Quotes About Economics

they have never presented a coherent and compelling explanation of why this market should be treated differently from other markets.

The habit of looking at the last ten thousand years as well as at the array of early societies as a mere prelude to the true history of our civilization which started approximately with the publication of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, is, to say the least, out of date.

Like many others of his generation, he came to suspect that sustaining a lively and innovative economic system might place more constraints on the pursuit of equality than he had once thought.

When the Marxists say, as they sometimes do, that Marx has proved the uselessness of a counter cycle policy and of similar piecemeal measures, then they simply do not speak the truth; Marx investigated an unrestrained capitalism, and he never dreamt of interventionism.

Where is the invisible hand? "It is often invisible because it is not here," according to economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Economics is hard. Really hard. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-boggingly hard it is. I mean you may think doing the Sunday Times crossword is difficult, but that's just peanuts to economics. And because it is so hard, people shouldn't blithely go shooting their mouths off about it, and pretending like it's so easy. In fact, we would all be better off if we just ignored these clowns.

It's the same thing as any colonial structure anywhere: The business of making money depends on having a peon culture.

Luminous Processes,' declared the local paper, 'seems to put profits before people.' How quickly we forget.

For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy,

Governments have historically opted to tax what they could, rather than what they should, and it shows.

For the first time, ending human deprivation is becoming as much a question of tackling national distribution as of international redistribution, argues Andy Sumner, the expert who crunched the data on where the world's poorest people now live.

The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,' said Milton Friedman back in 1970, and the mainstream business world willingly believed him.

In the twentieth century, economics lost the desire to articulate its goals: in their absence, the economic nest got hijacked by the cuckoo goal of GDP growth.

Back in Ancient Greece, when Xenophon first came up with the term economics, he described the practice of household management as an art. Following his lead, Aristotle distinguished economics from chrematistics, the art of acquiring wealth—in a distinction that seems to have been all but lost today.

There are now more than 2,000 billionaires living in 20 countries from the United States, China and Russia to Turkey, Thailand and Indonesia.93 An annual wealth tax levied at just 1.5 percent of their net worth would raise $74 billion each year: that alone would be enough to fill the funding gap to get every child into school and deliver essential health services in all low-income countries.

full century on, John Maynard Keynes echoed Mill's sentiments, asserting (rather wishfully) that 'the day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems—the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion'.

With sufficient international support, these countries can seize the opportunity to leapfrog the wasteful and polluting technologies of the past. And if they channel GDP growth into creating economies that are distributive and regenerative by design, they will start bringing all of their inhabitants above the Doughnut's social foundation without overshooting its ecological ceiling.

As our emerging self-portrait makes clear, we are motivated by far more than cost and price. So instead of turning first to markets to mediate our social and ecological relationships, the twenty-first-century economist would be wise to start by asking what social dynamics are already in play. What are the values, heuristics, norms and networks that currently shape human behaviour—and how could they be nurtured or nudged, rather than ignored and eroded?

Rethinking economics is not about finding the correct one (because it doesn't exist); it's about choosing or creating one that best serves our purpose—reflecting the context we face, the values we hold, and the aims we have.

First, change the goal. For over 70 years, economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century, a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.

Third, nurture human nature. At the heart of twentieth-century economics stands the portrait of rational economic man: he has told us that we are self-interested, isolated, calculating, fixed in taste and dominant over nature—and his portrait has shaped who we have become. But human nature is far richer than this, as early sketches of our new self-portrait reveal: we are social, interdependent, approximating, fluid in values and dependent upon the living world.

The word 'economics' was coined by the philosopher Xenophon in Ancient Greece. Combining oikos meaning household with nomos meaning rules or norms, he invented the art of household management, and it could not be more relevant today.

the world has become extraordinarily unequal: as of 2015, the world's richest 1 percent now own more wealth than all the other 99 percent put together.