

If you come up with an interesting new contraption, you don't need to persuade a government commission of its value. You just need to get someone to buy it.

Part of that magic is economic: emergent platforms can dramatically reduce the costs of creation.

la economía es una ciencia que cuenta con herramientas excelentes para la obtención de respuestas, pero que sufre una seria escasez de preguntas interesantes.

smarter people tend to think more like economists

countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness

Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.

shows that in 1929 Americans spent more than 60 percent of their disposable income on necessities; by 2016 that had fallen to a third.

Adam Smith called it the paradox of value: when an important good becomes plentiful, it costs far less than what people are willing to pay for it. The difference is called consumer surplus, and the explosion of this surplus over time is impossible to tabulate.

Poverty has no causes," wrote the economist Peter Bauer. "Wealth has causes.

In 1974, it cost $1,442 (in 2011 dollars) to fly from New York to Los Angeles; today it can be done for less than $300.

Mediante el intercambio voluntario, las personas benefician a otras beneficiándose a sí mismas; como él decía: «No esperamos conseguir nuestra cena por la benevolencia del carnicero, el cervecero o el panadero, sino porque ellos velan por sus propios intereses. No apelamos a su humanidad, sino a su amor propio».

In the United States, the share of income going to the richest one percent grew from 8 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2015, while the share going to the richest tenth of one percent grew from 2 percent to 8 percent.4

Hoy se reconoce casi universalmente que el marxismo fue un experimento que fracasó, al menos en sus aplicaciones mundanas. Los países que lo adoptaron se derrumbaron, lo abandonaron o languidecieron en unas dictaduras retrógradas.

Why spend money and blood to invade a country and plunder its treasure when you can just buy it from them at less expense and sell them some of your own?

Quienes condenan a las modernas sociedades capitalistas por su insensibilidad hacia los pobres probablemente ignoran lo poco que las sociedades precapitalistas del pasado invertían en el alivio de la pobreza.

Those who condemn modern capitalist societies for callousness toward the poor are probably unaware of how little the pre-capitalist societies of the past spent on poor relief.

A dollar tomorrow really is worth less than a dollar today (even if we assume there is no inflation), and interest is the price we put on the difference.

It makes little sense to make tens of millions of poor Americans pay more for clothing to save tens of thousands of jobs in the apparel industry.

As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it centuries later, "If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread.") Many Enlightenment thinkers, including Montesquieu, Kant, Voltaire, Diderot, and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, endorsed the ideal of doux commerce, gentle commerce.

Ludwig von Mises put it centuries later, "If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread.")

An analysis in Bangladesh confirmed that the women who worked in the garment industry (as my grandparents did in 1930s Canada) enjoyed rising wages, later marriage, and fewer and better-educated children.46 Over the course of a generation, slums, barrios, and favelas can morph into suburbs, and the working class can become middle class.47 To appreciate the long-term benefits of industrialization one does not have to accept its cruelties.

The economist Steven Radelet has pointed out that "the improvements in health among the global poor in the last few decades are so large and widespread that they rank among the greatest achievements in human history.

The pattern remains—globalization helped the lower and middle classes of poor countries, and the upper class of rich countries, much more than it helped the lower middle class of rich countries—but the differences are less extreme.