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Quotes About Economics

We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.
~ Cecil Rhodes
I can observe the game theory is applied very much in economics. Generally, it would be wise to get into the mathematics as much as seems reasonable because the economists who use more mathematics are somehow more respected than those who use less. That's the trend.
~ John Forbes Nash, Jr.
It is not by augmenting the capital of the country, but by rendering a greater part of that capital active and productive than would otherwise be so, that the most judicious operations of banking can increase the industry of the country.
~ Adam Smith
Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.
~ Thomas Sowell
The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
~ Henry Louis Gates
There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.
~ Norman Foster
Usury once in control will wreck the nation.
~ William Lyon Mackenzie King
In falling markets, there is nothing that has not happened before. The bear or pessimist sees only the past, which imprisons the wretched financial soul in eternal circles of boom and bust and boom again.
~ James Buchan
Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.
~ John Perry Barlow
Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.
~ Theodore Sturgeon
But ranchers who cherish the western life and its values also pray for oil wells in their calving pasture or a coal lease on prime grassland. Economics has pressed them into such a paradoxical state. For years, they've borrowed $100,000 for operating costs; now they can't afford interest. Disfigurement is synonymous with the whole idea of a frontier. As soon as we lay our hands on it, the freedom we thought it represented is quickly gone.
~ Gretel Ehrlich
Les force qu'elle a déchaînées suppriment la nécessité economique qui a été la base immuable des sociétés anciennes. Quand elle la remplace par la nécessité du développement economique infini, elle ne peut que remplacer la satisfatction des premiers besoins humains sommairement reconnus, par une fabrication ininterrompue de pseudo-besoins qui se ramènent au seul pseudo-besoin du maintien de son règne.
~ Guy Debord
During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
~ H. L. Mencken
A diferença entre o sexo pago e o sexo grátis é que o sexo pago costuma sair mais barato.
~ H.L. Mencken
The political and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational and psychological tests.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Amid the war the capitalists were asserting national necessity.
~ H.W. Brands
Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable.
~ H.W. Brands
Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.
~ Ha-Joon Chang
People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.
~ Ha-Joon Chang
Economics is a political argument. It is not – and can never be – a science; there are no objective truths in economics that can be established independently of political, and frequently moral, judgements. Therefore, when faced with an economic argument, you must ask the age-old question 'Cui bono?' (Who benefits?), first made famous by the Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero.
~ Ha-Joon Chang
Since the 1980s, we have given the rich a bigger slice of our pie in the belief that they would create more wealth, making the pie bigger than otherwise possible in the long run. The rich got the bigger slice of the pie all right, but they have actually reduced the pace at which the pie is growing.
~ Ha-Joon Chang
free trade economists have argued that the mere co-existence of protectionism and economic development does not prove that the former caused the latter. This is true. But I am at least trying to explain one phenomenon - economic development-with another that co-existed with it - protectionism. Free trade economists have to explain how free trade can be an explanation for the economic success of today's rich countries, when it simply had not been practised very much before they became rich.
~ Ha-Joon Chang
Markets weed out inefficient practices, but only when no one has sufficient power to manipulate them.
~ Ha-Joon Chang
The free market doesn't exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict the freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How 'free' a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition.
~ Ha-Joon Chang