Quotes About Economics

Confiscating physical wealth for the purpose of redistribution is confiscating something that will be used up over time, and cannot be replaced without the human capital that created it. Nor is human

Back then, the rule of thumb was that housing costs—whether rents or mortgage payments—should not take more than one-fourth of a person's income. In 1901, housing costs took 23 percent of the average American family's spending. By 2003, it took 33 percent of a far larger amount of spending.

Even Karl Marx, who spent more than three decades living in Victorian England, acknowledged the rise in British workers' living standards between the 1840s and the 1860s.

Contrary to various economic theories of imperialism, Africa was not a major outlet for European investment or exports.

So dominant did the Indians become over vast regions of East Africa that the rupee became the prevailing currency in much of that region.

Far from being a national crisis of affordable housing, outrageous rents and astronomical home prices are largely confined to a relatively few places along the east and west coasts. Rent per square foot of apartment space in San Francisco is more than double what it is in Denver, Dallas, or Kansas City, and nearly three times as high as in Memphis. Home prices show even greater disparities.

when the monetary value of output per capita in Nigeria is less than 2 percent of that in the United States-and in Tanzania less than 1 percent°~-that clearly cannot all be due to exchange rates.

How can this be, when the whole purpose of rent control is to keep rents down? First of all, the purpose of any policy tells you absolutely nothing about what will actually happen under that policy. Too many disastrous laws get passed because those who pass them win political points for their good intentions and nobody bothers to check up later to see what actually happened.

What seems a more tenable conclusion is that, as economic historian David S. Landes put it, The world has never been a level playing field.

Whether people are united by navigable waterways or cut off by rugged mountains or other geographical barriers has enormous cultural as well as economic and political significance.

lthough the basic principles of economics are not very complicated, the very ease with which they can be learned also makes them easy to dismissed as simplistic by those who do not want to accept analyses which contradict their cherished beliefs. Evasions of the obvious are often far more complicated than the facts. Nor is it automatically true that complex effects must have complex causes. The ramifications of something very simple can become enormously complex.

If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all the difference.

It was in the wake of these erosions of economic controls that intellectual challenges were then made to the role of government in the economy, first by the Physiocrats in France, who coined the term laissez-faire, and then by Adam Smith in Britain, who became its leading champion.

One of the reasons for the political success of price control is that part of its costs are hidden. Even the dire consequences of the shortage are unable to show the whole picture.

One of the main problems of price control is to define the appropriate price of what is being controlled

To understand most of the discussions about economics that take place in the media and in politics, all you need is to know the most basic economic principles. However, most of the people are unaware of them, including politicians, journalists and many academics from other fields.

Contrary to many theories of imperialism, this greatest of all empires did not revolve around an export of capital to the Third World.

Una de las razones del éxito político del control de precios es que parte de sus costes están ocultos. Incluso las terribles consecuencias de la escasez son incapaces de mostrar el panorama completo.

Uno de los principales problemas del control de precios es el de definir el precio adecuado de lo que se está controlando

Puesto en términos diferentes, el lucro es el precio que se paga por la eficiencia. Claramente, el incremento de la eficiencia debe ser mayor que el lucro, o de lo contrario el socialismo habría provocado, en la práctica, precios más asequibles y mayor prosperidad, como sus teóricos esperaban, pero esto último nunca se materializó en el mundo real.

Para entender la mayoría de las discusiones sobre economía que se producen en los medios de comunicación y en la política, lo único que se necesita es conocer los principios económicos más básicos. No obstante, la mayor parte de las personas los desconocen, incluidos políticos, periodistas y muchos académicos de otros ámbitos.

Muchos, incluso hoy, atribuyen con frecuencia el alto nivel de ganancias a los altos precios cobrados por personas motivadas por la «avaricia». La realidad, sin embargo, es que la mayoría de las grandes fortunas de la historia estadounidense ha resultado de la capacidad de alguien para reducir costes, y al mismo tiempo cobrar precios más bajos y por tanto ganar un mercado masivo para su producto.

Los precios no son simplemente un medio para transferir dinero, sino que su función principal es brindar incentivos que afecten al comportamiento en el uso de los recursos, y de los productos que resultan de éstos.

General Motors spends more on health care than steel.