Quotes About Economics

In auction situations, the final bidder overpays so often that economists call the accompanying feeling of regret the "winner's curse.

The maximum weekly rate paid for women in domestic service in New England around the time of the Revolution was the same as the maximum daily rate for male farm laborers.

Why in almost all societies have married women specialized in bearing and rearing children and in certain agricultural activities, whereas married men have done most of the fighting and market work?

The estimated value of the water filtration and storage services provided by the earth's forests is more than $4 trillion a year; as a corollary, for every 10 percent reduction of forest land, the cost of treating drinking water grow by about 20 percent.

Benjamin Graham, the author of Security Analysis, a classic guide to investing.

the other gods had discovered the universal economic law from time immemorial: whatever you tax you get less of, and whatever you subsidize you get more of. By heavily overtaxing wealth, she could decrease the amount of private wealth and therefore lessen its power. By subsidizing poverty with government welfare she would increase poverty and thus dependency upon the state. Human nature was such an easy thing to exploit when you understood how it operated.

it is generally considered to be the best tax ever invented. It raises more revenue at less economic cost than any other tax. For this reason, many conservatives oppose it.

Taxation, especially in small-coalition settings, redistributes from those outside the coalition (the poor) to those inside the coalition (the rich). Small coalition systems amply demonstrate this principle, for these are places where people are rich precisely because they are in the winning coalition, and others are poor because they are not.

On the more technical kind of economics my advance was impeded by my inadequate knowledge of mathematics which I had never found helpful in my work, even at such times as when I had temporarily mastered the particular techniques required, but felt not to be worth the effort to acquire real competence merely to be able to refute or criticize the work of others—as I now recognize, a serious mistake

At prices quoted on the markets of the day, those nearly four million human beings were worth something like $3 billion—an immense sum, especially at that time, a sum that exceeded the value of all the farmland in all the states of the South, a sum fully three times as great as the construction costs of all the railroads that then ran throughout all of the United States.

In 2015, a petabyte of cloud storage will cost $100,000 per year, down 90% from $1 million in 2011.

For many organizations, security comes down to basic economics. If the cost of security is less than the likely cost of losses due to lack of security, security wins. If the cost of security is more than the likely cost of losses, accept the losses.

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations1

Nothing is wanted but money, and negros are necessary to make it. —Stephen F. Austin, 1832

Both Mises and Rothbard have passed away, but their outlook—including Ph.D.s who subscribe to it—lives on in the Ludwig von Mises Institute. But groups like these have basically given up on mainstream economics; members mostly talk to each other and publish in their own journals. The closest thing to market fundamentalists are not merely outside the mainstream of the economics profession. They are way outside.

It is precisely because education is so affordable that the labor market expects us to possess so much. Without the subsidies, you would no longer need the education you can no longer afford.

Summing up: Correctly interpreted, the simple economic model specifically predicts that people will be less selfish as voters than as consumers. Indeed, like diners at an all-you-can-eat buffet, we should expect voters to "stuff themselves" with moral rectitude. Once again, analogies between voting and shopping are deeply misleading.

The serious fact is that the bulk of the really important things economics has to teach are things that people would see for themselves if they were willing to see. —Frank Knight, "The Role of Principles in Economics and Politics

After all their investigations, though, economists typically conclude that the man in the street—and the intellectual without economic training—underestimates how well markets work.12 I maintain that something quite different holds for democracy: it is widely over-rated not only by the public but by most economists too. Thus, while the general public underestimates how well markets work, even economists underestimate markets' virtues relative to the democratic alternative.

the ineradicable prejudice that every action intended to serve the profit interest must be anti-social by this fact alone."27

Government heavily subsidizes education. In 2011, U.S. federal, state, and local governments spent almost a trillion dollars on it.5 The simplest way to get less education, then, is to cut the subsidies.

Irrationality in politics is not a puzzle. It is precisely what an economic theory of irrationality predicts.

Strange though it sounds, if we're "running out" of anything, it's people.

Adam Smith, capitalism's original storyteller, "wrote that the ultimate goal of business is not to make a profit. Profit is just the means. The goal is general welfare" (Wink 1992, 68). Instead, the view of capitalism in play today tends to reduce people to economic beings driven by utilitarian self-interest toward the goal of accumulating wealth. What