Quotes About Economics

In reality, while currency movements can have a significant impact on inflation in other countries, dollar movements have rarely had a meaningful or durable impact on prices in the U.S.

Civilized countries generally adopt gold or silver or both as money.

It means that the silver coins of the United States at whatever ratio is fixed, and I want the present ratio that we have now, 16 to 1, maintained precisely as it is.

There is no silver bullet for poverty alleviation.

There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.

Deutsche Bank has a very simple problem. It doesn't make money.

Conflicts are never caused in any simple way by identity, culture or economics. Where resources are scarce, or there are strong historical memories of conflict, small events are more likely to inflame passions.

I don't know why anyone would prefer a more complicated tax code instead of a simpler one.

Human adaptability simply doesn't get accurately captured in econometric models.

If you simply announce that things are irrational, then that alone doesn't get you very far. You have to replace rational agents with some concrete notion of what it means to be irrational.

The only way to have several currencies from divergent nations lumped together is if they are culturally close, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. If they aren't, it simply can't continue to work.

Lost dollars are simply harder to replace than gained dollars are to lose.

Capitalism has to transform plenitude into scarcity, because it cannot endure its own abundance.

We should therefore reject the entire dichotomy between central planning, on the one hand, and market "rationality" on the other.

Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly. - Whole Earth Discipline (2009), page 216.

Form follows funding.

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. This trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking.

Farmers have good years and bad years—like every other business—but the median income of farm households is consistently higher than the median income of nonfarm households. The average American household has a net worth of $82,600, versus $827,000 for farm households.19 About half of the billions in farm subsidies go to farmers with household income over $150,000.

Arthur Blank, who co-founded Home Depot and owns the Atlanta Falcons, managed to get more than $700 million in tax breaks and subsidies to build his new sports palace. Some owners do even better, getting more in breaks than the cost of a stadium.

The biggest mistake so far," said Rudolph G. Penner, who was the chief economist in the Ford Administration's budget office, "was to urge this tremendous cut in taxes without reducing spending sufficiently. That is a major mistake that will have profound long run costs.

Migrants are the creators of some of the biggest and most liquid capital flows anywhere. They send back some $600 billion in remittances every year,6 which amounts to three times more than the direct gains from abolishing all trade barriers, four times more than all foreign aid, and 100 times the amount of all debt relief.

Marriage is more than a tradition. It's an economic necessity. In societies where there are more married couples, there are fewer children in poverty, and less violence.

most of us no longer have the luxury of asking whether a job is genuinely productive, but only whether it pays well and has tolerable conditions.