Quotes About Economics

The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.

and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.

I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth anyone's while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.

while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably

For every dollar that is spent on the (boondoggle) bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000, 000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most.

Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.

when personal incomes are taxed 50, 60 or 70 percent. People begin to ask themselves why they should work six, eight or nine months of the entire year for the government, and only six, four or three months for themselves and their families. If they lose the whole dollar when they lose, but can keep only a fraction of it when they win, they decide that it is foolish to take risks with their capital.

1) he will use the extra profits to expand his operations by buying more machines to make more coats; or (2) he will invest the extra profits in some other industry; or (3) he will spend the extra profits on increasing his own consumption. Whichever of these three courses he takes, he will increase employment.

Real wealth, of course, consists in what is produced and consumed: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in.

We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces.

Even a relatively mild inflation distorts the structure of production. It leads to the overexpansion of some industries at the expense of others. This involves a misapplication and waste of capital. When the inflation collapses, or is brought to a halt, the misdirected capital investment—whether in the form of machines, factories or office buildings—cannot yield an adequate return and loses the greater part of its value.

To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like trying to adjust the piano to the stool rather than the stool to the piano.

Saving" in short, in the modern world, is only another form of spending.

the real causes of any existing depression. For the real causes, most of the time, are maladjustments within the wage-cost-price structure: maladjustments between wages and prices, between prices of raw materials and prices of finished goods, or between one price and another or one wage and another.

the belief that public works necessarily create new jobs is false. If the money was raised by taxation, we saw, then for every dollar that the government spent on public works one less dollar was spent by the taxpayers to meet their own wants, and for every public job created one private job was destroyed.

It is significant that while there is a word profiteer to stigmatize those who make allegedly excessive profits, there is no such word as wageer - or losseer.

THE WHOLE ARGUMENT of this book may be summed up in the statement that in studying the effects of any given economic proposal we must trace not merely the immediate results but the results in the long run, not merely the primary consequences but the secondary consequences, and not merely the effects on some special group but the effects on everyone.

need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.

Many of the most frequent fallacies in economic reasoning come from the propensity, especially marked today, to think in terms of an abstraction—the collectivity, the "nation"—and to forget or ignore the individuals who make it up and give it meaning.

people collectively cannot buy twice as much goods as before unless twice as much goods are produced

ECONOMICS, as we have now seen again and again, is a science of recognizing secondary consequences. It is also a science of seeing general consequences. It is the science of tracing the effects of some proposed or existing policy not only on some special interest in the short run, but on the general interest in the long run.

Inflation itself is a form of taxation.

either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation.

whole more than it produces. The best way to raise wages, therefore, is to raise marginal labor productivity. This can be done by many methods: by an increase in capital accumulation—