Quotes About Economics

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.

In the United States in 1901, an hour's wages could buy around three quarts of milk; a century later, the same wages would buy sixteen quarts. The amount of every other foodstuff that can be bought with an hour of labor has multiplied as well: from a pound of butter to five pounds, a dozen eggs to twelve dozen, two pounds of pork chops to five pounds, and nine pounds of flour to forty-nine pounds.20

And 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.

In the United States in 1901, an hour's wages could buy around three quarts of milk; a century later, the same wages would buy sixteen quarts.

One of the most commonly cited human irrationalities is the sunk-cost fallacy, in which people continue to invest in a losing venture because of what they have invested so far rather than in anticipation of what they will gain going forward.

Our social and economic systems are so devoid of humanity and love.

I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.

To hear the Japanese plead for free trade is like hearing the word love on the lips of a harlot.

People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests.

The tax collector must love poor people, he's creating so many of them.

The person who is speaking in this manner believes that winning the argument makes him right, and that doing so necessarily validates the assumption-structure of the dominance hierarchy he most identifies with. This is often—and unsurprisingly—the hierarchy within which he has achieved the most success, or the one with which he is most temperamentally aligned. Almost all discussions involving politics or economics unfold in this manner,

Marx did the same thing when he described man in a fundamentally economic, class-based manner, and history as the eternal battleground of bourgeoisie and proletariat. Everything can be explained by running it through a Marxist algorithm.

irrational behavior is as unacceptable to a certain species of economist as the irrational magnitude of the hypotenuse was to the Pythagoreans. It doesn't fit their model of what can be; and yet it is.

I came into the Big Money making pictures during World War II," [Reagan] would always say. At that time the wartime income surtax hit 90 percent. "You could only make four pictures and then you were in the top bracket," he would continue. "So we all quit working after about four pictures and went off to the country." High tax rates caused less work. Low tax rates caused more. His experience proved it. These

Frederick Mosteller, who would later found Harvard's statistics department, was there. So was Leonard Jimmie Savage, the pioneer of decision theory and great advocate of the field that came to be called Bayesian statistics.* Norbert Wiener, the MIT mathematician and the creator of cybernetics, dropped by from time to time. This was a group where Milton Friedman, the future Nobelist in economics, was often the

Se puede hacer dinero de la nada?

I always wondered about that: if you can create money out of thin air, why not do that far more than is being done already?

Entrepreneurial profit… is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production in exactly the same sense that wages are the value expression of what the worker "produces." It is not a profit of exploitation any more than are wages.

Every piece of business strategy… must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction.

Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.

As a matter of practical necessity, socialist democracy may eventually turn out to be more of a sham than capitalist democracy ever was.

The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation.

we will manage the worlds finance whether world likes it or not.

Rather than justice for all, we are evolving into a system of justice for those who can afford it. We have banks that are not only too big to fail, but too big to be held accountable.