Quotes About Economics

Then, the most crowning insolence of all -- he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days. We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back -- when they came back from the war and couldn't find work -- at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds! Yes,

It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war period. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.

The question of the moral status of wealth, and the relation of Christian faith to issues of economic justice and responsibility, seems to me one of the areas in which Christians are most confused, divided, and uneasy.

Raising interest rates is voo-doo. You can't deal with a global system problem by trying to solve it with this.

I'm just saying that money is made in so many more interesting ways now.

The truth is the Federal Reserve Board has usurped the Government of the United States. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks government at will.

The most popular labor saving device is still money.

Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth. Capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth.

The truth is that the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody...It is not in the power of the government to make everybody more prosperous.

It has been said, and perhaps with truth, that the conclusions of Political Economy partake more of the certainty of the stricter sciences than those of most of the other branches of human knowledge.

The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.

The doctrine of population has been conspicuously absent, not because I doubt in the least its truth and vast importance, but because it forms no part of the direct problem of economics.

Socialism is the way, the truth, and the light.

Income from labor [in the United States] is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere.

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.

Free trade is meaningless unless there is also fair trade.

But free trade is meaningless unless there is also fair trade.

Yes, I said 1962 levels. I know it's hard to believe, but think back to the fifties, when American workers could own a house, raise a family, and send the kids to college, all on a single paycheck. Now both parents work and most people still can't afford a house.

If the forces are intense, (..) almost no company earns attractive returns on investment. If the forces are benign, (..) many companies are profitable. P. 25

If a firm can spot an industry in which the fragmented structure does not reflect the underlying economics of competition, this can provide a most significant strategic opportunity. A company can enter such an industry cheaply because of its initial structure. Since there are no underlying economic causes of fragmentation, none of the investment costs or risks of innovations to change underlying economic structure need be borne.

Is science the disinterested pursuit of knowledge which the world may apply if it will? Or is it an activity always dependent upon economic and political demands?

It's called fractional reserve banking. Before

The first thing you learn on the trading floor is that when large numbers of people are after the same commodity, be it a stock, a bond, or a job, the commodity quickly becomes overvalued.

why they studied economics, and they'd explain that it was the most practical course of study, even while they spent their time drawing funny little graphs.