Quotes About Economics

We all know that Americans love their statistics - in sport, obviously. And in finance too.

There's nothing the people love more than a Federal Reserve joke.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.

I'd love to make more money in America, that's the heart of it. I make much more money in Europe. It's a shame. I'm trying now to make a profit on this next tour, and I'll be much happier.

Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spiritous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90--and all this without taxes.

Australians are the biggest gamblers on the planet – one of the more arresting statistics I saw was that the country has less than 1 per cent of the world's population but more than 20 per cent of its slot machines

growth. Often used contrarily by economists and those who write about them: 'It now looks as if growth will remain stagnant until spring' (Observer); '… with the economy moving into a negative growth phase' (The Times). Growth obviously indicates expansion. If a thing is shrinking or standing still, growth simply isn't the word for it.

Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it's just 6 percent. We live in a paradoxical situation. For centuries, people ate unhealthily out of economic necessity. Now we do it out of choice.

Jane Jacobs cites it in her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities)

Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip aeroplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney.

one third of all the money America spent on furniture was spent on radios.

When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became

The inescapable conclusion is that higher spending in America doesn't necessarily result in better medicine, just higher costs.

Just as our ambitions have been driven by an appreciation for climate science, any practical plan for reducing emissions has to be driven by other disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, economics, finance, and more.

The average retail price for a gallon of jet fuel in the United States over the past few years is $2.22. Advanced biofuels for jets, to the extent they're available, cost on average $5.35 per gallon. The Green Premium for zero-carbon fuel, then, is the difference between these two prices, which is $3.13.

Tip: Keep the Green Premiums in mind and ask whether they're low enough for middle-income countries to pay.

Extra heat won't be good for the animals we eat and get milk from; it will make them less productive and more prone to dying young, which in turn will make meat, eggs, and dairy more expensive.

With the price of today's batteries, EV owners save money only if gas costs more than around $3 per gallon.

if you're a capitalist, you don't buy people—you buy their ability to work.

So, it's private appropriation on the basis of socialized production. That's the fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism.

It's all these different capitalists, in far-flung parts of the world—and that's all the more so today: in far-flung parts of the world—it's all these capitalists in competition with each other, forcing each other to find ways to more efficiently produce, and more effectively exploit people, even if that means throwing a bunch of people out of work, or off the land, or whatever.

Cohn was astounded at Trump's lack of basic understanding. He tried to explain. If you as the federal government borrow money through issuing bonds, you are increasing the U.S. deficit. What do you mean? Trump asked. Just run the presses—print money.

About $4 trillion, Trump said, even more—possibly $5 trillion. Cohn had a chart that showed it was $2.6 trillion.

The World Trade Organization is the worst organization ever created!" Trump said.